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Monday, February 8, 2010 4:33 PM EST
Is politics everything?
That “everything is political" is one of the left’s hoarier shibboleths. For a long time its most visible Canadian manifestation was on the decidedly pinkish This Magazine, whose tag line read “because everything is political.” Lately, the magazine decided to dump the tag, presumably because even that lefty crew thought it was getting just a little stale. All that said, there’s still more than a little kick in the old dog yet. Some years ago, Stanley Fish, one of America’s more eminent and loquacious public brainiacs, had this to say about the merits of the old saw:
“...there is more than a little truth to the assertion. Everything is political in the sense that any action we take or decision we make or conclusion we reach rests on assumptions, norms, and values not everyone would affirm. That is, everything we do is rooted in a contestable point of origin; and since the realm of the contestable is the realm of politics, everything is political.”
And yet in the realm of “free market” economic theory this notion is hardly taken for granted. Last weekend the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from former U.S. treasury secretary Hank Paulson’s new book. In it Paulson writes of john McCain’s ill starred decision to suspend his 2008 presidential campaign in order to return the Washington to “focus on the financial crisis”:
“We'd devised TARP to save the financial system. Now it had become all about politics — presidential politics. I wondered what McCain could have been thinking. Calling a meeting like this when we didn't have a deal was playing with dynamite.”
McCain’s obvious idiocy in this specific matter notwithstanding (and it was considerable), you’d think from the way Paulson’s talking that asking a few “political” questions about a dead-of-night decision to bail out a bunch of investment bankers to the tune of $700-billion dollars was akin to querying the first law of thermodynamics. The economic arrangements that put millions of Americans out of a job and/or out of their homes “rests on assumptions, norms, and values not everyone would affirm.”
And when Canada’s economic reckoning arrives — and it will — and John McCallum or Jim Flaherty talk about the “inevitability” of cuts to social and cultural spending it would do well to remember Stanley Fish’s formulation.
(Illustration by Marcelle Faucher for The Globe and Mail)
Link to this postWednesday, February 3, 2010 4:46 PM EST
Sound and fury
No one in their right mind should begrudge Danny Williams decision to seek cardiac care in the States. Wilbert Keon, a Tory senator and one of Canada’s most eminent cardiac surgeons, pretty much nailed it:
“ ‘If he can afford to pay for that, who can deny somebody the right to drive a Mercedes as opposed to a Honda?’
Dr. Keon said he thinks one reason Canadians might favour U.S. hospitals is their more luxurious facilities.
‘If for example he came to the Ottawa Heart Institute he would be in a little private room where there's just a chair for his wife to sit on and his family [would] have to stand around the end of the bed. He goes to one of the American luxury institutions and he gets a suite for his wife and family and so forth.’ “
That said, the kerfuffle as to what this means for the broader health-care debate is likely, per Macbeth, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
If you want a different take on the American system have a look at this piece from today’s New York Times on St. Vincent’s hospital in Greenwich Village. Besides confirming that champagne socialists like Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins would drive Che to join the John Birch society, the article points up the fundamental inhumanity of for-profit health care. Particularly loathsome are the so-called turnaround consultants who feed off the decline of health care for the poor like so many vampires at a convention of hemophiliacs. Read it and weep.
Monday, February 1, 2010 3:35 PM EST
The Crown and its discontents
This morning, following up on the same FT article I mentioned in my post on Saturday, NYT uber hack Paul Krugman echoed Chrystia Freeland’s observation that Canada, soul of tedium though she may be, is a shining beacon of sensible financial regulation (can you dig it? Yes I can!).
And while I found myself nodding along to the op-ed paen to our collective probity, I did find myself slightly off the beat confronted with the following:
“I’ve always considered Canada fascinating precisely because it’s similar to the United States in many but not all ways. The point is that when Canadian and U.S. experience diverge, it’s a very good bet that policy differences, rather than differences in culture or economic structure, are responsible for that divergence.”
Oh you mean like deferring to a metaphysical abstraction (the Crown) as the root of statutory authority?
Americans (progressives particularly) console themselves with the notion that we’re a lot like them and that when “the people” get out of hand, throwing up fundamentally irrational policy (isolationism, the death penalty, state sanctioned torture, “welfare to work”), pointing at their dozy younger brother will help pull manifest destiny back into line.
Well actually it’s a little more involved than that. The Crown is the instantiation of a moral order; molded by history and informed by current debates. Over the weekend I took in The Young Victoria, which in its slightly cheesy way tries to get at some of this.
