Wheat from the Chaff

Olympic Fever?

With less than two months before the 2010 Olympics, I find it curious that only one person I know has Olympic tickets. Indeed, in my Fraser Valley community, there seems to be a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the Games.

Many people have mentioned the high price of tickets, or the need to divulge sensitive financial information without any guarantee of tickets. But the majority have pointed to one dominant concern: there seems to be no way to travel to Vancouver, let alone Whistler. Currently, the only efficient way to reach Vancouver from the Fraser Valley is to drive and park. Yet all we hear from VANOC and the media is that driving and parking in Vancouver will be difficult, if not impossible. Perhaps we could drive 2/3 of the way and take the Skytrain from the Scott Rd. Park and Ride. But that is full at the best of times, so I can’t imagine what it will be like during the Olympics. Or we could drive to Mission and catch the West Coast Express, but its prohibitive cost for families and limited return times makes the WCE a less than useful option. Of course, we would like to use the Fraser Valley Regional Transit System… but no such thing exists.

So I guess we will stay at home and watch the Games from the comfort of our living room. We might as well be watching from Norway!

Put up a sign!

I don't normally promote anything written in the The Province, but a recent column by Ethan Baron certainly caught my eye. The scenario he presents, that of the police entering your house to confiscate anti-Olympics signs taped to your window, seems like a fairly plausible proposition. Is it populist fear mongering? Perhaps, but given recent laws proposed by municipalities and the provincial government, I don't feel totally confident that we can trust the municipalities to go after commercial signage only. Moreover, the RCMP seems oblivious to the growing concern over their tactics and Olympic mandate, a mandate that seems to pay more attention to the needs of the IOC than the requirements of Section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Anatonomy of a Murdered High School Course

On Sept. 22, The Tyee published an articled called "Anatomy of a Murdered High School Course". Here is the text of my response:

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I appreciate the article, Nick. As an English 12 teacher and part-time college instructor, I can certainly sympathize with your point of view. I’d like to add a few thoughts to the discussion.

I followed TPC 12 from its inception, and I knew a number of teachers who, like me, were interested in its approach. However, TPC appeared doomed before it was even deployed. Like so many BC humanities courses, new and old, the TPC curriculum guide was hopelessly vague. It had so many mushy and feel-good objectives, so many potential learning resources, and yet so few practical classroom tools, that it seemed very difficult to work with. I know that professional autonomy is important, but this course was so formless that I had no idea where to start. And I wasn’t the only teacher to hold that view.

As you mentioned, the universities were never on board. As a result, the kids voted with their feet and many teachers interested in the course never got a chance to work with it. I‘m mystified why there is such a disconnection between the K-12 and post-secondary education bureaucracies. Why isn’t post-secondary approval secured well before a new course is introduced? This lack of prior approval has hurt other courses, too, particularly in math and social studies. I remember a Pro-D meeting a few years ago regarding the new Civics 11 course, and the Ministry rep. in attendance seemed to have no idea why the universities had not yet given their approval. To me, this affirmation is one of the first things that must be secured. Otherwise, why invest your time as a teacher in developing a new course?

With regard to your comments on literature vs. communication, I couldn’t agree more. But my solution is simple: I don’t take the En. 12 IRP very seriously. Thankfully, the provincial exam doesn’t really match the curriculum, and its literature demands have been scaled back, so I focus much more on writing, critical thinking and argumentation. My students still do well on the provincial, and I feel they are much better prepared for post-secondary education.

Firefighting: A Public Good?

In a 2008 speech for TVO, Naomi Klein discussed the shrinking public sphere in the United States. Already small by Western standards, America's public sphere appears to be shrinking by the week. One of the few realms of American society that is still considered to be a public good is firefighting and disaster relief. But even that is disappearing. AIG Insurance (as well as Chubb Alarm) have set up their own private fire fighting forces to help insurees protect their homes... assuming your house is important enough to save. (For Chubb, that means a market value of at least one million dollars.)

Two stories that explain the trend can be found here and here. Notice that the business website (link 2) paints a substantially rosier picture in its conclusion compared to the Bloomberg article (link 1).

A "public good" can be defined as any item or service that is publically funded and available to all. Moreover, it's good for you if other people also have it. For example, public education is a public good because it's a benefit for you if other people around you are educated. Presumably firefighting is a public good, too, as the protection of all helps protect you as an individual.

