Category Archives: Politics

The Burden of Politics and Governing

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Photo by Daniel Malikyar on Unsplash

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.

 

 

Committed to Canada

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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 to Canada

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.

The Plague of History?

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Saw this at Marianne.net this morning:

(Is it necessary to unbolt the historic figures who’ve become an embarrassment? Renaming streets and removing statues of former slavery advocates: the controversy has arrived in France.)

A local city councillor brought this debate to the fore some months ago and it stirred up much debate, a lot of it less than civilized, and raised the whole question of how we perceive and deal with history. In question were the name of a local school and a street that carried the name of an openly racist politician and government agent whose policies did considerable harm to both orientals and First Nations people.

A first thought is the actual history that gets presented, initially at home and at school and the extent to which that history becomes the internal narrative. I know it was instructive coming to Canada in the last months of high school and being subjected to an entirely different perspective on history than what I had absorbed through the school system in the U.S., where I grew up. The cognitive dissonance set up by the new narrative, along with considerable openness and encouragement from parents who had a view of history that often was more nuanced than the textbook version, has lead to a willingness to at listen to “alternate” views of history and a desire to uncover as much of the overall narrative that I can form at least a provisional outlook on history and how that might guide any actions that stem from that outlook.

The second thought is that we all tend to construct our own narratives based on our own experiences and our exposure to whatever depth and breadth of history we have encountered. We’ve likely, many of us, had the experience of connecting with someone who has read the same text as we have, or watched the same documentary, and come away with a completely different take on what actually happened and what might be the consequences of those actions. This phenomenon can really muddy the waters of possible debate and common thought leading to action. Even when we can arrive at consensus about historic events, it’s a bit of a trick to intuit motives on the part of the players, and even trickier to map out a course of action, or inaction, as the case may be.

Is there a reasoned and generally acceptable approach to dealing with the enshrined who turn out to non-conforming when it comes to contemporary mores? Can the enshrined remain atop a pedestal with a degree of opprobrium attached to their notoriety? Can we use these discussions as a jumping off point for acknowledgement and possible redress of past wrongdoing? The evidence thus far isn’t all that encouraging with many not wanting to unearth the past (implying that it’s being kept out of mind to begin with) and others unwilling to acknowledge that some of our forbears acted out of less-than-benign motivation, with some stepping deeply into the pool of racism, sexism and general barbarism. How do those of us alive today square our own attitudes with the deeds of illustrious forbears with feet of clay? Is there sufficient will and resources to effectively redress the wrongs that were done under previous iterations of our societal structures?

All the ideas and questions in play need to be part of the process of dealing with A.W. Neill, with Sir John A. Macdonald, with all the Confederate Statuary that riled folks up at Charlottesville, and all the centuries of French public figures whose likenesses are bolted to pedestals around France. I suspect that there are other jurisdictions where the same discussions will arise, in addition to which, we need to deal more forthrightly that we do currently with the leading figures of our own days and the deeds that they perpetrate in our name.

 

A Tale of Two Cities

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…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?)

 

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-houston-stadium-grift-comes-home-to-roost/

 

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.

 

 

 

Bad Mouth

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Politics is high school with guns and more money.
—Frank Zappa
Aside from the frightful causes of the rise of the current American administration and the even more frightful aspects of the administration itself, it is a telling spectacle to listen to these folks as they react to events such as a missile test on the part of North Korea. The tenor of the language is better suited to a clique of elementary schoolyard bullies than to international diplomacy. When Rex Tillerson sounds like a true elder statesman because of the bar being set so low, it’s clear that others, including the bully-in-chief, are going to leave much to be desired in the realm of linguistic capacity for conveying nuanced and thoughtful responses to crises of any nature.
That’s not to say that the traditional diplomacy, however eloquent, does not have much for which to answer, but the current crop are nothing of an improvement in any kind of substance that would counterbalance the vacuity and puerility of their language. It comes as no surprise that these folks are clearly out of their depth and damnably proud of it. It rather reminds me of another rather nasty little quip from Frank Zappa:
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.

Junk Science, Junk Journalism

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The good news is that traditional media, long since captured by the forces of monied greed and power, are bleeding value in a way that, under normal circumstances, would presage their demise in fairly short order. The bad news is twofold.

