The outpouring of adulatory sentiment in the wake of the passing for former PM Brian Mulroney leaves me somewhat bitter and scratching my head. While not totally unmitigated, I can only see his time in office as a disaster. He was less elected in 1984 than John Turner was turfed unceremoniously from office for leading a tired and scandal-ridden régime left in his charge by a Pierre Trudeau become arrogant frustrated, and impatient, promising a new government of openness, transparency and honesty. It was a manner of only weeks before the Oerlikon scandal broke, only the first in a long series that eventually consigned the Mulroney to a fate similar to John Turner in 1993, where the Conservative Party was reduced to two seats in Parliament. Despite shepherding some “green” initiatives and working to end apartheid in South Africa, Mulroney’s close relationship with a caustic US administration based on a personal relationship with Ronald Reagan and a community of interest in expanding unfettered capital dominance across North America and around the world worked to ensure that no meaningful action would be taken to mitigate most of the looming environmental crises or the damage to society from the privatization of public assets and the institution of Free Trade, NAFTA, and the GST.
Oh, Brian, did we really know ye?
A raft of politicians of many stripes ran to the nearest microphone to sing Mulroney’s praises, but there was little mention of all the dark and dubious transactions that marked bhs time in office and the aftermath, wherein he continued to be a standard bearer in the international community for the Con program of privatization and austerity that continues to plague us with very real consequences to this day and well into the foreseeable future. As we can see from the front page of the G&M’s site, the same treatment is being prepared for out current PM, though he’s young enough that we have to wait some time to see the outpouring of fawning smarm.
This happened again recently with the passing of a local politician who was praised to the heavens for her profound influence on local politics… politics that have remained unaltered since long before her election to council and that are likely to persist well into whatever future we may face. This is not advocacy for speaking ill of the dead, but rather for telling true stories, however uncomfortable they may be. As long as we keep those rose-coloured glasses perched on the end of our noses, we are unlikely to engage in the hard work of facing down nasty environmental, social and economic quagmires.
…is, according to an article linked to the Globular Male front page, the most liveable city in Canada:
A fair city.
I’m reminded of the lyrics I first heard from Joan Baez long ago:
What hills, what hills are those, my love
That rise so fair and high?
Those are the hills of heaven, my love
But not for you and I
And what hills, what hills are those, my love
Those hills so dark and low?
Those are the hills of hell, my love
Where you and I must go.
The price of both rents and real estate ownership, as well as the disconnect between prices and current salary levels are an inhibiting factor in keeping people as far as possible from agglomerations with favourable climate, cultural depth and diversity, and security of life and limb. Victoria is also in the throes of becoming a victim of its own success, a process of Cory Doctorow’s enshittification and the fraying of the fabric of society.
According to the Globular Mail, the competent authorities (already tells you something) have approved the takeover of HSBC by RBC. They likely have some justification or another but it really doesn’t matter. RBC wanted it, so it’s not a big surprise that after much hemming and hawing and seeming deliberations on behalf of the Canadian public, the green flag came out. Once again the system feeds itself, as it intended. Who knew?
Listen to them fawn https://i0.wp.com/boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Henry_Kissinger.jpg?fit=1200%2C1008&ssl=1
Going about my business here at the old homestead, I was treated to a snippet of news from our public broadcaster on the passing of Henry Kissinger, the puppetmaster of foreign policy under Nixon and Ford. The piece included a eulogy from Anthony Blinken, the current Secretary of State, extolling his influence on history, an influencer of which the current generation of media mongrels would have difficulty conceiving. Jaysus Murphy, they even gave the guy a Nobel Peace Prize. At least Obama got his before he started serious bombing operations.
