Why only politics when we think of democracy?

Conversations about democracy tend to revolve overwhelmingly about politics and government. These topics are rightly at the centre of democratic dialogue as they are the overarching institutions of our society. But if we are to have a thoroughly democratic society, we cannot limit ourselves to democratic government. We need to consider all our institutions.

The workplace, for example, is to many Canadians the most important place of all, more important than politics, yet it seems to hardly enter the conversation. If government is democratic but the workplace remains autocratic, our liberty is incomplete. We are free men and women evenings and weekends, servants during the week.

The only democracy present in the workplace in this country, other than worker-owned businesses, is the labour union, and even unions are now under attack. In some countries, workplace democracy is taken seriously. Germany, for example, enshrines "codetermination" in law.

Codetermination in Germany operates at three levels. At the job level, employees, in addition to the right to be informed about their responsibilities and job procedures, have a right to make suggestions and to inspect certain company documents. At the operational level, employees elect works councils which are involved in the organization of the business, job arrangements, personnel planning, guidelines for hiring, social services, time registration and performance assessments. At the corporate level, employees elect representatives to boards of directors, one-third to one-half of the board depending on the size of the company. Considering that Germany has become the economic powerhouse of Europe, and perhaps the most successful manufacturing economy in the world, this extensive workplace democracy does not seem to have hampered its competitiveness.

As with the workplace, all of our institutions could be democratized. The mass media, for example, a critical component of social and political life, is owned and controlled by oligarchs and corporations. The only democratic medium—indeed the only independent medium—is the CBC. A national daily newspaper along the lines of the CBC would be a good start toward a democratic press.

Education, too, could not only become more democratic but could be much more effective as a springboard for democratic citizens. Our youth could be so immersed in not only the theory but the practice of democracy that upon graduation they could expect to find democracy wherever they find themselves and be capable of creating it where it is absent.

Perhaps only through such an education could we create a vigorous conversation on self-governance in this country. But then I assume Canadians might want such a conversation, that they are in fact interested in a thoroughly democratic society. Perhaps I am wrong.

Could Alberta go green?

With 50 per cent more greenhouse gas emissions than Ontario, Alberta is Canada's pollution province. And that makes us think of the tar sands. But it's more than bitumen. Alberta's electrical power generation, heavily dependent on coal, produces almost as much greenhouse gas as the tar sands. The province gets 63 per cent of its electrical power from coal, burning more than the rest of the country combined. Its coal-fired power plants release about the same amount of greenhouse gases as half of all the passenger vehicles in the country.

But according to a new report entitled Power to Change by the Pembina Institute and Clean Energy Canada, we could ditch the habit. The report claims that a major shift from coal to other sources, including solar, wind, hydropower, biomass and geothermal, could be accomplished in 20 years using current technologies. Albertans would experience only a slight price increase for electricity in the short term and lower prices thereafter. Alberta is uniquely suited for renewables, with more hours of sunshine and more reliable winds than any other province.

So, could Alberta go green? The answer, apparently, is yes, with one small bother—the tar sands, always the tar sands. With bitumen production reaching for the moon we are, I'm afraid, doomed to be Canada's pollution province for a while yet.

Today is the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers

Fifty-eight years ago, one of Canada's most honourable contributions to the international community was born. The first armed UN peacekeeping mission, an emergency force formed to deal with the Suez crisis, was created, largely due to the efforts of then Canadian Minister of External Affairs Lester B. Pearson. Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

In 2002, the United Nations General Assembly designated today, May 29th, as the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers. The day serves to pay tribute to "all the men and women who have served and continue to serve in United Nations peacekeeping operations for their high level of professionalism, dedication, and courage and to honor the memory of those who have lost their lives in the cause of peace."

Unfortunately, the number of Canadians serving to keep the peace has steadily dwindled. From the Suez crisis until the mid-1990s, Canada was the largest contributor of peacekeepers and the only country to have contributed to every UN mission. Our contribution once reached 3,000 military personnel. Canada's contribution today, including police, military experts and troops, is a meager 120. Our commitment to peacekeeping has declined, it seems, along with our international reputation generally.

Nonetheless, today deserves our recognition for all the Canadians and those from other nations who have served one of humanity's great causes.

Calgary, I'm forced to admit, is a world class city

I have always been inclined to ignore talk about making my city—Calgary—world class. It sounds rather desperate, a sad sort of social-climbing by civic boosters. But now it appears that Calgary really is a world class city. How can it not be when two of the world's top newspapers declare it to be so.

The New York Times, no less, has ranked our prairie metropolis as one of the globe's top travel destinations, number 17 out of its 52 places to go in 2014. "Flush with oil money, Calgary has morphed from ho-hum city on the prairie into a cultural hub, with offerings far beyond the Stampede, the annual rodeo and festival," says the Times. And who am I to disagree with the prestigious Times?

Or with The Guardian, Britain's premier daily. Actually The Guardian chose Alberta, not Calgary, ninth on their list of their top 40 destinations for 2014, however they highlighted Calgary's increasingly diverse and exciting city life as a major attraction. The city "has gone from cowboy town to cosmopolitan cool," raved the paper.

My own favourite Calgary story of recent days is probably not what The Guardian would call "cosmopolitan cool" but I find to be cool, nonetheless.

A pair of Canada geese has settled in to raise a family in a concrete planter near the door of the municipal building in downtown Calgary. The city has set up yellow barricades to give mom and pop some privacy while the eggs are hatching. Once they've hatched, officials will move the goslings and their parents to a slightly wetter area than the concrete steps of city hall. Now that's world class!

Dying with dignity in Quebec

Quebec's new Liberal government has decided to reintroduce Bill 52, the end-of-life care bill first tabled by the PQ in June 2013. The legislation will allow terminally ill patients to request medical assistance in dying if they suffer from an incurable illness that is in an advanced state and which inflicts intolerable physical and psychological pain. The bill has been welcomed by the province's medical, legal and political communities.

There will be a free vote and members of all parties are expected to support the bill. The PQ had never presented the issue in a partisan manner, and it is encouraging to see the Liberals adopt the same bipartisan approach. The new premier, Philippe Couillard, seems to  be keeping his word to be more inclusive.

The other provinces should take note. An Environics Institute survey late last year revealed that 68 per cent of Canadians believe those who help seriously ill people commit suicide should not be charged with a crime. Only 16 per cent felt charges should be laid.

It has always seemed presumptuous to me for others to dictate what you can do with your life. If you are unable to make rational decisions because of depression or other mental condition, that is a different matter. But for someone of sane mind who has no future to look forward to but one of profound suffering, your right over your own life deserves respect. Bill 52 shows that respect.

Hookers to be part of Italy's GDP

Italy's National Institute of Statistics recently announced that next year it will start including activities such as prostitution and illegal drug sales in the country's Gross Domestic Product.

