Our country

 I am a Canadian. This is my country.

This is my flag.

River Run, 2024

The history isn't a secret.

Grassy Narrows First Nation, an Anishinaabe community, lives along the English-Wabigoon river system, northwest of Lake Superior and directly north of Lake of the Woods. Until about the middle of the previous century, they lived by fur trapping, harvesting blueberries and wild rice harvest, and the river fishery. Fish formed a significant part of the people's diet, and they also found work as guides at the fishing resorts on the river. They did not have a bucolic lifestyle, enduring unwelcome interactions with the majority society, particularly in the form of the cruelties of the residential school system.

Then the government built a series of hydroelectric dams, which disrupted the wild rice harvest. Intensive logging destroyed the blueberry harvest. And the greatest blow, the one which makes the name Grassy Narrows a source of shame to every decent Canadian, fell in 1970: high levels of mercury were detected in the English-Wabigoon river system, and medical tests showed the people of Grassy Narrows were suffering from mercury poisoning.

None of this is mysterious. Scientists and medical personnel have known for centuries that mercury is highly toxic; our common phrase "mad as a hatter" refers to the effects of the mercury used to make felt for hats. There was no question about where the mercury had come from, either; a chlorine plant upstream had dumped ten tons of untreated mercury waste into the river system at Dryden, upstream of the Grassy Narrows reserve, in 1962. The pulp and paper industry had polluted a river used by people as a source of food from time immemorial in an act of gross negligence. Governments, with equal or greater negligence, had allowed them to do it. Both now had a clear obligation: stop the pollution, clean up the river, and provide a decent level of care and compensation for the people who were poisoned.

For fifty-four years the people of Grassy Narrows have demanded the government do exactly that. Youthful activists have become grandparents, calling in vain for successive governments of this province to show a shred of compassion, or failing that decency, or failing that, responsibility for a plain obligation.  For at least the past fourteen years, members of the Grassy Narrows First Nation (Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek) have marched in Toronto to call for the Ontario government to address the harms done to them.An increasing number of supporters have marched with them.

Darcy Allan Sheppard, 1975-2009

 Fifteen years ago, on August 31 2009, Darcy Allan Sheppard encountered Michael Bryant on the most fashionable stretch of Bloor Street, between University Avenue to the west and Yonge Street to the east. What happened then depends on who you ask; according to at least one witness, Michael Bryant struck Darcy Sheppard with the front bumper of his car either deliberately or negligently, and then without trying to see if the person he had hit was all right as the law requires, had attempted to make off. At this point, Darcy Sheppard had latched onto the car, possibly to demand Mr Bryant live up to his responsibilities. Michael Bryant apparently responded by driving rapidly along the wrong side of Bloor Street attempting to shake him off. In the course of this action, Bryant drove so close to the street furniture he struck Darcy Sheppard against the street furniture, fatally injuring him.

Project 2025 and "schedule 'F'"

Republicans complain the Democrats have set out to terrify the public with references to Project 2025. They point out the project did not come from the Republican Party, but from the Heritage Foundation, a right wing policy development and influence organization. The Heritage Foundation operates at arm's length from the Republican Party and the Trump campaign, but all three entities belong to the larger American Conservative movement, and the personnel in the Heritage foundation, including the staff responsible for Project 2025, overlaps with the personnel of the Trump Administration of 2017-2021 to a significant degree.

The project itself consists of a public policy framework, containing both broad ideological outlines and specific implementation details. Its authors have divided it into several phases: the initial policy document, titled Mandate for Leadership, which they have released publicly, then a series of training videos, which have been leaked to ProPublica, and a number of other as yet unpublished documents.

What the women's Olympic boxing controversy tells us

 

 

To use a sports metaphor the controversies over two women boxers at the Olympics, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting have a world of "tells" attached to them.

A verdict and a question

The conviction of Donald Trump by a New York jury actually raises a number of questions, some trivial and some decidedly not.

From the beginning, Donald Trump's behaviour has appalled me. His casual cruelty disgusts me, and his contempt for the very idea of service angers me at a deep level that frankly surprised me. His profound divisiveness and heedlessness incompetence frightens me, particularly when I consider the power of the office he has held and wants to reclaim. I and others appalled and enraged by Donald Trump should probably ask ourselves how much we really want to celebrate the conviction and possible incarceration of an elderly and by all accounts rather pathetic individual on a relatively minor, if squalid crime. 