Once Blinken was done with his little bit of praising Caesar, the news reader noted only that he had had the ear of powerful people right up until his death yesterday at the age of 100. They didn’t mention that he never did go to Oslo, and that this was due to the prospect of being arrested for war crimes. Kissinger was a major architect of US policy in the ’70s and particularly in Southeast Asia, although it seems clear that he might very possibly been at the root of the unceremonious unseating of the Allende government in Chile, as well as a good bit of the strife and instability that characterized life in most of Central America both during K’s tenure and after. But the CBC doesn’t see fit to mention any of what, for people who read a little more broadly, constitutes a legacy akin to Pol Pot, but which doesn’t quite rise to the glory of the Belgian monarchy, of Stalin, of Hitler, of Mao. His pals call him a master of Realpolitik. They are enablers of war criminals, and CBC, by its silence becomes, in however minor a way, complicit.
The more we sweep this stuff under the carpet, the more death and destruction we will be forced to endure.
In the course of many extended conversations with a friend who practices law, mostly pertaining to real estate, we would touch on the essence of what a career entailed. I was a school teacher until I discovered the wonders of retirement, and Scott even went as far as to pay a visit to the small rural school where I spent five really stellar years late in my working life. I had visited his office on occasion, but it would have been somewhat awkward for me to get in any observations of his interactions with clients, so I had to take his word for his thoughts on the law, its deployment, and on how it affected the parties undertaking the legal process.
A recurring theme in our conversations was that education formed a good part of many occupations where one has to deal with human beings, and Scott thought this was very relevant to the practice of law, particularly in the process of bringing parties to an acceptable settlement without engaging the services of the court and burning through exorbitant legal fees. I had observed some of this phenomenon in my father’s architectural practice where clients had, at times, unrealistic expectations of what could be built, and especially what could be built within a realistic budget, along with considerations of light, sight lines, interior spaces, interrelationships within the building envelope and how the building related to the building site. This was a critical part of the work because it was, in essence, the intellectual and spiritual framework for construction and ensured that the client understood well in advance not only the end result, but the journey from conception to planning, to detail preparation and on to construction before final occupancy. Dad’s success as an architect rested on the number of people who would write at the end of the process to say not only that they were deeply enjoying the final project, but also that they could see how those initial consultations had set the course for both the process and the result.
Such is not the case for all practitioners, and the area where education seems to be least central to the work at hand is in politics and government, an area where a good part of the electorate is content to function on preconceived notions of ideology and/or to accept the divisions laid out in the existing political framework of parties, candidates and support groups. As in business, it would appear for secrecy and deception to be largely the norm, sometimes through societal inertia, sometimes through duplicity, sometimes through expediency. The electorate gets bombarded with waves of information, but said information has been carefully chosen to direct attention to whatever the agency deems as good and to distract from the sources of the information and, often, the possible and likely consequences of the decisions being made. Where business is entirely about generating profit for shareholders and the executive suite, there seems little impetus to ensure that we are getting the whole picture and that the profits being generated will do more good than harm. The current and ongoing shut-down of the Sears retailing establishment in Canada is an interesting case study, where layoffs and disappearing pensions are being used to fund bonuses to the executives who have taken the enterprise into bankruptcy and dissolution, where those responsible for the decisions that lead to the downfall reap large rewards and those who toiled in the trenches are stripped of benefits, both present and future.
The same hiding behind a veil of secrecy also prevails in most governing bodies, often for the benefit of small groups of people whose fortunes allows them much greater influence than the one vote to which the general populace can aspire. Where this amounts to corruption, if often goes unpunished because of that same veil of secrecy. This is a legal matter and missed opportunity to hold to account those at fault. Other times, there may be cases where policy seems distant in its origin and benefit, and the implementation seems high-handed and dictatorial. In those cases, what’s lacking in a meaningful effort on the part of those enacting that policy to ensure than all parties are armed with the data and analysis to make sense of the action. All of our elected representatives ought to be armed with the knowledge to explain their decisions and the ability to make sense of those decisions to the people who elected them. as well as those who may have made other, unfulfilled choices at election time.
As an example, the current discussions of reconciliation with First Nations certainly has both supporters and detractors. On this file, we seem to be moving slowly, but there is an ongoing stream of relevant information that needs to be put at everyone’s disposal and there needs to be time for options to be developed and time and resources allotted to First Nations to sort out what might be their idea of the desired outcomes. For those like Senator Lynn Beyak whose sense is that First Nations should just “get over it” and become Canadians, there is a chance to review the information and to show that they have a basis for their beliefs, and for the rest of us to understand that perspective, without necessarily accepting that it might be valid if we have data and analysis to bolster our own thoughts.As new material emerges, we might need to re-evaluate our positions.