Firstly, we seem to have a government with a tendency to prop up said media in the name of perpetuating “Canadian Culture”. This is the culture that gave us environmental devastation, residential schools, unending war, the security state, laughable levels of economic and political inequality, contaminated food and water, climate disruption (despite all the pretty words) and a willingness to ignore the ills that confront large segments of the population, and I don’t see that it merits any support from its victims, nor should the “winners” be allowed to redirect their largesse toward PostMedia and its homologues through tax deductions or preferential policy. In the Free Market (a chimera and a camouflage if there ever was one) they should fail and disappear, remaining only in history as a reminder to those that would make themselves irrelevant to a broad swathe of the population.

There certainly is another side to Canadian culture, the dogged persistence of Terry Fox, the  farmers who ponied up to ship hay from one end of the country to another in time of drought and shortage, the folks who scheduled holidays to go and help with recovery following floods, the CUSO crowd who went to Africa and elsewhere to teach and make a selfless contribution to the betterment of lives in underprivileged communities, the people of Newfoundland and Labrador who were so giving when disaster struck in New York City, the FN communities who flew to the rescue of passengers and crew of the Leviathan II , the communities and citizens who responded so generously to the appeal to support refugees and people who volunteer and donate to prop up the failing social safety net. Perhaps we could employ any contemplated funds destined for the press to repairing the tatters in the aforementioned safety net.

Sadly, secondly, it seems that Greenpeace, the target of Princess Margaret’s wrath, has indulged in some chicanery in enticing good folks to contribute to their fund to defend against Resolute Paper’s SLAPP suit. This would be entirely unconscionable were it not the norm, often in government circles, and frequently in the realm of commerce and finance. Our language and visual referents have been so twisted and diluted in the pursuit of commercial advantage as to border on incomprehensibility. People who do this at a personal level lose credibility and trust, eventually being shunned by those who practice a modicum of integrity in their dealings with others, while it seems normal practice in business where the caveats are buried, if expressed at all, in the fine print and legalese attendant on contracts and end user agreements.

Ms. Wente falls into her own morass when she allows her vituperative screed to be published under a headline that hyperbolizes Greenpeace as a menace to the world, after which she extends her hand to the Canadian public for alms to support her in the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed.

D’Ya Think?

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Crap! reacting to headlines on MSM sites is likely about as real a waste of time as exists in this universe, but there’s this on the landing page of the Globe this morning:

On the verge of being dethroned, Christy Clark’s BC Liberals seek atonement

It remains to be seen whether Clark will actually move out of the way. Certainly the publication of a piece by the Times Colonist written by none other than Perhaps-Shoulda-Oughta-Be-A-Guest-Of-Her-Majesty Gary Collins is emblematic of the coverage given by Postmedia folks and their ilk of the hazards of the Dipper-Green Arrangement, and as a long and tainted history has shown us, most anything wrought by Clark & Co. is likely not at all what it seems. You can almost hear the little crabs crawling around under the rock over the noise of the tide clamouring for change.

There is talk of flip-flops on donations, Oh,well, what have we here? this is the same idea floated tin the legislature six times by the opposition and which polled a vast majority of support from friend and foe alike. but was rejected by those who benefit most, and, strangely enough, have continued to benefit since the election of May 9. It reeks of closing the barn door about the time that the last horse wheezes across the finish line, and that’s without the caveat so often in play with Miz Christy: When? You can easily feature the interior chuckle when this promise materializes in the Throne Speech with the unspoken little thought bubble hanging over her head reading; “When hell freezes over!” It’s also easy for us to visualize the crossed finger behind her back, right over the tramp stamp of a leech emblazoned with the family motto: “Sucker!”

The same applies to the revelation that there is a bit of an *ahem* social deficit stemming from the last sixteen years of corporate giveaways, environmental rapine, a general tapping down the heads of those Less-Fortunate-But-Always-Wtih-Us poor folks, a rise in whose rates would impede the dotting of the landscape with bloated and useless megaprojects dreamed up like so many erector sets for the SNC-Lavalin types and their brethren whose names so prominently grace the BC Liberal donor lists.

Patience. Vigilance. A hair-trigger on saying what needs to be said as a veritable tsunami of bluster, wishful thinking and outright lies washes over the province. I really would like to see Messers. Weaver and Horgan get to put their political experiment to the test. Another election right away? Not so keen just yet, but that would also get us a look at the underlying strength of the NDP-Green accord: how would these two and their henches work out some form of collaboration to ensure that Clark loses the keys to the kingdom and that they would be able to move forward with a mutually-agreed program of forward motion and redress of wrong doings by the current régime.