On the trivial side, I wonder how the US Treasury Department, which provides security for American presidents and former presidents, will decide which agents have to accompany Donald Trump to prison. Musical chairs, perhaps? Offering danger money or hardship pay?

The jury verdict on Donald Trump does not, in fact, mean he will go to prison or even jail: not soon, and quite possibly not at all. Courts have routinely sentenced people guilty of worse things than any of the charges against Mr. Trump to fines, community service, or probation. As well. Mr. Trump still has avenues of appeal.

Again with the modest proposals

A major impediment to systems to make traffic safer is resistance on the part of motorists. Like many other people, motorists tend to resist measures that could restrict what they see as their freedoms, even if they improve safety for everyone. The motoring public, which of course makes up a large proportion of the general public, will accept safety measures more willingly if these measures provide advantages for the drivers and owners of motor vehicles.

Reciprocity

A basic principle for resolving conflicts and discussing moral issues is reciprocity. Turn the question around. Would it be OK if the positions if the people (or communities) were reversed? What if I did that to you?

I have written here about the obligation of people and communities protesting for Palestine and advocating for a ceasefire to avoid raising fears, by actions or statements, of antisemitism among Canada's Jewish community. I stand by that urging. That obligation applies reciprocally: the Muslim communities in Canada also have traumatic histories of colonialism, dispossession, and exile. Their concerns deserve sensitivity as well, particularly in this time of horrific violence. 

Letter to Stephen Holyday

Last night, February 28, Councillor Holyday convened a meeting to discuss the Bloor Street bike lanes. The discussion revealed a number of things, including some of the illusions cherished by advocates for the car in this city. One thing the meeting made particularly clear was the extent to which transportation has evolved into a political and cultural issue, the way so many issues, in so many people's minds, have fused together into a picture they project, to themselves and others, of who they are. Thirty years ago, the fiercest cycling advocates I knew were ardent conservatives; today, despising bike and cycle lanes has become part of a prepackaged identity labelled "conservative". It doesn't have to be this way.

 In response to my observations at this meeting, I have written an open letter I am sending to Councillor Holyday, my own city councillor, and the mayor of Toronto. You can read it after the jump.

Antisemitism

Memorial for victims of antisemitism

Start at the beginning: antisemitism is wrong. Full stop, no excuses, no qualifications. It's wrong.

Our society has a longer record of antisemitism than we have of anti-Black racism or anti-Indigenous oppression. Europeans persecuted the Jewish community before Columbus and after, before the Atlantic slave trade and after. Anti-Semitic hate has driven some of the most calculated and methodical mass murders in history.

In the empty spaces between the words...

Does "make America great again" signal a desire for a recovery of American self confidence and more products made in the United States, or a last clutch at a white supremacist social order? Either, or both, depending on who you ask. 

Does "defund the police" refer to a proposal to shift responsibility for social and mental health issues from the police, jails, and prisons, and redirect the associated funding to health and social service agencies, or does it mean disbanding all police agencies? It depends on who you ask; I have heard both interpretations of the slogan asserted with conviction.

Does the slogan "land back" mean Indigenous nations should have increased jurisdiction over resource development, land use, and environmental decision making within their traditional territories, or does it mean packing "white" people back to their place of origin?

 

Does the chant "from the river to the sea" call for a single, democratic, non-confessional state with room for all believers between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea? Does it mean a single Palestinian Muslim-majority state from which Jewish inhabitants, or most of them, have fled or forced to leave? Does it mean a single Jewish Israeli state from the Mediterranean, as a Likud slogan has advocated, or even beyond the Jordan, as some advocates of "Biblical Israel" claim?

Virtue

In his essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War, George Orwell wrote the following passage: 

Civic Virtue  in Green-Wood Cemetery
by Rhododendrites

Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the 'change of heart', much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system. (emphasis added)

Orwell's concession of the "partial truth" of the talk of the need for a "change of heart" proceeds naturally from a comment he made in his essay about the work of Charles Dickens:

The central problem — how to prevent power from being abused — remains unsolved. Dickens... had the vision to see that. ‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.