The same is not true of a private good. This type of good does not require equal access to a product or service. The fact that others lack what I have (let's say, a Porsche) is not a hindrance to me if they can still move efficiently with public transit, a bicycle or a Kia. Inequality in this case is a matter of reward and preference, rather than mutual benefit.

Canada's ratio of public to private goods is slightly higher than the United States (especially with health care), but less than most western European countries. Even within Canada, Quebec sees child care as more of a public good, while most other provinces do not. BC still views basic auto insurance as a public good ("it's good for me that other people are insured"), while Alberta or Ontario consider it a private good.

What constitutes a public good varies greatly. Each country tends to have a different ratio of public to private goods, but this ratio is a relatively stable predictor of daily politics. In other words, the dominant ideology of any country can be measured by this ratio. It shows how much we (or the political elites, at least) are other-regarding or egoists.

If we are living in an age of increasing political egoism, perhaps those who defend public goods, or seek their expansion, need to emphasize the self-interested nature of public goods (they help you, too). It wouldn't hurt to also emphasize the efficiency of public enterprises when delivering goods we all need, in the sense that private enterprises replicate bureacracies and lead to higher administrative costs, like in the American medical system.

Jane Jacobs and Gentrification

The West Village was saved, but as with all victories, unintended consequences ensued. Clarence Davies, a Felt ally and head of the Housing and Redevelopment Board that

replaced [Moses's] Committeeon Slum Clearance wrote ... "that if the Village area is left alone and if no middle-income housing is projected by the Board ... eventually the Village will consist solely of luxury housing, which we, of course, will be powerless to prevent ... This trend is already quite obvious and would itself destroy any semblance of the present Village that [Jacobs and her allies] seem so anxious to preserve."

The term was not yet in use but Davies had foreseen the gentrification that would within twenty years turn the Village into some of the most expensive real estate on earth. The mixed-income neighborhood of dockworkers and middle-class households and artists’ lofts that Jacobs championed would become the victim of its own charm. There would be little room for working-class families or struggling artists in the Greenwich Village that Jacobs fought to preserve. "Her vision of organic city growth," Flint writes, "would do little to curb gentrification."

Leaving out certain details

The trouble with truth and journalism is not that the media regularly publishes falsities. It's that it usually omits important information or emphasizes certain facts over others.

Here's an example: On August 17, 2009, the Vancouver Sun publishes an article with the headline, "Liberals funded by business, NDP by unions". On the face of it, it would appear there is equivalence: business and unions support their respective parties to the same degree. But, of course, that's not really true. The sub-heading provides a bit more detail when it reads, "Businesses donated 70 per cent of Liberal funds for 2009 election; unions gave 40 per cent of NDP revenue". At least here we begin to see that there is no equivalence; Gordon Campbell's Liberals are more beholden to corporations than the NDP are beholden to unions. Too bad the headlines and sub-headings aren't switched.

Much more problematic is what is left out completely. The other way of understanding things would be to compare the absolute amount that the business sector gave to the Liberals, as compared to the absolute amount the unions gave to the NDP (in this case, between Jan. 1 and the May election). However, for some strange reason, those important numbers aren't in the news story. By my calculations - using all of the raw data provided by the article - the NDP received $2.16 million from the unions, while the Liberals received $6.65 million from the corporations. That means the Liberal Party received over 3 times more money from corporate BC as the NDP received from the unions. Such an omission might appear subtle, but it certainly works to reduce the significant differences that the headline ignores. And so much for equivalence.

Neil Boyd ... Criminologist in the Clouds

On August 6th, Neil Boyd, a widely quoted criminologist from SFU, wrote an opinion piece that decried those who criticize him and other academic commentators on the issue of crime. Here's a brief response.

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Neil Boyd, a well known SFU criminologist, seems puzzled that people “don’t like what academics have to say” about crime. I would propose the opposite: Boyd does not like to hear what others think about crime, and that he represents a point of view that most Canadians wholeheartedly reject.

Boyd and many others in his trade take a social scientific view of crime. Criminal behaviour is analyzed with statistics and identifiable trends, and the response to crime is framed by rehabilitation, deterrence and other approaches amenable to measurement. Moreover, these empirical preferences carry a significant normative commitment, to which Boyd appears deeply committed.