Bullshit Baffles Brains

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Uniconformity? Photo by Scott Webb, via Unsplash (https://unsplash.com)

 

It’s no mystery that there is a serious crisis in the operation of human society, and there are many explanations for why this has come to pass, but it looks increasingly as though humanity may be nothing more than a failed evolutionary gambit and that we are about to bring our temple down around our own ears in the most Samson-like fashion, at least partly through a lack of ability to deploy the reasoning that was touted as the distinguishing feature of humanity (our opposable thumbs may have been the instrument of our undoing).

 

This thought got somewhat focused most recently via a piece from urban homesteader Erica Strauss about the fine experience she has had schooling her children at home. There are a couple of really important and relevant reasons why this works, and she lays all this out in a very readable and thought-provoking manner that leaves me with more questions than answers (as thought-provoking pieces should).

Reason number 5 is a good place to start, because it is at the source of all that ensues. Says Ms. Strauss:

The Vice Principal isn’t a bad person, but her world is juggling legally mandated administrative bullshit constantly. I have very little tolerance for administrative bullshit on a good day, and when I think it’s jeopardizing the safety of my kid…well, I know a few terms that describe how deep inside the administrator’s intestinal tract such concerns should be filed, but they might scorch the eyeballs of our more delicate readers.

The public education system has become increasingly tied up with administrative constraints as a succession of governments in most locales have become more prescriptive about what will and what will not be taught and about how student and faculty interactions will be moderated. This, of course, coincides with the rise of litigious behaviour on the part of most everyone concerned with education. In most jurisdictions, the clear trend over that last half century has been to standardization of both instruction and of evaluation and the questions and answers that guide the educational process have been increasingly written by people who know how to run a business within the current paradigm and are more concerned with perpetuating that paradigm than they are with providing an education that will produce a society whose citizens will have some sense of belonging to a common, yet flexible entity. The intellectual and emotional agility to navigate and sustain the sense of belonging and the flexibility to tolerate and encourage a multiplicity of approaches to participating in and shaping society is difficult to engender when the answers must be machine-scored multiple choice in nature, and often, if there is only one right answer, the question it asked would have been totally irrelevant. The saddest part is that the education system abhors unresolved questions and conflicts and enforces conformity of one kind or another using the biggest hammer it can find. It’s the kind of authoritarian treatment that many would like to be able to implement themselves, but that has produced a likely preponderance of students who come through the system with a sense of having survived rather than having been launched on a path to some version of fulfillment.

From this idea stems the rest of the reasons for keeping the kids at home. “It fits our lifestyle” may not be for everyone, especially a household where either or both parents (or a single parent) has an enforced schedule that precludes any thought of spending any substantial part of the day with the offspring, but obviously works for those who have created a life that revolves around the homestead and where both parents, in this case, can devote time to both direct instruction and to the creation of experiential learning events. If we consider that the whole of the school day can be devoted to a “field trip” where there are directed experiences and reflections, we are already likely to generate more curiosity and interest that we would with the typical day in public schools shuffling from one desk to the next, and the encouragement to reflection without outside direction gives the possibility of even greater exploration and synthesis.

A quick digression might be appropriate here, because this is not intended as a diatribe against public schooling. There are many teachers and administrators who go to great lengths to provide students with the opportunity to engage in experiences that will stimulate reflection and questioning. There are, thankfully, still field trips, visiting guest speakers, internet explorations, work experience and other vehicles deployed by concerned educators to flesh out the bare bones of an educational curriculum that is almost constantly in need of supplementation. These educators also know how to modify and adapt both standard curriculum to the needs, readiness and abilities of their students, and they also understand that the impact of the experiences may be delayed as students process and integrate what they have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched and shared with other students and staff. However, not all educators operate on this premise, and even those who do face enormous constraints in terms of time, resources and money, as well as strictures in operating procedures and militate against the implementation of anything that deviates in the slightest from the core curriculum and the published institutional routines.

Free from these strictures, parents can achieve what most educators can only admire from afar, and Ms. Strauss is quick to acknowledge that helping hands are readily available:

The resources for homeschooling in our area are incredible. We live in a little pocket of suburban Seattle with many homeschooling families and strong school district support for homeschoolers. In fact, there is a public homeschooling school – with a campus and everything – that we partner with.

If society encourages home schooling and fosters the initiative of parents by providing  resources and constructive guidance, and if there are other homeschooling parents willing to share resources and perspectives, the chances of desirable outcomes are considerably enhanced. This goes hand in glove with being curriculum nerds:

Tactically, we find the planning aspect of homeschooling just kinda…fun. My husband has his masters degree in Adult Education and designs educational curriculum for a living, and nothing makes me happier than a complicated, intricate project requiring nerdy research and multiple spreadsheets. Ask us to plan 4 years of classical high school education and we’ll call that date-night.