Orwell identifies a classic paradox  here: how do you make a good society out of human beings with impulses, and in some case a real disposition, to behave badly. The context of these quotes also hints at a solution. In art and literature in religion, in all areas where human beings choose to participate and where we accept our participation may change us, even if we do not necessarily choose to change, we consent to address our inner lives and thoughts, the source from which our behaviour springs. Thus, a writer such as Charles Dickens, or a religious teacher, or a poet, painter or playwright can exhort us to see ourselves and the world in a different way. Religious teachers and artists have the authority to ask us to change the way we think, and in that sense the person we are. Politics, on the other hand, exists to define standards of behaviour we will, if necessary, enforce. Enforcement, in the final analysis, means some form of violence. 

To begin with the principle: the body politic does not have the right to shape its members. Politics stops at my skin. To go on to the practical: as Orwell notes, focus on the individual serves to distract from the real business of politics: putting in place the rules, expectations, and structures we require in order to live together as the people we are, not the people some utopian vision hopes for.

Peter Pan's Crocodile and Donald Trump

Many years ago I heard a theatre legend, one of many such stories, in which a young and cocky actor playing the crocodile in Peter Pan managed to infuriate the stagehands. In crocodile costume, of course, he walked bent over, following tape on the stage, and one night, after a particularly egregious offence against the stage crew, he followed the tape, tick tocking away... straight into the orchestra pit.

The usual message for this story for actors is: don't piss off the stage crew. It also has a message for politicians and pundits: don't blindly follow the tape. In politics, of course, the tape we follow has many names and takes many forms: peer pressure, compromise or the allure of power. More dangerously, the tape we follow takes the shape of a phenomenon visible throughout politics and society: a series of minor propositions, each of which we may not want to agree to, but which at the time seem less painful than a sense of letting the team down, or losing friends, access, and influence. C. S. Lewis described this process in his great essay The Inner Ring.

A welcome departure...

Jeff Sessions testifying
by Office of Robert Aderholt

 I begin to write this in the last few minutes of January 20, 2021. I will probably publish it in the first hours of January 21, which, among some other distinctions, marks the first full day of the Biden-Harris administration. TV news has shown President Biden swearing in new officials of his administration, with an admonition similar to Churchill's famous "blood toil tears and sweat", and a single, uncompromising requirement: he required all his appointees to always show respect for their colleagues and the American people. 

At the same time, the officials, strategists, functionaries and hangers on of the previous administration have departed Washington, one or two clutching freshly printed presidential pardons, others just leaving. As Americans celebrate a hard-won transfer of power, in the last minutes of this day I want to celebrate the departure of a man who left Washington over two years ago, and now lives in well earned obscurity, his attempt at a political comeback denied by Donald Trump for precisely the wrong reasons. That man, Jefferson Sessions, implemented the most egregiously cruel of all the policies of the Trump administration, the policy of family separation at the American border with Mexico. 

January 20

As I write this, Joe Biden prepares to take the oath of office as president of the United States. He now has an opportunity: to move American politics in a new and humane direction. He also has a series of challenges: a republic fractured, with at least some bitter end fans of the previous chief executive who will not accept him as their president, and who have made no secret of their propensity for violence. He has to lead his country through the worst months of a pandemic, made far worse by the blundering, posturing, and dishonesty of his predecessor. He has to deal with a historic deficit and a government burdened by over seven trillion dollars more debt than it carried when he left at the end of his terms as vice president. He, his government, and the American people also face the task of weaning the American economy off the twin narcotics of easy money and fossil fuels.

I wish him well. 

Voting, voters, and entropy

Tucker Carlson
by Gage Skidmore

A popular metaphor for entropy, attributed to Schopenhauer, goes like this: if you take a barrel of sewage and pour in a glass of fine French wine, you have a barrel of sewage. If you take a barrel of fine French wine and (shudder) pour in a glass of sewage, you have a barrel of sewage.

In one of his nightly opinion pieces, Tucker Carlson sarcastically lauded the triumph of voters who cast ballots from the grave. He later had to retract one of his examples after learning one of the ballots he cited had come from a very much alive widow, who had identified herself as Mrs. (husband's name). Carlson's sarcasm had an interesting effect: it produced an emotional reaction sufficient to briefly cloud my analysis, and I had to take a (virtual) step back to analyze what he had to say. Once I broke his arguments down and considered them, I found a couple of interesting layers, ones hinting at American Conservative strategy going forward. 