But I would posit that the large majority of Canadians don’t see crime in the same way. They see crime, particularly violent crime, as primarily a moral issue, and have a normative commitment clearly at odds with Boyd's professional perspective. Even if there were only one violent crime next year in Canada, the question would remain: did the convicted criminal receive a penalty of reduced entitlements commensurate to the rights he or she took away from his/her victim(s)? This is justice as equity or fairness. Crime in this sense is not conceived as a medicalized problem that must be solved by experts. It does believe that people must be held responsible for their actions, particularly when these actions are so heinous that they violate the basic rights of others. Indeed, it's a view that believes the justice system is as much about the victims of crime as the criminals themselves. It also believes that drugs or alcohol - especially if attached to violent crime - do not automatically provide a get-out-of-jail-for-free card. If one is capable of the mundane tasks of eating, finding some form of shelter and securing drug supplies - all of which require at least a modicum of rationality - then why is such rationality immediately and quite conveniently ignored when it comes to criminal responsibility? Finally, it believes that the criminal justice system ought not be a social working institution. If there are legitimate human needs for social welfare, then why does it appear that the police and the courts are obliged to be primary social working agencies? They lack the requisite resources to accomplish such a lofty goal, with the end result that they do a mediocre job of both policing and social working.

The criminal rights faction usually responds (condescendingly) that this normative perspective is mere retribution, and that it doesn’t solve the problem of crime. Unfortunately, we rarely hear in any extended way why retribution is indeed wrong, except that it is supposedly “uncivilized”. Apparently moral responsibility is barbaric. Moreover, the demand for “solutions” merely restates a rather self-serving standard - the kind of standard that employs a lot of people in the criminal rights industry - that simply ignores the call for moral equivalence.

If Boyd wants to be taken more seriously, perhaps he should talk less of “ad hominem” attacks, and more of a fundamental clash of values. This may take him beyond his comfort zone of statistical analysis, but it might answer his aforementioned puzzlement more honestly.

My goodness! Canwest is suddenly interested in private energy production!

Though I avoid Canwest newspapers like the plague, I occasionally read The Province and The Sun when time permits. Today's issue of The Province is a travesty. After largely ignoring run-of-the-river hydro projects during the recent election (when I did follow the two Vancouver dailies), the newspaper has finally decided to run a series of articles on the subject. Now. After the election. Thanks for contributing to the public sphere, guys. As Rafe Mair opined in his electoral post mortem, "the news media of B.C. utterly failed in its duty to inform the voters about critical environmental issues." The rather belated interest in these issues from The Province, especially IPP's (independent power producers), can't help but make one cynical.

In typical fashion for The Province, it underdelivers on its reportage. In the main article, the serious issues of environmental damage are alluded to, but no specifics are given, and the high contract costs being shouldered by BC Hydro are only mentioned briefly at the end (where few readers venture). The second article, the one about "party lines" and IPP's, is very short and vague, and it only paraphrases the (apparent) NDP position. No quotes from NDP leaders are given. Things get more interesting in the third article, which lists many of the Liberal and BC Hydro insiders who have jumped to IPP corporate positions, though the denial of conflict of interest from BC minister of energy Blair Lekstrom goes unchallenged.

However, if there is any doubt about the IPP's in the minds of readers, Michael Smyth, The Province's main columnist, comes to the rescue. His column follows the two page spread, and it attempts to attack the NDP and their apparent "hypocrisy" over the issue.

Smyth's column is a laugher, one in a long line of snide, one-sided collections of bumper-sticker arguments.

He starts with a defence of the run-of-the-river project that will finally give clean energy to the In-SHUCK-ch First Nation on Harrison Lake. He contends the following: "But the critics won't care. Comfortably ensconced in their own air-conditioned condos, watching their power-sucking big-screen TVs, they will condemn the First Nation and the private company it has partnered with." Really? Will they? Exactly who has condemned this? When? Smyth provides no evidence for his prediction. Having lived near Harrison Lake for years, I have never heard such criticism of the In-SHUCK-ch project. [Ok... a week after I first published this I read some negative words from certain environmental groups... but nothing from the NDP.] Indeed, if there ever was an IPP project that the NDP would support, this would be the one. Moreover, the In-SHUCK-ch First Nation should have been hooked up to the power lines years ago - that is, to the power lines that are already there. The IPP that's being proposed is not primarily for the aboriginals; it's coming because power line infrastructure is easily accessed. It's interesting that Smyth totally ignores the very controversial Bute Inlet project proposed by Plutonic Power. That company is rife with BC Liberal insiders and faces serious opposition from locals and environmentalists alike.