There is a certain amount of anxiety in the salmon farming community at this point, where First Nations are occupying a farm and where notice of review of tenures seems to have given the idea to the companies that they are about to be unceremoniously evicted from the waterways of the province. It turns out that the reviews are scheduled and that the panic might reveal more about the outlook of Marine Harvest than about the state of the spaces they occupy. For a group that appears to have done whatever it can to squelch information relating to disease outbreaks, escapes and other negative effects on wild stocks, there might be a tendency to think that the fish farming community senses that the end of their current business mode might be coming to an end. I wonder if they are willing to put all the informational cards on the table and let the public decide in full knowledge of how the industry operates and what are the real benefits and harms involved in their operations. It i here that the government, and especially the ministers responsible, ought to have the duty and the mandate to see that all appropriate information is put at the disposal of the electorate so that, when the government decides to either renew the tenures or to let them lapse, we will all have a clear understanding of the reasoning behind that decision.
When it comes to light that local casinos have become a money laundromat, and where it comes to light that the phenomenon has been known to government for the better part of a decade, and where the knowledge has been buried because it might have a negative impact on certain “commercial” enterprises, and where those enterprises are undertaken by people whose moral, electoral and financial support props up the party that buries the report, we have the exact opposite of a desirable education quotient. This is not a simple oversight, but a fraud on the electorate, even if the law seems not to see it as punishable.
The same applies to the approval of projects that appear, on the fact of it, to contrary to the interests of Canadians as a whole, but that will be good for board rooms in Toronto, Calgary and Houston, projects whose evaluation omits large swathes of data about downstream consequences to be suffered by all of us, but whole effects will be mitigated for those who stand to gain the most.
As a voter, I am willing to revise my position on many files, but I need to see that I’m getting decisions based on the best information, which means all the information. It falls upon my representatives to convince that the revision is warranted.
I read just about everything written by Michael Lewis, starting with Moneyball, through all the sports and financial tomes he published. He has interesting perspectives and is a good storyteller. The sports stuff is good entertainment and thought-provoking, the financial stuff is a little chilling, and his latest pronouncement on Canadian housing as outlined in an article in MacLean’s adds to an already disturbing picture of market manipulation on a grand scale leading to the destruction of liveability in much of Canada’s urban landscape. The recent revelations of casino money-laundering in B.C. only adds to the feeling that there are subterfuges being used to skirt both the letter and the spirit of laws and to pervert the market mechanisms that are supposed to provide a measure of affordability for those residents who need to work and live in our communities.
Studies seem to indicate that foreign ownership is not the major problem, but that doesn’t entirely eliminate the phenomenon of overseas capital as one of the exacerbating factors, especially when it appears that there are “underground banks” in play and that real estate developers constitute the largest group of those flushing large quantities of cash through the gaming system. Also in play is the accumulation of debt by those signing up for mortgages, some of which may not be within the realm of realistic repayment, particularly in case of a retrenchment of the market where the asset might become less valuable than the sum of the debt incurred to purchase.
The U.S. is being run by a clique of bandits who have assumed the reins of power and are busy ensuring that the satisfaction of their greed, as well as that of their puppet masters, is being satisfied to the detriment of society and the environment. We in B.C. have toiled under a government for the past decade and a half whose main mission seemed to be sequestering the benefit of the commons for the benefit on party donors, many of whom are in finance and real estate, either directly or indirectly. This has generated a socio-economic structure where there has been a pretty thorough decoupling of any relation between housing costs and salaries/wages, meaning that a lot of folks can’t afford to live anywhere within reasonable proximity to where the jobs are, and that, increasingly, jobs go begging because there is no one around to work them as they flee what are unrealistic markets for housing. The knock-on effects of twisted markets are being felt outside the urban centres as people sell out of the rich markets and take the resulting cash to lower-cost areas, but the real estate and finance people follow them, and prices rise sharply with the arrival of these newly-wealthy real estate refugees, pricing the locals out of their own market.