Put simply, the United States is a radical experiment in libertarian individualism. Canada, er, isn’t. Sorting similarities between Americans and Canadians is like fishing about dancing.
(Illustration by Anthony Jenkins/The Globe and Mail)
Saturday, January 30, 2010 1:25 PM EST
Canadian faith
Canadian faith
My fellow blogger Norman Spector is one smart cookie. In his last couple of blog posts he has sounded a clarion of caution regarding the Supreme Court’s disposition in the matter of Omar Khadr. In sum Spector’s point is this: The courts can moralize all they like about the violation of young Omar’s rights but repatriating him to face “Canadian justice” is a whole other matter, one that falls properly under the jurisdiction of our political institutions:
“The only authority on our side that is competent to assess their true position and the impact our actions would have on Canada-U.S. relations is the government, advised by DFAIT and perhaps by some experienced hands like Alan Gottlieb and Derek Burney.
And, whatever the Harper government decides to do in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, one of the last places you’d look for this kind of expertise, on which hundreds of thousands of jobs filled by ordinary Canadians depend, are among the ranks of the nine justices who sit on that Court.”
Okay, okay we get it. If you’re going to play in the NFL you’d better wear a helmet. That said, I noted an article this morning in the Financial Times by a former editor at the Globe Chrystia Freeland. In it she takes a stab at explaining how it is the Canadian banking system avoided to financial tsunami that hit the rest of the banking world:
“The Canadian system is based on principles; it is about the spirit, not the letter of the law.”
If and when we approach the Americans and ask that they hand Khadr over to us we ought to do so in a manner that reflects the principles that compel us to do so. When we listen to the better angels of our nature that is precisely how and why Canada has maintained its eccentric sovereignty strung out on a thin line beside the world’s most powerful predatory economic and military power. In short, act as if ye had faith and faith shall be granted to you.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 6:38 PM EST
Demagogues and their discontent
Last Saturday I skulked along at the margins of the anti-prorogation march through downtown Toronto. I kept an open notebook and a journalist’s bland expression but I have to admit my heart was with the crowd, particularly the university-aged organizers who clearly were in it for the right reasons.
Walied Khogali, a student at U of T and one of the chief organizers, seemed genuinely awestruck at the turnout. “We started with an organizing meeting at Hart House and drew 200 people now we’ve got something like 210,000 members on Facebook. This crowd is amazing; people bought their kids. ”
There was something genuinely idealistic and sweet about his enthusiasm. That said, a half hour survey of the crowd elucidated a somewhat less sanguine observation. The signs and chants said it all: “That (with an arrow pointing at a photo of Stephen Harper) is what hypocrisy looks like. This is what democracy looks like.” “Harper you can’t hide from war crimes.” “Hey hey ho ho Stephen Harper’s got to go.”
And finally among a batch of slightly inebriated U of T students arose the chant “Harper is a wanker, Harper is a wanker.” A disapproving titter went up from the crowd — a little too naughty for a polite Canadian crowd. Still the tenor of the Toronto event reinforced what the Harperites would dismiss as the inherently partisan aspect of the protest.
It seems these days that advocating for democracy has itself become a partisan enterprise. Last week’s 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing corporations unrestricted spending in favour of political candidates or causes (all in the name of “free speech“) gave rive rise to a mighty dissent from Justice John Paul Stevens, delivered viva voce from the bench. Stevens didn’t pull any punches in describing the ill effects of overturning, at a single stroke, a century of precedent in this regard:
“The fact that corporations are different from human beings might seem to need no elaboration, except that the majority opinion almost completely elides it…
Unlike natural persons, corporations have ‘limited liability’ for their owners and managers, ‘perpetual life,’ separation of ownership and control, ‘and favorable treatment of the accumulation and distribution of assets . . . that enhance their ability to attract capital and to deploy their resources in ways that maximize the return on their shareholders’ investments.’ 494 U. S., at 658–659. Unlike voters in U. S. elections, corporations may be foreign controlled.
Unlike other interest groups, business corporations have been ‘effectively delegated responsibility for ensuring society’s economic welfare’; they inescapably structure the life of every citizen. ‘[T]he resources in the treasury of a business corporation,’ furthermore, ‘are not an indication of popular support for the corporation’s political ideas.’ Id., at 659 (quoting MCFL, 479 U. S., at 258).
‘They reflect instead the economically motivated decisions of investors and customers. The availability of these resources may make a corporation a formidable political presence, even though the power of the corporation may be no reflection of the power of its ideas.’ 494 U. S., at 659 (quoting MCFL, 479 U. S., at 258). It might also be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.
Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established. These basic points help explain why corporate electioneering is not only more likely to impair compelling governmental interests, but also why restrictions on that electioneering are less likely to encroach upon First Amendment freedoms.”
In conclusion, Stevens notes with more than a hint of bitterness that: “While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”
In a piece subsequent to the decision Adam Liptak, The Times’s supreme court reporter, noted that the 89 year old Stevens, who will likely retire from the court this year, has evinced a common theme in many of his recent opinions: “that the Supreme Court had lost touch with fundamental notions of fair play.” Or, to state it more plainly, its democratic impulse. The Court has acted in this case to balance the efforts (paltry though they may be) on the part of the Obama administration at redistribution by setting loose the dogs of American commerce, whose interests have never been particularly democratic in nature.
Tonight, in the face of this and his other recent political setbacks, Obama gives his first State of the Union Address. It’s an opportunity to bite back at his tormentors. In a sense, though, Obama’s beaten even before he begins, since like that crowd buzzing around the Eaton Centre last Saturday his efforts at protecting the fading ember of democracy will no doubt be portrayed by the other side as just another bleating voice of partisan demagoguery.
Sunday, January 24, 2010 10:27 PM EST
Never mind
Just in case we as a free and democratic people needed any more encouragement to stand together against the anti-democratic forces of repression and prorogation, the following arrived this morning from my friend Andrew Clark who reports for the Guardian newspaper in New York. (Clark is the sort of Canuckophile Brit who remains vaguely fascinated by the idea that there exists a massive landmass to the north of the United States that continues to count the Queen as its head of state.)
“Am on Sunday duty for the Guardian and just offered a piece on protests over Harper proroguing parliament. The foreign editor's response was that the deathly words ‘Canadian politics’ killed any story. Just thought you'd like to know!”
Oh. Never mind.
Thursday, January 21, 2010 6:54 PM EST
One year and one day
This morning’s ideologically motivated U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down laws restricting corporate spending at election time is something of a game changer. Politico reports that already “the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent $36 million on ads and get-out-the-vote activities in 2008, pledged to organize the largest, most aggressive election campaign in its history targeting congressional Democrats who support Obama administration proposals to overhaul health insurance and the financial system and limit carbon emissions.”
In response to the decision, Barack Obama was quoted in The New York Times saying: “With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”
To my ear this sounds more like a eulogy than a call to arms. With Democrats scurrying away from his reform agenda like vampires from the breaking dawn, this decision puts paid to Obama’s campaign slogan “change we can believe in.” All that’s left for The One is to trim his sails and hope he can cobble together a new populist alliance with so called “independent” voters. Meantime American progressives will return to their accustomed position carping on the sidelines. It was fun while it lasted — exactly one year and one day.
(Photo: Olivier Douliery/Getty Images)
Wednesday, January 20, 2010 9:29 AM EST
Canadian debates
During the last federal election I interviewed Michael Ignatieff’s opponent in Etobicoke lakeshore, the former Progressive Conservative incumbent Patrick Boyer. A law professor and prolific author, Boyer was/is intellectually accomplished, articulate and consequently, unintimidated by Ignatieff’s imperious manner and Ivy League/Oxbridge resume. Boyer suggested that, generally speaking at least up until that time in October of 2008, the Canadian press had given Ig something of a free ride.
Boyer chalked this up to a combination of insecurity and obsequious deference in the face of Ig’s international bona fides. As a sidecar to this argument, Boyer pointed out the parochial nature of Canada’s broader political discourse. There is, he said, little or no interplay between politicians, journalists and academe. They tend to operate each in their silos. A figure like the Tory mayor of London, Boris Johnson, writing regularly for a major daily (in his case the Telegraph at £200,000 per annum) and carrying on at the same time as a major public figure for his party (arguably third after George Osborne and David Cameron) is pretty much unthinkable here. Public discourse goes on in three separate locations with a sort of deaf antipathy between them and ne’er the twain shall meet.
Last week in Toronto I met with two guys who broadly agree with Boyer’s assessment and are trying to do something about it. Patrick Luciani and Rudyard Griffiths run a couple of ongoing programs aimed at elevating the public discourse in Canada: the Munk Debates and the Salon Speaker Series. Centered in Toronto but emanating from a variety of locales across the country, these debates, panels and solo speakers, sourced from all over the world, aim to discuss and debate the crucial issues of the day. They are decidedly anti-parochial in spirit. Griffiths suggested, with a mischievous grin, that they are the opposite of Heather Reisman’s moto (put into harness to promote her book chain, Indigo) that the world needs more Canada. “Our view is that Canada needs rather more of the world than the other way around.”