I suspect that the Strauss couple has much to contribute to the home schooling of other students in this little universe, endnote everyone would consider the development of learning maps for students to be pleasure on the “date night” scale, but almost everyone can have something to add to the resource pot and many can benefit from the expertise of those who know how to encourage and channel learning.  This is like public school with only the enthusiastic and knowledgeable educators and without the strictures and administrative bullshit.

The other two reasons fall into the general heading of a process that allows for allotment of time according to the needs of the student and the homeschooling parents:

 

Early grade homeschooling is more like one-on-one tutoring. Unless (student) is a giant ass, it takes us about 45 minutes a day to do a core curriculum – what we call “table work.” We cover math, phonics, handwriting, and reading. He’s 6, heading into 1st grade. That’s all he needs. Over the course of the day we also do history, some art, some science – but that happens more organically. That leaves him a lot of time to still be a kid and just play or deep-dive on his interests.

 

 

 

 

Homeschooling makes traveling with children so much easier. You can take advantage of off-season discounts and odd-routings to nab great deals on airfare, apartment rentals and more. You can hit popular destinations off-peak and spend less time battling crowds who all have the same 10 day spring break window.

 

There are some students who go through the standard school system as happy campers, navigating the shoals of curriculum, regimentation, staff and student personality issues and general growing pains with a minimum of fuss. For many, there are anxieties and conflicts to the degree where these vicissitudes can’t be seen as an opportunity to generalize and synthesize some constructive learning. and where the greatest need is for refuge: home schooling can provide that cocoon, but what Ms. Strauss shows is that there is more than shelter in the home school, that learning happens at all hours of the day and night and in physical surroundings far removed from the classroom. The outdoors can be the place and time for all manner of “curriculum fulfillment”, as can time spent at work with a parent, or a trip to the beach, or a visit to a local merchant, baker, or animation studio. Even those who are well-adapted to the maladaptive system often do a great deal of their real learning outside of the classroom, particularly once they can read, and as they learn to observe and interact with their surroundings, the whole world becomes the classroom in a way that is much less constricted than it has perforce to be for those spending the bulk of their days within the four walls of the schoolhouse. If a student doesn’t have to measure learning by keeping pace with his peers in a class, then time and space can be trump cards rather than limitations.

The fly in the ointment arises from this question:

If society is a common undertaking, how much commonality to we need to make it work?

A look at what goes on in what passes for society of late indicates that there is a lot of pull in different directions, intellectually, politically, spiritually and economically that makes us look more like cohabitants than social beings, and, with the “Let’s go to Mars first” crowd, we seem even less inclined to even cohabitate. The recent rise of the terms Fake News and Alternate Facts seems symptomatic of the splintering of any coherent knowledge that would bind us together as a society, and it looks, as times, as though there is an amorphous mass of humanity that is so deeply asleep as to be incapable even of denial of the need to establish common knowledge and, horrors, common sense. The way our current education system works, it seems unlikely that it can be much of a remedy for our current quandary, and the kind of home schooling undertaken by folks such as the Strauss family is great for those who have parents willing to shoulder the load, but for those students without such parents, the options close up quickly, and there will also be those who are homeschooled with the idea of narrowing the education to a set of tenets held closely and dearly by the educating parents who wish to isolate their progeny from the hurly-burly of broader society, meaning that there is a good possibility of cultivating citizens unwilling to participate and interact with all manner of groups in society that don’t share their world view.

There is, of course, no easy answer, and I fear that time and inertia will militate against our being able to achieve some sort of consensus balance in our educational endeavours, though Finland seems to have devised a system where they rely on a short school year, short school days, an inclusive and flexible curriculum implemented by concerned and involved parents and educators and which acknowledges the central rôle played by parents and students in engendering learning outside of school locations and hours. However, even the implementation of that sort of structure seems hard to envision in our current circumstances.

I, of course, have all the answers, but mostly, so does everyone else.

What Turns Up Sometimes

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This was a comment left by Scotty On Denman. Given the long hiatus before the wars at the Rockpile start up again in earnest, I thought it worthy of a look.

 

Voters do not need to vote en mass for the Greens to end up with a BC Liberal government by way of splitting the vote: even if half of polled citizens who say they support the Greens actually voted for them, it would likely return the BC Liberals. All reasonable measures suggest Green support is very soft; sure, lots of citizens would like to vote Green, and probably for more than simply environmental reasons, but will vote strategically for the NDP which is the only party that has a realistic chance of beating the BC Liberals—besides, the parties’ respective environmental platforms are much closer together than either’s are to the BC Liberals’ who are essentially the environmental bad guys in this play.