Smyth also says the "New Democratic Party now wants to shut these same projects down." A typical exaggeration. A "moratorium" means that the whole IPP process will be temporarily halted and reviewed, and the stringent environmental processes that have hitherto been lacking (but which even Smyth acknowledges are important) will be put into place. Smyth surely knows what a moratorium means and what the NDP have said about the issue. To say that they will kill the whole thing is a blatant lie.

I suppose Smyth's role is to mitigate any negativity from the other stories (making Dennis Skulsky and Gordon Campbell very happy), even though the other articles are pretty mild.

With Canwest columnists like Smyth, no wonder I usually read the The Globe and Mail, The Tyee and The Georgia Straight for my BC news.

Elections Do Not Equal Governments

My brother made a great point in a recent letter to the Georgia Straight. Though we may vote on the basis of party leader, we don't actually vote for a premier or a prime minister. On election night, we vote for a local representative who will ostensibly represent our riding's interests in parliament or the legislature. In an important sense, election night is really about 308 simultaneous elections federally, and 85 provincially. When those different elections are tallied, the party leader with the most support from the elected members takes the seat as the head of government. That is the essence of parliamentary democracy. In other words, there is a fusion of the executive and the legislative, insofar as control of the legislative branch (usually the lower house) gives you power over the bureaucracy. If you want to vote for your head of government directly, you'll have to move to the United States.

Unfortunately, "legions of politically illiterate British Columbians" (and Canadians in general) were incensed when, in 2008, the Liberals and NDP proposed a coalition to take over from Harper's minority Conservative government. Anti-coalition types, mostly Conservative, argued that they didn't vote for Stephane Dion, the leader of the Liberals. (They also said relying on the BQ was treasonous, forgetting that the Conservatives under Harper had proposed such an arm's length alliance with the BQ in 2004.) The argument against Dion, however, showed that many Canadians were under the mistaken belief that, since they didn't vote for Dion, he couldn't become PM. Actually... nobody voted for Dion, except for a majority of voters in the riding of Saint-Laurent/Cartierville. Moreover, not a single person voted for him (or Harper) qua prime minister.

So of course Dion could have become PM. It's not up to voters, whether we like it or not. In our indirect democracy, it's up to the members of parliament, whose support is required for a government to stand. That's why our parliamentary system is a "system of confidence". Even in Canada, in the early 1920's, the Liberal Mackenzie King was our prime minister even though the Conservatives had more seats. King had the support - the confidence - of the Progressives, and that's all that mattered.

Another distinction that helps clarify the situation is to understand the difference between government and election. The two are not necessarily symmetrical in a parliamentary system. This is the logical outcome of a confidence system. You can have more governments than elections, because you might have different coalitions - based on the results of one election - as confidence shifts and changes. Here's a case in point: since World War Two, Canada has had more elections than Israel or Italy, though many fewer governments. Canada has had 20 elections (starting in 1949), Israel has had 18, and Italy has had 17. The difference is our electoral system. We use the first-past-the-post election system, which tends to create artificial majorities (or limited coalition options) and therefore more stable levels of confidence. Israel and Italy use various types of proportional elections, which tend to elect more and smaller parties, and therefore less stable government coalitions. But the system of confidence remains in all three parliaments, because that's what we mean by parliamentary democracy. If Canada isn't used to a lot of coalitions, it's because of our election system. But that does not affect the reality that confidence from the sitting members remains central to who becomes prime minister.

My Musings on STV

As we approach the upcoming referendum on the multi-member STV (Single Transferable Vote) system, I face a dilemma. Frankly, I favour neither the current First-Past-The-Post system nor the proposed STV method.

