New Adventures In Party Democracy

Two very nice gentlemen came to my door this weekend, to invite me to join, but not join, but sorta kinda join the Liberal Party of Canada. Particularly they wanted me to do so if I was excited about Justin Trudeau  and his candidacy for the leadership of that party.

Don't know how I missed this, but it seems that any voting age Canadian (who is not currently a member of another national political party) can become a hemi-demi-semi-kinda-Liberal and participate in the leadership festival. You don't even have to pay anything to get this hemi-demi-semi-kinda membership. I was intrigued until I remembered I didn't fit the profile (re. non-membership in non-Liberal national party).

I'm not decided on the merits of Just Justin. He's certainly got a lot of the qualities one wants in a modern candidate for high political office, cosmetic though they may be. And perhaps there's something more solid there too. I'm really not sure. Going up against Stephen Harper you could do worse.

Still, I was brought back to thoughts about the dangers of this way of electing party leaders. I wrote about this a good long while ago (before the blog went  into hiatus) in relation to the Liberal's last leadership decision. The post certainly wasn't prescient about how Michael Ignatief might do (although maybe I could argue he did better than Stephane Dion would've done) but I've seen nothing to convince me I'm not right on the basic point: party democracy has a very anti-democratic dark side. It disempowers the sitting Member of Parliament in favour of a diffuse party apparatus and thereby the Prime Minister. I would argue also that the negative effects include a big drop in the overall quality of candidates for office, since many smart, talented people, knowing that back-bench MPs are powerless unless they reach the cabinet level, stay out of the arena. This approach seems to take things even farther in that direction.

I want to think more about this, since I'm less convinced now than I was that geography-based representation is the best way to aggregate diverse opinion on national issues, but it's what we've got, and while we've got it it'd be nice to make better use of it.

Why "The Wolery"?

In the Winnie-The-Pooh books, Owl is the character all the others regard as wise. He lives in the grandest house in the Hundred Acre Wood, and has impressed them all with things like his ability to spell his very own name: Wol. As Pooh puts it, "If anyone knows anything about anything, it's Owl who knows something about something". In The House at Pooh Corner, his home, impressively called The Chestnuts blows over in a storm, and all you really need to know about Owl is that while others go off to find him a new place to live, he sets about thinking up a good name for it. He comes up with "The Wolery".

Owl is the embodiment of what we now would call a pundit. He has the reputation of wisdom because it appears he can do some of the things wise people are thought to do (i.e. write), and he always talks about the things he thinks he knows with great authority. If the Hundred Acre Wood had a 24-hour news channel, he would have his own show, a little out of prime-time maybe, but it would be long-running and serious.

So why call a blog The Wolery? Notwithstanding the fact I just plain like the name (and Winnie the Pooh) I have to admit to having a little bit of the Owl in me (and a fair bit of Eeyore too, if you really want to know). I tend to like my big words, serious, rambling conversations, and those lovely big ideas that aren't really so big. I think a bit too well of my own thoughts and ideas (which are almost always, in the end, someone else's thoughts or ideas). This blog is partly here for me to get some ideas out into the world, and partly to help me find my voice as a writer. My fear is that I might tend toward some of the worst aspects of punditry (over-certainty, reductionism, arrogance). So my blog's title is meant to remind me of those not-so-endearing tendencies, and hopefully will help me rein them in, keep me honest, and humble in the face of a complex & chaotic reality. I hope my audience, if I ever find one, will also aid in that quest.

PLES RING IF AN RNSER IS REQIRD

Now THAT'S technical writing!

XKCD shows that a vocabulary of the 10,000 most commonly used words is all you need (at least for rocket science):

Fiscal Realities Are Usually Imaginary

Listened to Ontario Minister of Education Lauren Broten this morning.

I cringe whenever I hear a politician say something about "fiscal realities" in the tone of someone bravely facing up to an unpleasant but permanent and immutable Truth. It's rare that this is actually the case. Politicians are the ones who decide what the fiscal reality is, so it's almost always disingenuous of them to whine about it, or ask for a pass because of it, when they themselves decided on it.