The most recent of these debates - “be it resolved climate change is mankind’s defining crisis, and demands a commensurate response” - brought combatants from Britain (George Monbiot pro and Nigel Lawson con) Denmark (Bjorn Lomborg con) and Canada (Elizabeth May decidedly, even stridently, pro). The climate-change debate was the fourth in the biannual series and future debate subjects will likely include religion and that most sacred of Canadian cows, universal health care. The main benefactor for the debates is the Canadian gold bug (Barrick Gold Corporation) and gazillionaire Peter Munk. He’s very much a presence, giving a short(ish) speech before each event extolling the virtues of free/elevated expression. One can’t help but note a certain irony given Munk’s very public complaints calling for the regulation of so-called rogue NGOs, including one devoted to bird dogging the operations of Barrick itself. The subject, perhaps, of a future debate?
(Photo: Peter Munk introduces a debate on humanitarian intervention in December of 2008. Arantxa Cedillo for The Globe and Mail)
Thursday, January 14, 2010 11:27 PM EST
American nutbar
I’m going a little off the beaten track to comment on a particularly noxious editorial in The Wall Street journal under the headline Haiti’s Tragedy. In the face of unmitigated natural disaste,r the role of the editorial in a newspaper falls somewhere between advocacy and analysis. The Globe’s lead editorial Thursday was in this sense a model of probity and propriety. The Journal, on the other hand, took this obscene tragedy as a signal opportunity to promote a bizarrely self serving interpretation of the quake and its aftermath:
“The earthquake is also a reminder that while natural calamities do not discriminate between rich countries and poor ones, their effects almost invariably do. The 1994 Northridge quake was nearly as powerful as the one that struck Haiti, but its human toll was comparatively slight. The difference is a function of a wealth-generating and law-abiding society that can afford, among other things, the expense of proper building codes.”
This is tantamount to suggesting that had Maldivans the wit to be born in a mountainous region of the world the effects of global warming on those soon to be swamped islanders would be considerably less severe. In an op-ed in Thursday's New York Times, Tracy Kidder points out that:
“Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted. (In more recent years American administrations fell into a pattern of promoting and then undermining Haitian constitutional democracy.)”
The interests that The Wall Street Journal represents in making their “argument” regarding Haiti — Republican, parochial and xenophobic — will in this instance be overwhelmed by the better angels of the American nature. But make no mistake, the nutbar ideology that equates wealth generation with moral superiority is still abroad in the land to the south. Pray to God that their tea partying, gun totting insanity remains at bay.
(Photo: A nurse takes a woman's blood pressure in a makeshift camp in front of the national palace in Port-au-Prince on Thursday. Logan Abassi/United Nations)
Tuesday, January 12, 2010 5:46 PM EST
Time and apathy
Yesterday’s New York Times included a lengthy reprise/meditation on the worst business deal of all time - the disastrous merger/takeover of Time Warner by/with AOL. For all the substantive reasons this deal cratered, never underestimate the power of venality to scupper the best laid plans. To wit:
“The optimism surrounding the deal was brief. In May of 2000, the dot-com bubble began to burst and online advertising began to slow, making it difficult for AOL to meet the financial forecasts on which the deal was based. The world began moving quickly to high-speed Internet access, putting AOL’s ubiquitous dial-up service in jeopardy.
The companies had another problem: both sides seemed to hate one another.”
Yes, well, that couldn’t have helped.
And while comparisons are odious, there’s an obvious parallel to the potential strategic advantage seemingly afforded by an entente cordiale between l’equipe orange et l’equipe rouges. At the grunt level, the animus between these potential partners makes AOL/Time Warner look like the soul of wedded bliss.
From my experience Dippers think Liberals are cynical hypocrites whereas Grits view the party to their left as goggle-eyed innocents an/or unreconstructed Maoists. So, I’m not betting the house that a workable deal is a lock in time for the next electoral fracas.
What I do know is that prorogation, Afghanistan and Copenhagen are pretty close to a perfect engine for generating public outrage. The Tories are counting on two things to tide them over: time and its handmaiden, apathy. Here’s hoping the opposition doesn’t hand them both on a platter.
Douglas Bell Contributors
Douglas Bell
Douglas Bell is a Toronto-based writer and occasional actor. He wrote for and acted in CBC TV's The Newsroom. His first book Run Over (Random House Canada) was short-listed for the Toronto book award. Recently he wrote the Spectator blog for TorontoLife.com. He has at one time or another canvassed door to door for all parties save the Marxist Leninists.