Police and Violence

 Justin King (Beau of the Fifth Column on Twitter and YouTube) recently noted, in a tweet, the lack of sympathy for police in an online forum for military and security contractors. After a gunman shot and seriously injured two Los Angeles Sheriff's deputies, he noticed a series of comments ranging from ironic to hostile, and it puzzled him.

I don't pretend to know the reason this particular community appears to have turned against the police, but I do know about some trends in police training. When I consider the notions of honour I observe among people in high risk occupations, and compare that with what I see in police training and police behaviour, I can see one explanation for the hostility in the series of tweets Justin King quotes. I may not have the right explanation, but I think my hypothesis fits the available information.

Watch any television show from forty years ago and compare it with just about any similar show today, and the change in police tactics and equipment will appear instantly. Where twenty or thirty years ago a pair of detectives might knock on a door, today's shows portray squads of officers in full body armour taking down doors with battering rams. Television may exaggerate, but it tends to track social change, and police behaviour has indeed changed. Radley Balko has written about this, calling the phenomenon The Rise of the Warrior Cop. In the most important sense, however, the dominant attitudes in police training and department policies make the police of today less truly warriors than the police of forty or fifty years ago. Driving a Bearcat or an MRAP and wearing a plate carrier and a tin hat does not make anyone a warrior. Trading a revolver for a Heckler & Koch rifle doesn't make anyone a warrior. One thing only defines a warrior: a willingness to die for something outside yourself. Warriors die for a principle, or for their friends, or their country. A generation of training and policy have combined to impress on police the idea they have a single duty: to go home at the end of their shift with a whole skin. In one particularly egregious case, in the United States, a municipality fired an officer for failing to kill a citizen, claiming he took an unacceptable risk by attempting to deescalate a confrontation instead of shooting. 

It is a commonplace to say the police have a problem with "bad apples", but I consider "the fish rots from the head" a more appropriate metaphor. Many of the issues with police behaviour arise from official policies and training, often with provincial or state and national support, and driven by promoters and influencers with an international reach. The result seems clear: much of official and unofficial police culture inclines officers to kill people in their charge rather than take the risk of making non-violent choices. It does not surprise me to see respect and support for the police have declined as well. 

Next steps

This morning, we celebrated a victory. We hoped, briefly, Doug Ford would respect this city, respect the law and constitution, and let the election, already seriously, disrupted, go ahead. By this afternoon, we learned to our distress he was willing to try to break a long and honourable Ontario tradition of respecting the constitution and the principle of judicial review, in order to enforce his will.

An open letter to MPPs

Doug Ford by Bruce Reeve

In a few days, possibly even less, you will receive a summons to Queen's Park to vote. Doug Ford wants you to invoke the "notwithstanding" clause in order to override a judicial decision preventing him from changing the size of Toronto's wards in the middle an the election already underway. You can do it, but you don't have to. You shouldn't.

The notwithstanding clause has always marked out a line, a line between the collective will and the rights of the individual. Until now, Ontario has always stayed on the side of individual rights. We have always had governments, and representatives, in this province who undertook to reconcile the desires of the majority with the rights of minorities. It made governing harder, but it should be hard. Members of the Provincial Parliament get offices and good pay and respect because you have taken on a difficult job. Make it easier by curtailing our rights and you lose that respect.

Why Cyclists Take the Lane, Why Motorists Shouldn't Object

Toronto's Metro News generally has fair and positive coverage of cyclists, but they have the odd lapse, as this article demonstrates:

As a driver, I’ve also seen the kind of bike behaviour that gives all of us cyclists a bad name — weaving in and out of traffic, riding on the sidewalk, hogging an entire lane when there’s no need, failing to signal before turning or coming to a sudden stop, cutting off other cyclists or startling them by passing on the inside. One of the worst offences is riding a bike at night without a light, then having the gall to become indignant when cars almost run them over.

In the immortal words of Sesame  Street, one of these things is not like the others. Cutting other road users off, failing to signal, riding on the sidewalk: all these endanger other road users. Taking the lane, which the writer describes, wrongly, as "hogging an entire lane when there’s no need" doesn't endanger anyone. At worst, it annoys other drivers who would like to press their accelerators a bit harder. Drivers who resent cyclists for holding them up should ask if they ever fume about other drivers taking unnecessary trips alone in their cars, which cause far more traffic jams and waste far more time.