In Ontario right now, we are facing a large imbalance in our finances which admittedly cannot continue indefinitely, but which is also not yet a true crisis (no one is threatening to stop lending the province money). The government however has decided to attack the imbalance aggressively, using its legislative muscle to overturn the contractual rights of public sector workers and roll back salaries and other benefits they enjoy, while curtailing their ability to bargain through their unions over the shape those roll-backs might take.

As a piece of public policy I think this is very heavy handed, and continues the bad precedent of using legislatures to force change that could well have been achieved through negotiation. But what I want to say here is that it's not "fiscal realities" that are forcing the government into making "hard decisions" but rather something almost completely the reverse. The government has decided to prioritize maintaining current (or slightly reduced) levels of revenue (taxes + borrowing) ahead of maintaining current (or slightly reduced) levels of public service, particularly in education, for what seem to be the craven and cowardly fear of the way a high budget deficit plays in the press.

In other words, it's the fear of making hard decisions that has forced the government into embracing the canard of fiscal realities; the political equivalent of "the devil made me do it".

The government wants you to think there are no choices in the face of what it calls: reality. What's actually real is its ranking of competing priorities.

Did you yawn and miss it?

Barack Obama mentioned global warming in his victory speech last night! Specifically he included a line on the destructive power of a warming planet. It went by pretty quickly, but it was there. May we start to hope the issue is taken up again? A carbon tax? Cap-and-trade? Other carbon abatement programs?

There's still that small matter of a hostile Congress, but: fingers crossed!

About last night...

Phew!

Pacificism and the Poppy

The old veteran stands, medals clinking quietly in the subway station selling poppies to mark Remembrance Day and raise money for vets less fortunate than he is. I buy one and stand attentively while it's pinned on my jacket, trying not to notice the discomfort.

I wear a poppy at this time of year to show some awareness of the sacrifice of so many in our nation's conflicts. Some of those conflicts had the patina of justice about them, many did not. Regardless, innocents became soldiers and fought, died, or were maimed or psychically scarred to the point they could never take back up the lives they might have lived. Willingly or not, they made a sacrifice, their families made a sacrifice, the posterity they might have built became a sacrifice. That should be remembered.

It is increasingly rare that those who bear real responsibility appear anywhere near the bloody fighting. So inevitably our innocents kill & wound their innocents. Innocent civilians are more and more often targets (a.k.a. 'collateral damage') in wars we fight far from home, ensuring an unconscionable asymmetry in the harm we suffer and the harm we inflict. That should be remembered also.

Some people might see my poppy and think I support war. I support an end to war. I wish I knew some way to signal that without disrespecting the service of that old veteran and his clinking medals.

What shall we call it?

I recently learned that the term climate change came into common usage through Frank Luntz, a man who specializes in helping right-wing politicians (and cartels) tune their language to the emotional response they want or need (he also came up with "death tax"). Luntz's focus groups thought that climate change was less threatening than global warming; although, I don't think he did any of his research in Canada, where the idea of warmer winters isn't nearly as unpopular as he might've found it was in, say, Florida. Long-story-short, the Dubya administration started using climate change and now it has all but replaced global warming in mainstream media usage. (Aside: politicians lead most effectively through careful use of language).

Extreme weather events are becoming ever more commonplace, and this year both "red" and "blue" states in the U.S. have experienced them, though nothing gets attention quite like subway flooding in Lower Manhattan. Hurricane Sandy may turn out to be a turning point in climate politics, so it might be a good time to rethink how we describe the phenomena we are experiencing. As I alluded earlier, I think global warming isn't as threatening to Canadians as it might be to sub-Saharan Africans, Fijians, or even Frank Luntz's focus groups, but climate change is itself too clinical and antiseptic (probably what Luntz was going for, of course). Different regions are going to experience the effects of global warming differently (Europe may well get colder) with a few "winners" and a great many losers. For most people the felt issue isn't going to be an abstract degree or two of higher average temperatures world-wide, it's going to be the increasing unreliability of the seasons, and the weather; it will be the freak storms, droughts, wild-fires, and wild-life (water moccasins in Toronto?). So I'm proposing we ditch technician's climate change for a term both more accurate to real experience, and yes, more threatening: climate instability. Or perhaps, Anthropogenic Climate Instability; maybe Human-Induced Climate Instability?

Any other ideas?