And why not. After all, these activities create jobs and incomes and are therefore an integral part of a national economy. Estimating them will present a challenge, of course, as they are not usually reported, however that is no excuse for pretending they don't exist. Italy already includes an estimate for "grey market" activity—legitimate businesses that evade taxes.

It also illustrates once again how the GDP distorts the economic picture. The GDP includes much that is bad in society: higher crime rates lead to more expenditures on police, international tensions lead to more expenditures on arms, more disease leads to more medical spending, etc. In a recent submission to the National Energy Board, pipeline company Kinder Morgan claimed that marine oil spills, “can have both positive and negative effects on local and regional economies ... Spill response and clean-up creates business and employment opportunities for affected communities, regions, and clean-up service providers.” Kinder Morgan nicely illustrated the perversity of the GDP. From its perspective, oil spills are good for us.

The problem is that the GDP is being used for purposes well beyond what its inventors intended. Simon Kuznets, the economist largely responsible for developing the GDP in the 1930s, stated "The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income." Unfortunately, that's what the GDP has become—the primary measure of nations' welfare. It's long past time it was replaced by an economic yardstick that measures the quality of a nation's economy rather than its quantity.

In the meantime, I'd rather see hookers show up on our GDP than oil spills.

Why is the environment considered primarily a left-wing concern?

Conservative and conservation are almost the same word, both deriving from the Latin conservare, "to preserve," and differing only by two letters. We might expect, therefore, that conservatives would be great conservationists, deeply concerned about preserving the natural world, foremost stewards of the environment.

Yet that doesn't seem to be the case. Not that conservatives aren't concerned about the environment, they just don't seem to be as concerned as progressives, and are strongly inclined to put the economy first. Furthermore, they are disposed to think of the environmentally-minded as left-wing. We are all too familiar with former Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver's characterization of environmentalists as radical ideologues funded by foreign interests. Environmentalism almost seems to be a dirty word to conservatives, or at least to the Conservatives in Ottawa.

It is true that environmentalists tend to support progressive causes generally, social justice for instance, but that shouldn't preclude conservatives from strongly promoting the preservation of nature. After all, a healthy environment is, in the long term, critical to a healthy economy.

So what's with the conservative antipathy to vigorous defence of the environment? The answer, I suspect, lies with the newness of environmental concern. Up until recently, the planet was considered to be an infinite source of resources. Even economists, who ought to have known better, tended to ignore it in their theorizing. Only in the past few decades have we, or at least some of us, including the scientific community, come to the full realization of the damage we are doing to the Earth and the limits to its resources. Conservatives, always lagging, and often opposing, in the unending struggle for progress, simply haven't caught up.

Let's hope it doesn't take them too long. Time is short. Humanity could wait centuries, indeed millennia, to recognize the moral need to end slavery, emancipate women, abolish child labour, and liberate ethnic minorities and gays, but we only have decades to turn global warming around and start living within the planet's means. And this isn't just a moral imperative, it's even more an economic imperative. Without the support of a solid majority of people everywhere, we may just not make it.

Voting—the opiate of the people?

A letter to the Deseret News, a Salt Lake City, Utah, daily paper, suggested rather unkindly that the rite of voting in the U.S. is nothing more than “the opiate of the masses.” I was rather surprised to find a quote from Marx in a newspaper owned by the Mormon Church.

The author of the letter was commenting on a recent in-depth study by two political scientists from Princeton and Northwestern universities, Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, who concluded in their report that, "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. ... Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all."

The study is a damning indictment of the American political system, declaring that the U.S. is in effect a plutocracy, not a democracy. Nonetheless, I'm not sure I would go so far as to refer to voting as the opiate of the masses. Although the two major American political parties have been described as about as different as Burger King and McDonalds, I believe electing Democrats or Republicans can make a significant difference. Obama's health care plan may have been tailored to corporate interests, but at least he brought in a plan, something I doubt the increasingly reactionary Republicans would have done.

The question for us is how much of an opiate voting is in our country. I would suggest much less. Our Supreme Court has been sensible enough to recognize that banning corporations from funding elections is a reasonable democratic measure. As a result, they are prohibited from contributing to federal campaigns. The Court has also recognized that third parties can be restricted in their political funding. Furthermore, I believe our political parties offer us considerably more philosophical range than the Democrats and Republicans offer Americans.

Nonetheless, economic elites and business groups still have excessive influence in our democratic processes. They are major funders in municipal elections and most provincial elections. Their domination of the economy allows them substantial leverage over governments. And of course they own most of the mass media. Voting in Canada may not be an opiate, but it isn't entirely the clear voice of democracy either.

Going ... going ... gone ... Western Antarctic ice sheet slips into the sea

It seems the planet is running out of ice. The latest news on that front came with two reports last week that said the Western Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing. The loss of the entire ice sheet could eventually cause a sea level rise of up to 4 metres.

Studies by NASA and the University of Washington both concluded that the melting of the ice sheet, driven by climate change, has begun and cannot be halted, even with drastic action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The collapse is already causing much faster sea level rise than scientists had anticipated and will be far greater than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change earlier this year. Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, observed, “This system, whether Greenland or Antarctica, is changing on a faster time scale than we anticipated. We are discovering that every day.”

But not to worry. The complete collapse of the sheet will take centuries, lots of time to rebuild our coastal cities and take in millions of refugees from Bangladesh and other low-lying countries. Not a bad idea to get started now though.

Egypt's Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and déjà vu

That Egyptian general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi intends to return the country to military rule becomes increasingly clear. Leader of the July 2013 coup against then President Mohamed Morsi, Sisi is running in the May 26-27 presidential election which he is expected to win in a landslide. He is highly popular and is systematically eliminating the military's major opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood. Security forces have killed hundreds of Brotherhood members in the streets, arrested thousands and recently a court sentenced 529 to execution. The Brotherhood has been banned and declared a terrorist organization even though it has repeatedly denounced terrorism.

Brutally oppressing the Brotherhood is only the beginning. Recently he lectured the press on how he expects them to behave, warning them not to push for freedom of speech and other rights, saying demands for greater freedom jeopardized national security. He further instructed them not to advocate for major reforms to state institutions or to expose corruption.

He believes elected civilian officials should not have political and economic power over the military and has helped expand the economic dominance of the military, which already exerts control over a wide array of industries. Ownership of the economy has long been the most treasured prize for the generals.

The efforts of progressives, the inspiring rallies for democracy and human rights in Tahrir Square, the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's version of the Arab Spring, are all to be lost, all fading away as Egypt returns to the dark days of military dictatorship. A very sad day for democracy.

Sisi once said he wouldn't run for the nation's highest office, but then he had a dream that he would one day become president and naturally he had to follow his dream. That dream, it seems, will now return Egypt to an old nightmare.

Conference Board illustrates folly of conventional economic metrics

Once again conventional measurement has painted a warped view of our economic well-being. Relying principally on growth in the GDP sense, The Conference Board of Canada applauds the oil and gas rich provinces—Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador—for being the country's top economic performers.