Real estate people love it, as both buying and selling causes the honey to stick to their hands, bankers love it, because the create money from nothing and take it back in as a representation of real wealth, and officialdom seems loathe to anything other than minor tinkering for fear of alienating powerful constituencies and not wanting to be tagged as having caused the pain that will inevitably result from a marketplace that is so out of kilter. However, that pain will come, and experience teaches us that those with the greatest political clout will be those who feel it least, while those who have pawns in the game will take it on the chin. After all, unless you live in Iceland, you haven’t seen any of the people responsible for the last crash held to account for it. The prospects for the next “correction” don’t seem all that rosy either.
How strange it can seem that, when a trade dispute arises, one of the principals in the dispute seems all of a sudden to become solicitous of the well-being of the constituents of one of the other parties involved in the dispute. Such seems to be the case with the current round of sniping over aircraft contracts, originally between Boeing and Bombardier. With Bombardier having a good chunk of its investment held by the Province of Québec and with Bombardier, over the course of several decades, having been the beneficiary of considerable largesse on the part of the federal government, one might conclude that Boeing has some legitimacy in their claims against Bombardier. Silly me, I neglected to pay attention to the duopoly that is supposed to govern the whole of the aeronautical sphere, airline division, to be divided more or less equally between the lion and unicorn that are Boeing and Airbus. So when Delta Airlines purchased a significant chunk of Bombardier’s C100 (I believe it was), Boeing cried foul and asked for the imposition of tariffs to countervail the unfair advantage that Canada offered in terms of subsidies. 220%, boys, just like that! Make America Great Again, and a follow-up of another 80%. We’ll show them! Never mind that Boeing is so fat with US military contracts of the type that could unto themselves be considered a subsidy that they didn’t, it would seem have a comparable aircraft to sell to Delta, but Delta could easily buy something that Boeing makes to keep Boeing happy…so Canada is making rumblings about playing hardball by negotiation a deal for used Australian F-18s rather than a purchase of new F-18s from Boeing, but would these not be serviced by, hmmm…, Boeing? If this conjures up thoughts of Alice in Wonderland, you’re probably on the right track. And then we get this, on the Web, on television, and who knows, it may be in print as well, I no longer read pulp dailies, so I don’t know:
Committed they are, to continuing to sell as much as possible at the highest profit to a country whose aeronautical industry has been consistently suborned over the last many decades to the interests of outfits like Boeing. They will toss us a bone from time to time, but Boeing is committed to generating shareholder value and nothing else. This commitment is reminiscent of the protestations of eternal faithfulness at the altar that is little other than a prelude to divorce. It’s offensive.
…except, in this case, it’s a case of two attitudes defining a single city.something that seems to come to the fore when crisis is upon us. The constructive side of the two outlooks was outlined in some depth is Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built in Hell, a telling litany of how self-help and community organization develops in times of great stress and potential societal breakdown.
Houston in the time of Harvey is very much a case in point.
Case #1 showed up on a news broadcast that my wife was watching the other day, and the owner was quoted elsewhere in the press as saying something like: “To Hell with profits.” When people see human need and the common good as a higher calling than whatever the status quo was, we’re all better off.
Case #2 is not such a happy outcome, in which a mega church had to be shamed into contributing to the well being of the dispossessed and the despondent, despite the clear message in the New Testament about duty of care. This piece from iconoclast sportswriter Dave Zirin, delves into the shenanigans of not only televangelists, but sports franchise owners and the havoc they wreak, with seeming impunity, on the public accounts (remember that roof replacement at BC Place?)
One can only hope that, in this battle for the soul of humanity as we enter a time of greater danger and precarity than humanity has faced in and phase of its “civilized” existence, the answer will lie behind Door Number One, with figurative mattresses for all.