No serious restructuring of the economy or society is on offer, nor are there compelling reasons for undertaking such before a return to observing laws that already exist happens. Many of the problems we have in BC are due to flagrant breaches of trust by the BC Liberal government that include breaking campaign promises in a very big way (eg. BCR, HST and LNG), blatant conflicts of interest, cronyism, secrecy and numerous negligence in enforcing all kinds of laws and regulations.

We already have a plurality system that rewards parties which build bigger tents through compromise. Otherwise there is no constitutional alternative allowed for the passage of bills, that is, by a simple majority of parliamentary votes. This is true regardless of electoral system, despite claims by pro-reppers that parliamentary voting will be somehow different under pro-rep; it wouldn’t be, and neither would the Westminster parliamentary system’s primary strength: confidence (pro-reppers have been known to make claims that ignore this immutable fact).

Everything you suggest should get done by an NDP government I agree with except for pro-rep. It’s the very last thing a new government should embroil itself in, especially in BC where there’ll be plenty of more important work in forensic discovery and remediation of BC Liberal damage to the public weal, and where STV was rejected twice, by twice the margin the second time as the first. We should take a lesson from the federal electoral reform debacle: never let partisans decide anything about electoral systems. In time an older NDP government might consider referring electoral reform to the proper agency, Elections BC, the only one with the proven impartiality and expertise to address reform to the extent voters want.

Although Citizens’ Initiative has frustrated many voters (reminding that it was designed by partisans under political imposition, not by an impartial agency like Elections BC in response to public will), it seems, with regard “Recall,” unreasonable to allow less than 40% of riding voters to overturn an election result (the designers couldn’t very well set the threshold at 50% because the target MLA could well have won the seat in the first place with less that 50% of the votes, nor could they very well allow only 30% to overturn an election else a revolving door of Recalls and by-elections interrupt with Westminster parliament’s prime directive to pass legislation whenever it’s needed and in a timely way (parliamentary confidence precludes legislative gridlock). No Recall has succeeded in BC despite over two dozen attempts.

The Anti HST Petition, on the other hand, was much more successful, in fact setting an important international precedent: it led to the first time in eight centuries of Commonwealth parliamentary history that a legislated tax was rescinded by force of popular measure. In BC that simply meant the HST was rejected at referendum—although that mail-in ballot voting system experience (not to be confused with electoral systems) should have taught us a lesson that such voting systems should not be allowed due to inherent veracity and fraud problems; banning online voting and mail-in ballots would be a welcome reform.

But these experiences have suggested improvements more practical than firing MLAs with ease. The Petition rules of CI do not include binding MLAs to a clear vote in the Assembly; Campbell could have legally addressed the Petition by simply introducing the matter on the order paper, the Petition only having legal force to make MLAs acknowledge it in session. Referendum is of course another way to address the Petition but, even then, Campbell set the threshold to a level he considered politic—50%—when he could have quite legally set it higher. Taking these kinds of discretions away from partisan politicians might be a worthy reform of CI.

The designers of CI also wrestled with California-style Propositions, but shied away, recognizing existing reticence among the electorate who were well aware of the excesses of such CI tactics in that state. These matters might be addressed in order to allow, but ameliorate the pitfalls of, Proposition rules such as we’ve seen down south.

In any case, as the words Citizens’ Initiative implies, it’s largely up to citizens to make it work, whatever the rules; they have to get involved—and no legislation will make that happen short of compulsory voting. Perhaps we could have a referendum—see how many turn out.

The easiest and quickest way to improve BC politics is to get campaign financing under control, and that means first getting rid of the BC Liberals who will never acquiesce when in power, and who might very well never get a chance, after forensic investigation of the books (assuming they lose), to win power again—if only they’re disconnected from it just once.

 

 

No original Dylan on Y’Tube, so Robben will have to do.

Comfortably Numb

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Slacking off because things are busy, but also because I needed a bit of a break from the tension inherent in any discussion how we govern ourselves, the odd time when we get the opportunity.

So I got a notice that WordPress needed to update the site, and there was this comment awaiting moderation, from Scotty on Denman, a cogent bit that I will feature prominently if he gives permission. Crap! I’ve dropped the ball, so I guess I better pick it up, given that we continue to live in interesting times and there is still a crying need for perspective from the proponents of a generous and inclusive society.