In the short term they are: highest GDP growth, highest employment growth, etc. But the Conference Board never discusses the danger of basing our prosperity on the production of fossil fuels, the major cause of global warming. Indeed, incredibly the Board's report (yes, I've read it) never talks about environmental limits on the economy at all, except to comment on environmental concerns delaying pipeline construction. There is a kind of madness in celebrating the very thing that could quite possibly cause the collapse of the economy along with the rest of civilization.

The underlying cause of the Board's madness is basing economic prosperity on GDP growth. It is folly to think of growth as a good thing when we are already well beyond the planet's carrying capacity. The idea, possessed of the Board and unfortunately most of our leaders, and apparently most of us, that we can grow seemingly forever is living in a fantasy world. It is time to accept reality—the Earth is finite, there are limits. The only sensible conversation we can have about growth is how to end it. The Conference Board economists clearly need a better yardstick to measure economic and social well-being. They should, in short, enter the real world.

Is Putin playing to the gallery?

That Vladimir Putin laments the loss of the Soviet empire is well known, so adding a few bits back in no doubt appeals to him. He also has a perfectly legitimate reason for playing tough on Russia's western front—security. Russia has suffered a number of devastating invasions from the west and indeed maintaining a buffer along the western border was the major foreign policy goal of the Soviet Union.

But one wonders if Putin isn't also playing to the home front. His reattaching of Crimea to Russia 60 years after Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine was, after all, hugely popular among the Russian people. (And among the Crimean people too, for that matter.) He is overwhelmingly popular and has boosted Russian national pride. According to Pew Research, "Over 80 per cent say they have confidence in President Putin to do the right thing in world affairs, up from 69 per cent in 2012." Half now have a very favorable opinion of their homeland, compared with under a third in 2013. Furthermore, a solid majority agree with Putin that the loss of the Soviet Union was a great misfortune. On the other hand, their opinion of the European Union and the United States has decidedly soured, with only 15 per cent trusting in Obama to do the right thing in world affairs.

There's nothing like a good row abroad to boost the fortunes of a leader messing up at home. And Russia is a mess—a corrupt, gangster-run government with an economy overwhelmingly dependent on oil and gas, and even there the spoils seem to bypass the nation's most important needs.

The Sochi Olympics was supposed to raise the nation's image but it did rather more to illustrate the corruption endemic to Putin's regime. So picking a fight with the West may be the president's little demagogic distraction to take his peoples' attention off his misrule. And it seems to be working.

Students instruct teachers to bring economics into the real world

Following the Second World War, Western nations embarked on securing the welfare state as a balance to the capitalist market economy, the result of which was the most prosperous and equitable societies ever known. The most influential economist through this period was Britain's John Maynard Keynes with his prescription of a sensible balance between government and industry involvement in economic life. But with the emergence of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, other economists came to the fore—market fundamentalists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

The idea of ever less government, leaving the economy and indeed society, to the vagaries of capitalist markets increasingly gained precedence. The idea of fully-informed individuals maximizing their enlightened self-interest in rational markets captivated many in the academic and political class, combined as it was with generous support from the rich for politicians who cleaved to market dogma. The teaching of economics, which became increasingly enamoured of mathematical models over the reality of human behaviour, tended to reinforce the philosophy.

All this turned out to be utopian thinking. Like communists, the market fundamentalists believed all the answers lay in one economic and social model. Neither model, unfortunately, accounted for the messy reality of economic life as it is lived by real people. People don't always choose on the basis of mere utility and they aren't always rational in their decision-making. And the philosophy neglected the critical importance of the environment, the basis of all economies.

One result of the commitment to ever less government was the financial and economic collapse of 2008. Herd instinct, greed and sheer recklessness, among other very human behaviours, proved that the financial market was anything but the rational institution free-marketers insisted it was.

Reacting to the 2008 failure of the "liberated" financial markets, a growing number of students is rejecting an economic curriculum that doesn't apply to the real world. According to the Guardian, "Economics students from 19 countries have joined forces to call for an overhaul of the way their subject is taught, saying the dominance of narrow free-market theories at top universities harms the world's ability to confront challenges such as financial stability and climate change."

The International Student Initiative for Pluralist Economics insists that research and teaching is too narrowly focused, and declares, "The real world should be brought back into the classroom, as well as debate and a pluralism of theories and methods. This will help renew the discipline and ultimately create a space in which solutions to society's problems can be generated." They go on to suggest that universities should "establish special departments that could oversee interdisciplinary programs blending economics and other fields."

The students are supported by economist Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, who criticizes mainstream economic teaching for ignoring evidence of growing inequality and its influence on GDP growth.

Youth are often accused of being too idealistic. In this case, it seems, they are the realists. And if they are heeded, economics in itself as well as public policies drawn from it, will be much improved.

Are the little swimmers in trouble?

The world is full of endocrine disruptors. Chemicals that mimic natural hormones in the body are found in a host of products from food packaging to toothpaste to toys. Now researchers in Denmark and Germany have found that many of them—one-third of the 96 they tested—disrupt the way sperm function, affecting their swimming and navigational skills, and thus their ability to fertilize an egg.

Apparently the chemicals lead to abnormally high calcium levels in the sperm, adversely affecting their swimming and causing them to prematurely release enzymes needed to break through the egg's outer coating.

Furthermore, endocrine disrupters in the female reproductive tract may swamp the hormonal signal that sperm use to find the egg. Hormones produced by the egg tell sperm where to find it, but if other chemicals mimic those hormones, the sperm may be led astray.

This sounds like bad news, but is it? One wonders. The seven billion people on Earth are relentlessly polluting the planet while simultaneously exhausting its resources, and by mid-century we are predicted to grow to 10 billion. Curbing our fecundity may not be a bad thing. How ironic if we are being emasculated by our own excesses.

From Ukraine—"Basically we're screwed"

A young eastern Ukrainian philosophy student, commenting on the weekend referendum in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, summed up his country's condition rather neatly: "I haven't voted," he said, "and nor have any of my friends. It's a referendum for idiots, organized by idiots. Of course I don't want to be part of their absurd republic or join Russia. But having said that, I don't like the new Kiev government either. Basically, we're screwed."

According to the pro-Russia separatists, they won big, claiming 89 per cent yes in Donetsk for the question, "Do you support the act of state self-rule of the Donetsk People's Republic?" Referendum officials in Luhansk reported 96 per cent yes for a similar question. Considering there were no international observers, no up-to-date electoral lists, heavily armed men keeping watch, and most of those who disagreed with the separatists choosing to boycott the referendum, the results are, to put it mildly, questionable.