FPTP is surely past its time. In an age where deference to authority is on the wane, and everyone rightly expects his or her view to count, our current electoral scheme is obsolete. In election after election, we see most candidates win their ridings with a plurality that’s well below 50%, rendering the majority of votes worthless. Unless regional parties, like the BQ, upset the distribution of votes, FPTP usually leads to artificial majorities that appear to give winning parties more of a mandate than they actually have. The 1988 federal election is a case in point, from which Brian Mulroney claimed to have a strong mandate for free trade. Of course, he had to point to the seats in the House of Commons rather than the popular vote.

The STV electoral system, however, has its own considerable deficiencies.

• To start with, it’s not a proportional electoral system. It is a preferential balloting system that allows a winning candidate to claim significant support, though usually with second and third preferences added to the initial first preference. This gives the candidate a somewhat contrived popular mandate. But let’s be clear: this is about greater inclusiveness and representativeness, not true proportionality.
• Second, as many commentators have noted, multi-member STV systems involve a great deal of complexity. The Droop quota that determines the threshold for victory is the easiest part of the calculation. The many unpredictable variables, like how many people will actually vote, the extent of their preferences, whether candidates will meet the threshold on the first ballot, and the distribution of fractional votes, all make tabulating the final results very difficult. Computers will be required to process the calculations and recalculations. [At least FPTP is easy to figure out: the candidate with the largest number of votes, majority or not, wins the riding.] So, if this exercise in electoral reform is largely about encouraging more participation, a black-box approach to counting will hardly generate renewed enthusiasm.
• Third, I continue to wonder who my MLA would be. Who of the five in my proposed super-riding would actually represent me? What if they all say it's someone else's problem?
• Fourth, we’ll have to deal with an unwieldy ballot. In 5, 6 or 7 member ridings, we will probably face an extremely large list of candidates, longer than a municipal ballot. It will be difficult to know most of the candidates, especially those who live outside your old riding. In the face of this, most people will likely vote for what they know: the political party. In Malta, one of the few places to use STV, few voters rank candidates outside their preferred party. It remains a two-party system. In
  Australia’s senate election, where you can vote one of two ways, most voters choose a party from a list of parties rather than rank individual candidates using STV. To the extent that we see party bloc voting, there will be little difference from our current system.
• Finally, multimember STV systems do not address the issue of party discipline and control by the leader. Riding associations will still need to follow head office rules and potential disallowance of candidates. In fact, these riding associations may become so big - because of the bigger ridings - that even less input from local members would be welcomed. Moreover, big ridings (like the one I would live in) would require more party resources if voters were to hear about distant candidates. This is hardly the recipe for lessening party control over the candidates.

I would prefer a wider referendum, like that in New Zealand in 1992. There, voters were asked to vote on maintaining FPTP, and, if not, which system should replace it. STV was only one of four choices. The voters, in their democratic wisdom, chose a different model - and the one I would pick if I were trusted to make the choice: MMP. Mixed member proportional systems acknowledge that no single electoral system is perfect, and prudently mix two systems to preserve the benefits (and minimize the drawbacks) of each. MMP gives the voter two ballots. In one ballot, a voter casts a party preference, and a directly proportional number of candidates are thus chosen from a descending party list. The list becomes a political artifact: if it has a skewed distribution of gender, region, class, etc., and too many party hacks from the largest city, the party risks harsh condemnation during an election. Since party leadership will be with us in any electoral system, at least MMP creates a form of explicit party accountability. Moreover, if it's done right, creating the list can reinvigorate party activism, and make the party more than a part-time electoral machine. Moreover, quotas are usually introduced to prevent dozens of fringe parties from dominating parliament. Often ignored is that MMP also preserves a large portion of its seats for a traditional FPTP election. The second ballot asks you to choose a constituency representative like we have now. This preserves the benefit of having a locally accountable politician. The degree of proportional compensation and the ratio of riding and proportional list seats can vary, depending on whether the electorate prefers stable majorities with many local representatives, or greater democratic fairness.

In the end, the upcoming referendum offers two unacceptable options. I can therefore boycott the referendum, spoil the ballot, or hold my nose and choose one of the two options. I'm pretty sure I won’t vote for STV. I’d rather campaign for a real choice in electoral reform, and not settle for the lesser of two electoral evils. There should be more than two options available, and we ought to have the right to choose among them.