As last year(!) drew to a close, I found myself making like a BC Liberal flack and wearing out the <delete> key in my inbox. Both my wife and I, in our retirement, have taken it upon ourselves to be active in the community and beyond, in aid of creating a social and economic system that works on the principle of inclusion and that works toward a model of ecological regeneration, she from the standpoint of Christian obligation (as well as a generous nature), and I from the standpoint of a morality evolved through secular readings and observations. Our main focus is on our local community, which, it’s plain, is in need of an awakening to current circumstances and to a rebuild foundation for economic activity and reward, but she has ventured as far as Kenya with a women’s missions group, and we both maintain links to both national and international groups seeking to redress the worst (at first) of the world’s ills.
The sad parts that, once one has established a link to an organization, it seems that the relationship becomes one of lifetime support. My inbox has offered me more opportunities to donate in the last couple of weeks than I could ever hope to match, and there are many serial “offenders”, people who remind me several times daily about upcoming deadlines for tax receipts, or opportunities to meet matching donation quotas. The language has gotten progressively more florid as the deadlines approach, tugging ever harder at the heartstrings and guilt pangs to ensure the survival of each and every progressive social and ecologically-focused organization ready to vanish into the ether without my paltry donation.
I guess I can be a hard-hearted bastard when I need to: long ago, I learned to say a firm “No, thank you” based on the principle of being an active reader, seeker and link-follower. I can find the people with whom I need to connect to lend support and don’t need to be solicited with cold calls of one kind or another to prompt me, lest I forget to feed the machine: we do, of course, also get solicitations through Canada Post and via the phone, and my constant refrain when called upon, boils down to “don’t call me, I’ll call you: the best way to get left off the donations list is to ask.”
None of us can do it all, and it is precisely because we don’t seem to act in concert a good part of the time that concentrations of money an power find so ready a lever in the mechanisms of our current society, but I rue the day when we have a superstructure on the scale of the United Way for apportioning money donated to social, political and economic causes. Organizations of that nature seem to become self-focused and look after the organization itself before tending to the needs of the component causes. There is also a multiplicity of approaches that exist to deal with the inequity and iniquity of our current circumstances, some focused in the political realm, some purely ecological, some social initiatives, some squarely aimed at economic levers. I’m good at deciding where to put my time, money and words, and I don’t want people tugging at my sleeve at every corner, upsetting my internal harmony. I also know how fortunate I am in the circumstances of my birth, upbringing, career, cultural and social life, and to sense that my fortune should be everybody’s fortune, but please, a little decorum.
One report was published by the Fraser Institute, the other by the Wait Times Alliance, and both outlined a rather dire situation for people awaiting referral to a medical specialist for treatment, delays that haven’t lessened despite injections of cash from whatever level of government. Global News aired the first report and followed up with a personal account in an on-line piece posted here (video also available).
The sum of the two reports is that we’re trying to achieve different results by applying the same processes and thinking, a mode almost universally acknowledged to produce little other than frustration. The underlying message, the same delivered several times in word and deed by Dr. Brian Day, is that we should carve out a rôle for the private practice of medicine in order to reduce wait times.
Certainly wait times might shrink for those who could afford to jump to the private side of the medical equation, but it would certainly torpedo any notion of universality and would, above all, line the pockets of some physicians and the investors who would expect to reap a benefit from the work of some and the misery of others. Piling on another ten per cent for investor profit seems a strange way to get out of the cash crunch unless the intent is to eliminate access for some clients while expediting the draining of the bank accounts of others.
There is an interesting benchmark that the two studies seem to have set for purposes of comparison: the baseline year being 1993. For those with short memories, this is the period immediately preceding Paul Martin’s book-balancing feats, accomplished largely at the expense of transfer payments, and specifically the unravelling of the universal health care system. My mother had a hip replacement in 1994 and my father had bypass surgery the same year. I don’t think either of them had time to get a referral before the surgeries were done to remedy the condition; in neither case did even a week lapse before the intervention took place.
These two reports smack of yet another stab at introducing the same chaotic and dysfunctional system of medical delivery that we see in the U.S., and what the reports scream at high intensity is that greed is the primary motivator of both these organizations.