A more reliable poll, conducted by Pew Research, suggests that Russian-speaking Ukrainians have little appetite for separation. Fifty-eight per cent believe Ukraine should remain one country while less than half that number believe regions should be allowed to secede. However, like the young philosophy student, they aren't happy with Kiev either and have significant differences with western Ukraine. For example, two-thirds of those in the east believe Kiev is having a bad influence on events while 60 per cent of those in the west believe it is having a good influence.
 
And then there's the language issue: almost ninety per cent of Russian speakers believe both Russian and Ukrainian should be official languages whereas two-thirds of those in the west believe the only official language should be Ukrainian. Canadians are all too familiar with the intractability of language arguments.

Of particular interest, perhaps, are the divergent attitudes toward the May 25 presidential election. Fifty-nine per cent in the west believe it will be fair while, ominously, 63 per cent in the east think that's unlikely.

So a majority of all groups want the country to remain united, yet it is riddled with division. Screwed? Perhaps not, but seriously challenged certainly.

April 28—National Day of Mourning

In 1984, the Canadian Labour Congress declared April 28th a National Day of Mourning for workers who have been killed, or suffer disease or injury as a result of work. It is now recognized in over a 100 countries around the world.

Every year, unions, labour councils, families and community partners gather to "mourn for the dead." It is intended to not only remember those who have given their lives in the workplace, but to remember also the suffering caused by hazardous working conditions, and to commit to action that restores and promotes dignity and health in our workplaces and communities.

In 2012, 979 Canadians died from job-related injuries or disease. This is the official figure—many more die from under-reported illnesses and occupational diseases that go unrecognized in the compensation systems. All served their country and all deserve a moment of remembrance.

Are we gambling our economy on the tar sands?

Depending heavily for jobs, profits and taxes on our most rapidly increasing source of greenhouse gas emissions is environmental folly. It may mean more economic prosperity in the short term, but by contributing to global warming, it will undermine economic prosperity, and a lot else, in the long term. It is a dangerous dependence. And pollution may not be the only danger this dependence presents.

At least two other threats to our economy emanate from our tar sands dependence, one ethical, one financial. The ethical threat is the growing hostility to our insistence on producing the world's dirtiest oil. We are all aware of the U.S. environmental movement's opposition to the Keystone pipeline. We are aware also of the international community's increasing impatience with our reckless attitude toward climate change. And more voices join the condemnation all the time, some with considerable moral clout. For example, in recent months both former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and anti-apartheid icon Desmond Tutu have spoken out strongly against the tar sands. This growing chorus will increasingly dissuade governments from buying tar sands products and investors from buying shares in tar sands producers.

Even more challenging is the "carbon bubble" threat. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if we are to avoid dangerous levels of warming, investment in fossil fuels must start falling by tens of billions a year. Only a third of the reserves on the books of fossil fuel companies can be burned if the world is to restrict climate change to 2C; the other two-thirds will be lost as assets. Yet companies continue to invest heavily in finding more reserves.

These twin threats are making their presence felt. According to Oxford University research, a divestment campaign against fossil fuel investments is growing faster than campaigns that targeted apartheid, tobacco and arms manufacturers. As to the carbon bubble, a number of major financial players, including Citi bank, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Standard and Poor's, and Moody's, are warning investors of the risk.

Increasingly it looks like we have too many eggs in one basket, and unfortunately our government is myopically focused on that basket.

Don't give up on the Senate, Mr. Harper

It wouldn't be surprising if Prime Minister Harper was in a bit of a funk over the Supreme Court's decision on the Senate this week. The Court unanimously rejected his government’s attempt to transform the Senate into an elected body and to set term limits, saying that such basic changes require the consent of at least seven provinces and half of Canadians. For Mr. Harper, this was fifth straight defeat at the hands of the Court in the past month, all on substantial issues.

“We’re essentially stuck with the status quo for the time being," said the PM, "It’s a decision that I’m disappointed with [and] that a vast majority of Canadians will be very disappointed with.” I don't really know if a vast majority of Canadians are very disappointed, but we are not stuck with the status quo.

Meaningful changes can be made without resorting to constitutional amendments. For example, I recently blogged about setting the Senate up as a citizens' assembly. Political scientist Peter Russell, an authority on the Senate and the Supreme Court, suggests that the government and the opposition parties collaborate on a non-partisan method of selecting senators. These approaches would remove the Senate's most offensive attribute—its use as a repository for faithful servants of the party in power. This alone would greatly enhance its legitimacy and usefulness.

Even the constitutional route should not be abandoned. Democracy is simply too important to leave this expensive and corrupted institution in its present state. If the government established a committee of provincial representatives mandated for one task and one task only—a referendum question on Senate reform—with a strong chairman to keep it strictly on track, it just might be able to come up with an appropriate question to present to the people. It is worth at least a try.

So cheer up, Mr. Harper, and look on the bright side: you have another reason to blame the judiciary for the country's problems. Enjoy that at least while getting on with the job of dealing with one of the major weaknesses in our political system.

The Great Game—did Putin outplay the West in Crimea?

In the 19th century, the British and Russian empires' strategic rivalry for supremacy in Central Asia was referred to as the Great Game. The game has never really ended as Russia has continued to vie with Western powers for influence and control in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. And in recent days, the Russians may have just outplayed the West in Ukraine.

Influence in Ukraine has see-sawed since the Cold War ended with its leaders varying between those leaning toward the West and those leaning toward Russia. Both sides have invested heavily in swinging the country one way or the other. In 2010 the Russian favourite, Viktor Yanukovych, won the presidential election. Score one for Russia. But when he chose to establish closer ties with Russia rather than proceed with an agreement with the European Union, protesters flooded into the streets and ultimately drove him from office. Score one for the West. Then apparently Mr. Putin decided the game was over, flexed his muscles, and grabbed the prize.

Assuming, that is, that Crimea is the prize. The peninsula, like the rest of the country, is poor but it has the saving grace of promising gas reserves, onshore and under the Black Sea. Before now-former president Yanukovych skedaddled for Russia, Ukraine was about to sign a deal with a group of oil companies including Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell to drill off Crimea’s southwest coast.

Thus was an opportunity lost for Ukraine to achieve greater independence from Russian gas, something it dearly wants, and for the EU which shares that sentiment. For the United States, it meant a loss of various kinds, quite aside from being outplayed by Putin. The Americans would naturally like to see Europe less dependent on Russia, and no doubt it would not appreciate its oil companies being cut out of the Crimean spoils. And, not to be overlooked, Crimea is a door to the vast gas resources of Central Asia (shades of the Great Game), and the Americans must be furious to see that door close. So while Russia locks up Crimean gas, the West gets to bail out the rest of Ukraine, a corruption-riddled, bankrupt nation that will cost them billions.

Russia is highly unlikely to give up their prize and the Western powers might just as well get used to it. The only sensible approach now is to do their best to create a stable, respectful relationship between the two sides in Ukraine and between Ukraine and Russia.

