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.

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.

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?