And what can Canada do to help? Not much. The players that count—Russia, Ukraine, the United States and the EU, particularly Germany—will ignore us. At one time we had a reputation as a skilled negotiator and an honest broker, traits that would have made us useful, but that's all in the past. Now our Prime Minister chooses instead to rattle his little sabre.

We could, of course, offer Ukraine advice from our own experience and point out that when you nestle beside a major power, sometimes to get by you just have to kiss up. Ukraine's acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, should prepare to pucker.

UK PM claims Britain is a Christian country—it ain't

British Prime Minister David Cameron has put the cat among the pigeons claiming, perhaps unduly influenced by the Easter season, that Britain is a Christian country. In fact, he suggested Brits should be downright evangelical about it.

He is, however, dead wrong. A 2012 British Society Attitudes Survey indicated that the country is barely religious, never mind Christian. According to the survey, only 37 per cent of Britons consider themselves Christian while 48 per cent have no religion at all.

What Cameron is trying to achieve with his proselytizing is hard to fathom, but playing the religious card is an American gimmick that probably won't play well in the secular world of British political life. In any case, it seems Richard Dawkins is now more representative of British religious views than the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Common sense in Kitimat

Good news over the weekend. The citizens of Kitimat B.C. had their say on the Northern Gateway pipeline, and they said NO.

In a referendum on Saturday, they voted 1,793 to 1,278 to oppose running the pipeline to their town, the proposed terminus. Mayor Joanne Monaghan promised to discuss the result at tonight's Council meeting and deciding where to go from there. "The people have spoken," she said, "it’s a democratic process.” Kitimat is key to the pipeline as it would house the marine terminal where supertankers would load before sailing down the narrow Douglas Channel to take the dilbit (diluted bitumen) to markets in Asia.

Opponents had to overcome a major effort by Enbridge, the company sponsoring the pipeline, to promote the project with a barrage of advertising and open houses. Its promises of jobs and money flowing into the town were no doubt hard to resist for many. Residents of the local Haisla First Nation have also shown a lot of resistance to the pipeline, however they were ineligible to vote in the referendum.

I suspect the primary concern of Kitimat's people was the chilling thought of supertankers full of dilbit floating off their pristine shores. But the vote also serves as another strike against tar sands production. Anything that helps to put the brakes on Canada's great folly is welcome.

The referendum result is not binding, but it is mighty encouraging.

The United States—democracy or oligarchy?

Last year, Iran held an election to choose its president. Many in the West mocked the election because the candidates were vetted by the Guardian Council (a group appointed largely by the Supreme Leader). This, however, is not so different from American presidential elections. In the U.S., candidates have to get approval from the corporate sector simply because if they don't get those big corporate bucks they'll never be able to afford a successful campaign. This is an informal vetting compared to the Iranian formal one, but a vetting nonetheless.

We have long referred to the United States as the world's leading democracy. It is certainly still a leader, but given the increasing influence of money in American society generally and in politics specifically, the "democracy" part now has to be reconsidered.

Democracy is political equality, and the U.S. is a very long way from political equality. It starts with the vast inequality of wealth in the country and ends with the ability of the disproportionate rich to corrupt politics with abundant largesse.

The magnitude of the inequality is vast and growing. The richest one per cent of Americans own 38 per cent of the country's financial wealth, the bottom 60 per cent own 2.3 percent. One family—the Waltons, owners of Walmart—are worth $148-billion, more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined. From 2009 through 2012, 95 per cent of all new income earned went to the top one per cent. One family, the very politically-active Koch brothers, saw a $12-billion increase in their wealth.

This might not be so bad for democracy if the wealth was kept out of politics, but it isn't. Any hope of that has been systematically extinguished by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2010, in the Citizens United case, the Court ruled that the constitution forbade governments from restricting political independent expenditures by corporations and other associations. Acting independently of candidates and parties, big donors can spend unlimited amounts on attack ads and other campaign efforts.

Recently the Court loosened the reins even further. In another ruling, it decreed that big campaign donors can dole out money to as many candidates and political committees as they want as long as they abide by limits on contributions to each individual campaign. In striking down reasonable campaign limits, the Court seems incapable of distinguishing money from speech, or corporations from citizens.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders sums up the Court's behaviour with the observation, "The Supreme Court is paving the way toward an oligarchic form of society in which a handful of billionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson will control our political process,” a sentiment hard to argue with.

Corporate control is not, of course, limited to funding politicians. The defense industry, for example, has cleverly established manufacturing plants around the country such that hardly a single congressman can propose reducing the military budget without proposing the loss of jobs in his own constituency or state. Furthermore, gun manufacturers have a proxy in the National Rifle Association. By heavily funding what has been referred to as a "virtual subsidiary of the gun industry," they allow it to savagely attack any politician who dares to propose gun control laws or indeed any measure that might interfere with the profits of gun dealers and weapons makers.

Republicans are, not surprisingly, delighted with the Supreme Court and find no problem with corporations using their economic muscle to set the political agenda. I remember my first conversation with an American conservative about democracy and she pointedly informed me that the United States was not a democracy, it was a republic. If she wasn't right about the former when she told me this those many years ago, she is certainly right now.

$36-million for a cup? Some people are just too rich

It's called the chicken cup because it's got chickens painted on it. The world's highest priced birds, in fact. The cup fetched $36.1-million, including commission, at Sotheby's spring auction in Hong Kong. Described as the "the holy grail when it comes to Chinese art," the cup set a record for Chinese porcelain.

It was bought by self-made multimillionaire Liu Yiqian for his museum in Shanghai. Liu isn't all that rich, worth a mere $900-million, not even a billionaire, and only the 200th richest man in China, yet apparently rich enough to pay $36-million for a cup. He was bemused by the fuss over the purchase. "Why do you all care so much about the price?" he asked, "I bought it only because I like it."

While not wanting to begrudge Liu his riches (he made his money in the stock market), there is something vaguely obscene about paying millions for a cup, even a Ming Dynasty cup, when many on the planet would be grateful for the rice to fill it.

Quebec—another majority that isn't

A lot of euphoria last night from Liberal supporters and those many Canadians (including not a few Quebecers) who don't want to hear about separation for another generation at least. Not only did the Liberals win, they won big, majority big.

Or at least the majority that counts which, unfortunately, is not a majority of Quebecers. A solid majority (58 per cent) did not vote Liberal. Premier-elect Couillard and his party won 56 per cent of the seats in the National Assembly with only 42 per cent of the popular vote, an electoral victory but not a democratic one.

I have long complained about being ruled federally by a party that most of us didn't want. Now Quebecers will be ruled by a party that didn't do much better than Mr. Harper's Conservatives.

Perhaps it won't be as bad in Quebec. After all, the Liberals have won, and if they are truly liberals, they will listen to a broad range of views. Our federal government, on the other hand, is not only the most ideological we've ever had, it's led by a man who is the least open to other views of any Prime Minister I can remember. Fortunately for Quebecers, Mr. Couillard appears to be a great deal more inclusive.

Nonetheless, it would be nice to see governments in this country required to represent at least a majority of their citizens. But that, it seems, just isn't the Canadian way.

Canada strikes out as a progressive nation

There was a time—long, long ago—when Canada had a reputation in the world as a progressive nation. Well ... not so long ago actually. Only eight years in fact. It just seems like a long time. Now, in at least three areas we have joined the ranks of the reactionaries, we have three strikes against us, and we must therefore, as in baseball, be counted out.

Strike one, the environment: The Guardian newspaper has referred to Canada as "the dirty old man of the climate world" and a "corrupt petro-state." And sadly, it is appropriate. We seem to increasingly exist for the primary purpose of exporting bitumen. Anyone or anything that gets in the way is trashed, particularly scientists and environmentalists. We opted out of Kyoto and are failing to meet the modest reduction in greenhouse gas emissions we agreed to in the Copenhagen Accord. We richly deserved the Lifetime Unachievement Fossil Award we were dishonoured with at the UN climate talks in Warsaw last year. After all, we had won the Colossal Fossil Award—awarded to the country doing the most damage to climate talks in a given year—five years in a row.

Strike two, drug policy: At the UN Commission for Narcotic Drugs' international drug control negotiations last March in Vienna, we helped block the inclusion of harm reduction in future international drug policies despite the desperate need for it in countries with high levels of injection drug use and HIV. "Historically, Canada had been leader in this area," said Don MacPherson, adjunct professor in Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, "A substantial amount of the scientific research validating harm reduction measures was done right here in Vancouver, and we've implemented quite robust harm reduction policies at the provincial level across Canada." (The federal government attempted to halt those provincial efforts but was denied by the courts.)

Strike three, illegal arms sales: Canada has refused to sign the UN Arms Trade Treaty, an agreement aimed at curbing the illegal global trade in conventional weapons. Five of the world's top ten arms exporters—Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain—have all ratified the treaty. Our government seems to be balking because of lobbying from gun groups even though the treaty doesn't interfere with domestic arms sales or laws. Canada has also been criticized internationally for proposing a loophole in the Convention on Cluster Munitions that would allow our soldiers to use cluster munitions when in joint operations with U.S. forces. "Canada has always been such an upstanding global citizen," said Angela Kane, UN High Representative for Disarmament, "And I would like to see this kind of greater spirit ... prevailing also in this case." Good luck, Ms. Kane.

So there you have it. In these three areas at least we are now perceived internationally as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Canada a progressive nation? No more. I can't help but wonder how many Canadian youths backpacking around the world now put the Stars and Stripes on their knapsacks.

Support the tax gap motion

That governments are robbed of billions of dollars by the rich and by corporations exploiting tax havens is a well-known national and international scandal. It is now standard practice for corporations to exploit a variety of often opaque schemes to shift profits into low or no-tax jurisdictions.

The corporate tax rate in Canada, including federal and provincial taxes, averages 25 per cent. This is generous compared to the average American rate of 35 per cent, but in any case most corporations don't pay it. Of the TXS 60 (top 60 corporations on the Toronto stock exchange), through the period 2007-11 over half paid less than 10 per cent, thirteen paid less than five per cent and only four paid the full 25 per cent.

The Canadian Revenue Agency is currently in a legal battle with the uranium mining firm Cameco. Cameco set up a subsidiary in Switzerland, sold its uranium to the subsidiary for $10 a pound, and the subsidiary then sold it on the world market for prices as high as $100 a pound. (The price is currently $30.) All the uranium is mined in Canada, but by basing its revenues on the $10 figure the company avoided at least $850-million in Canadian taxes.

A quarter of Canadian direct foreign investment now goes to tax haven countries. This gambit is, of course, highly unfair to small and medium-sized Canadian firms who are unable to exploit tax havens but have to compete with international corporations that can and do.

The Canada Revenue Agency's pursuit of this issue has been hindered by the government's enthusiasm for staff cuts. The agency has suffered a loss of over 3,000 staff, the most of any department.

Our government, as a result, has no idea how many tax dollars it is missing. The Parliamentary Budget Officer would like to know (as would I), however the Canada Revenue Agency hasn't been much help, refusing to provide key information even though it isn't confidential.

In response to this, NDP MP Pierre Dionne Labelle has introduced a motion in the House of Commons calling on the government to:

a) study and measure Canadian tax losses to international tax havens and tax evasion, in order to determine the Canadian federal “tax gap”;

b) order the Canada Revenue Agency to provide the Parliamentary Budget Officer with the information necessary to provide an independent estimate of the Canadian federal tax gap arising from tax evasion and tax avoidance through the use of tax havens;

This motion will be debated in the House on April 9th. If you, too, would like to know how much tax money we have to ante up because of corporate tax avoidance, you might ask your MP to support the motion. Or you can simply go here and have Canadians for Tax Fairness send a message for you.

The "mother of all accountants" flays election bill

Sheila Fraser was once one of Stephen Harper's favourite people. When she, in her capacity of auditor-general, exposed the Chretien government's sponsorship scandal, sewing the seeds that would bring down the Liberals, Mr. Harper praised her handsomely as the "mother of all accountants" and in a neat turn of phrase remarked she "did not say that she thought that something smelled fishy. She identified the fish."

Well Ms. Fraser has now identified a new fish and it's Bill C-23, the inappropriately-named Fair Elections Act. According to The Canadian Press, she claims that the proposed legislation would, among other things, "disenfranchise thousands of voters, undercut the independence of the chief electoral watchdog, impede investigations into wrongdoing, give a financial advantage to rich, established parties and undermine Canadians' faith in the electoral system."

I have heard many criticisms of the Bill, but I take none more seriously than Ms. Fraser's. She is perhaps the best auditor-general we ever had and currently co-chairs an advisory board to Elections Canada. The latter adds considerably to my trust in our electoral system.

I don't agree with Stephen Harper on many things, but I agree with him unreservedly that Sheila Fraser is a lady of competence and courage. He has shown no inclination to bow to the widespread criticism of his government's Bill, but perhaps he will heed the esteemed public servant he once acclaimed as the mother of all accountants.

More to Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations than meets the neoliberal eye

When we think of Adam Smith, the great Scottish philosopher and economist, and his seminal book The Wealth of Nations, we are inclined to think of free markets, individual self-interest, and the invisible hand. However, reading another good book recently, How Markets Fail by John Cassidy, I was reminded there was a lot more to Smith and The Wealth of Nations than the elements of laissez faire capitalism.

Consider, for instance, Smith's example of the pin factory which he uses to illustrate the power of the division of labour. He compares the productivity of workers creating a pin on an assembly line to workers making pins individually: "One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for fitting the head ...." etc. "Whereas one workman ... could scarce ... make one pin a day," ten workers skilled in their individual tasks, "could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins a day."

And what are these workers doing to complete this remarkable feat? They are co-operating. Smith has illustrated, perhaps unwittingly, the power of co-operation over individualism.

He goes on to discuss the making of the humble wool coats worn by pin makers. These too are efficiently created through the division of labour, by many hands creating a coat rather than one. Thus are the coat makers connected to the pin makers, one collective to another. And such it is for myriad products, and the resources for those products, and the transporting of resources and products, and so on ad infinitum. Smith is talking about interconnectedness. Each of us may pursue his or her individual self-interest, but we can only succeed with the help of many others.

Margaret Thatcher, former British prime minister and enthusiast of unfettered markets, once famously proclaimed, "There is no such thing as society." She was wrong. Society is real, and it is a collection of collectives.

Smith also saw multiple roles for government. In addition to defending the nation and administering justice, government had a duty "erecting and maintaining certain public works and public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain ... though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society."

Of particular interest to us in this the twenty-first century, Smith saw the need to regulate the financial industry. He had little trust in merchants of any kind, once observing, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public." But, no matter, free market competition would keep them in line.

Bankers, however, needed the tighter leash of government regulation. "The obligation to build party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty," he wrote, "exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed." How ironic that two centuries years after The Wealth of Nations was published, the U.S. government ignored Smith's advice and acting instead on the urging of his would-be ideological descendants, deregulated the financial industry allowing the bankers to wreck their companies, the industry and much of the economy.

Free market fundamentalists of the political kind often rely on Adam Smith to justify their policies and those of the economist kind to justify their advice on policy to politicians. But there are more things to Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations than they dream of in their philosophy.

Alberta, oil, and indoctrinating children

"Give us a child till he’s seven and we’ll have him for life"—a maxim some claim comes from St. Ignatius Loyola himself, founder of the Jesuits. Somewhat hackneyed but nonetheless true, the Alberta government and the oil industry seem to be taking it seriously.

The government is engaged in a major overhaul of Alberta's school curriculum and, to the surprise of some, it is bringing in major oil companies as consultants on the changes. Syncrude Canada and Suncor Energy are listed under a working group led by the Edmonton Public School Board in the redesign of the kindergarten to grade three curriculum. Cenovus Energy will consult on the grades four to twelve curriculum. That industry would be involved in education in the higher grades when kids are starting to consider career paths makes sense, but in kindergarten?

The idea that the oil industry can be an impartial conveyor of knowledge is risible. It is one side of a fierce debate regarding fossil fuels and the environment, a debate that will affect the future of humanity, and it vigorously promotes its side. It is by far the biggest lobbyist in Ottawa, its efforts dwarfing those of other industries. And with great success—they have seen the Conservative government rewrite or repeal a host of laws governing environmental assessments, navigable waterways and other measures, and shut down or hamstring environmental research.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) inundates the airwaves with ads, aided and abetted by the federal government which has spent millions on major TV campaigns pitching Canadians on its biased version of “responsible resource development.” CAPP is already making forays into schools with its Energy in Action program designed to teach grade four and five students about "oil and natural gas resources and the importance of environmental stewardship," for which it won the Alberta School Board Association's Friends of Education award in 2011. This is ironic indeed considering that elements in the oil industry have been complicit in undermining climate science. (At least Exxon hasn't been invited to consult on the new curriculum.)

Considering the massive propaganda effort by the oil industry to hype fossil fuels, including the infamous tar sands, inviting them to participate in curriculum development for children in their most formative and vulnerable years is inviting indoctrination. Not that the children will be asked to recite "the oil sands are my friend" every morning at start of class. The government and the industry will be quite satisfied if an instinctive association between "oil industry" and "environmental stewardship" is firmly planted in young minds. The fact that the two concepts are in major ways incompatible is, I suspect, a truth that won't be included in the curricula.

Federal hiring and the warrior ethos

The federal government has, it seems, something of a Jekyll and Hyde attitude towards military veterans. On the one hand, its budget-cutting has resulted in the closing of Veterans Affairs offices and a penny-pinching approach to the well-being of injured and disabled veterans.

On the other hand, the government announced it will implement measures that "will help move Veterans to the front of the line when it comes to hiring qualified Canadians for federal public service jobs." Veterans with at least three years service will be given preference in advertised external hiring and will also be able to apply for internal hiring.

Why former military personnel should be given an advantage over other Canadians for employment is hard to justify. One refrain is that they served their country. But this is meaningless—everyone with a job (or is volunteering) serves their country. Or we hear that they put their lives on the line for their country. But a great many workers do that. Ever year, an average of 1,000 Canadians suffer workplace fatalities and for every death, hundreds more are seriously injured. Agriculture is the deadliest industry with an average of over 100 fatalities a year. The military are by no means alone in serving their country or serving it dangerously.

What we are looking at here is warrior-worship, the atavistic notion that the highest form of manhood is the warrior—man fulfilling himself by picking up his weapon to defend the tribe. It is long past time to rid ourselves of such primitive habits of mind.

All civil servants, including those who train to kill, should be treated with respect by their employer, and if they need help because of job-related injury they should get it. And if they need help to retrain and obtain more constructive employment, they should get that too. But not at the cost of depriving other, more qualified citizens of their opportunities. That kind of discrimination does a disservice to those others and to the civil service itself.

Saudi arms sales—the triumph of economics over morality

If nothing else, it illustrates how, in the world of international relations, economics trumps morality. I refer to General Dynamics Land Systems Canada landing a deal to sell light-armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia. The deal was announced last month by International Trade Minister Ed Fast who praised it as a major success for Canadian diplomacy.

Now how on earth can selling arms to Saudi Arabia possibly be a cause for celebration? The Saudi regime is one of the world's most oppressive dictatorships and certainly its most misogynistic. According to Human Rights Watch, “In Saudi Arabia, 2013 was another bad year for human rights, marred by executions and repression of women and activists.” And Saudi repression isn't just local. In 2011, Saudi Arabia invaded Bahrain to suppress dissent by the Shiite majority against another gulf dictator. The vehicles we are about to sell them could conceivably be used in their next invasion or, for that matter, against their own people.

And why is our government, a government that has in the past objected to religious discrimination around the world, championing the sales of military equipment to a regime that forbids the public worship of any religion but Islam and even systematically discriminates against Muslim faiths other than its own?

The answer of course is money. The contract is worth $10-billion over 14 years and will sustain more than 3,000 jobs annually. This is the lipstick on the pig.

And there's a bigger picture. Saudi Arabia controls 25 per cent of the world's oil supply, giving it a uniquely influential role in the world economy. It is a country too big to fail. So if the Saudis want weapons, the Saudis get weapons. And our government is happy to help, morality be damned.

The global economy—a case of bad engineering

For a number of years I toiled in the oil industry as an engineer, and not infrequently lessons I learned from my engineering experience return to inform me in other contexts. Recently I have been thinking of the global economy in such terms, and it fails miserably to pass the test of good engineering.

When an engineer designs a bridge he doesn't simply design the supports to meet the stresses he expects to be imposed upon them. He conservatively designs the supports to meet the expected stresses—and then adds a generous safety factor. In other words, he follows the precautionary principle, knowing that he cannot account for every eventuality.

And that is the way a sensible society would design its economy. It would conservatively estimate the demands the environment is capable of meeting from resource extraction and waste disposal, and then add in a generous safety factor. It would then design its economic activities to fit into the calculated environmental capacity.

Unfortunately for society after society, civilization after civilization, throughout history, humanity has not done that. The usual practice has been to exploit the environment to whatever extent the desired economy demands, even if that pushes it to the maximum. And then, when the maximum shrinks, as it always does, due to drought or flood or other whim of nature, that society's economy is threatened, not infrequently to the point where it collapses, bringing society down with it. This is a pattern repeated over and over, yet we have never learned the lesson of living within our means, or more correctly, within the means of our environment.

Past civilizations might have been able to plead ignorance for their failure. They didn't fully understand the relationship between their economy and the environment. We do, we are by far the best informed generation in history, and yet we are making the same mistake. In our case, it isn't ignorance, it's stupidity.

According to the Global Footprint Network, we are using the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and to absorb our waste. UN scenarios suggest that if current trends continue, by the 2030s we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us. Unfortunately, we only have one.

Representing the amount of productive land and sea area necessary to supply the resources a population consumes plus the waste it produces in global hectares (gha), the Earth's biocapacity is estimated at 1.8 gha per person. Our actual demand, however, our global footprint, is 2.6 gha per person. We are sucking the planet dry.

We frequently hear talk about balancing the economy and the environment, but this is an error. The environment has no need of our economy, indeed it would be vastly better off without it, but our economy is totally dependent on the environment. Our economy must, therefore, not balance the environment but fit comfortably within it with room to spare. Only then will we have a well-engineered economy and only then will our civilization be able to sustain itself.

U.S. conservatives going all progressive?

If Justice Minister Peter MacKay announcing that the Conservatives may soften marijuana laws came as a surprise, the change of heart among some conservatives in the U.S. is nothing less than a shock.

Addressing the 2014 Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference in Washington, CPAC's blogger of the year, Mary Katherine Ham, argued in favor of accepting marijuana legalization in states such as Colorado and Washington and wherever else it may be adopted. She argued that allowing people to make their own choices about their health was a core conservative value and might even reduce pot smoking by taking “the cool out of it.” Apparently, she got a good hearing from a highly receptive crowd.

And that ain't all. In a debate on security, when one panelist referred to Edward Snowden as a traitor, he was loudly booed. His adversary, arguing that it was conservatives’ duty to take the programs Snowden exposed as affronts to personal liberty, was much better received.

In a panel on criminal justice, Texas Governor Rick Perry, while not backing off on his state's use of capital punishment, defended reforms for nonviolent offenders that included “drug courts,” which give judges more latitude on sentencing and provide alternatives to incarceration. “You want to talk about real conservative governments?" he said, "Shut prisons down. That’s what can happen with these drug courts.” He was supported by fellow panelist Grover Norquist, the infamous anti-tax crusader, who suggested that conservatives could attack prison systems on the basis they are vast government bureaucracies.

Heady stuff, not at all what we expect from the Republican right, but maybe they are just tuning in to the real America. The country has sometimes been described as a land of liberals governed by conservatives. Perhaps that's changing, or maybe they are simply coming to terms with the fact that the best solutions to their nation's problems lie on the other side of the philosophical divide.

Perhaps Mr. MacKay's change of heart on marijuana is yet another example of the Harper Conservatives taking their cue from American Republicans. If they take these cues on security and prison reform as well, they will be making further progress.

Ukraine and American arrogance

The New York Times ran an intriguing headline earlier this week. It read "Debate Over Who, in U.S., is to Blame for Ukraine." Apparently American politicians are debating which among them is responsible for recent events in Ukraine, Republicans blaming Obama and Democrats blaming Bush.

The arrogance is extraordinary. The debate seems predicated on the notion that if something goes awry in the world, it's because the Americans in charge aren't managing things properly. Somebody must have slipped up. In other words, it's their job to run the world. It seems incomprehensible to the American political class that they should not be involved in everything that's happening everywhere.

Sadly, there's a certain truth to the notion. The U.S. is constantly interfering in the affairs of other nations, and apparently they have been interfering in the Ukraine. That they should leave the Ukrainians and the Russians alone to sort out their own quarrels just doesn't seem to cross the American mind, or at least the political minds.

Nonetheless, if they can help negotiate a truce between the various parties, that would be helpful indeed. Unfortunately their standing in Russia at the moment is at a very low ebb. They have created the distinct impression of being partial to the anti-Russian elements, and their credibility wasn't helped by John Kerry accusing Russia of 19th century behaviour for "invading another country on completely trumped up pretext" when a mere 10 years ago the U.S. did exactly that. And of course, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland's well-publicized comment "fuck the EU" won't help bring the Europeans on side. Running the world isn't easy.

Does the terrorist threat justify the snooping? Not according to the stats

British Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking about the need for mass surveillance of communications, talked about keeping concerns about civil liberties "in proportion." Perhaps what should be kept in proportion is his enthusiasm for mass snooping. Mr. Cameron and other national leaders justify their obsession about security and its attendant secrecy on the terrorist threat. But how much of a threat is terrorism?

In Mr. Cameron's Great Britain, since "the world changed" in 9/11 terrorists have killed less than 60 people. Every one of those deaths is a tragedy, of course, but on a national scale the number is trivial, about five deaths per year. This is roughly equal to the number of Brits who die annually from bee stings.

The numbers in the U.S. are hardly more disturbing. Since 2000, deaths from homeland terrorism average out at 235 per year, including of course the World Trade Center bombing. Again, for a nation of 314 million people, that is a minor threat. Twice that many Americans die every year from falling out of bed.

The only death in Canada from terrorism over the same period was the man killed by the anglophone Quebecer who attempted to assassinate Parti Québécois leader Pauline Maurois on election night.

Terror attacks present great drama and therefore attract enormous media attention, rather more than bee stings or falling out of bed even though they hold no greater threat to the average citizen. And politicians dread attacks because they make them look weak, which of course is often the point, and politicians fear little more than looking weak.

As a result, Britain, the U.S. and Canada have invested massively in and given unprecedented powers to security institutions including surveillance agencies such as Britain's GCHQ, the Americans' NSA and our very own CSEC. This year, CSEC's budget was increased from $444-million to $829-million, including part payment for its new headquarters. The lavish new building, estimated to ultimately cost $1.2-billion, has been aptly described as a spy palace.

Terrorism has been long with us and will no doubt be with us for much longer. Reasonable precautions are justified, but let's stop using a minor threat to justify major surveillance, to say nothing of extravagant expenditure.