Tory MPs defy government

No, the above headline most certainly does not refer to Canadian Tory MPs.

In the recent vote in the British House of Commons on Prime Minister David Cameron's motion to initiate military action against Syria, all attention was focused on the defeat of the motion. And rightly so—the vote was of considerable importance in world affairs—but what also caught my attention was that 30 Conservative MPs voted against their own government.

This despite the fact that the Prime Minister, according to The Guardian, "managed a strong performance" while opposition leader Ed Miliband "put in one of his less impressive performances." What a wonderful display of democracy: MPs voting their conscience rather than allowing themselves to be whipped into docile compliance.

Would such a thing ever happen in Canada? It bloody well ought to, on the issue of military intervention at least, but I doubt even war would draw the consciences of Canadian MPs out of their caucus solidarity. So I applaud those 30 British MPs and congratulate them on their gutsy decision. Well done, ladies and gentlemen.

Tar sands ain't funny, says Travel Alberta

Travel Alberta was begging for it. Its latest ads, featuring the many attractions of the province, are really quite nice. But then they end with the extraordinary phrase, "Remember to breathe." Remember to breathe. How could any satirist resist a phrase like that coming from tar sands Alberta, the country's pollution province.

And, of course, they couldn't. A couple of American filmmakers are working on a documentary entitled "Welcome to Fort McMoney" which will incorporate part of the “Remember to Breathe” ad campaign. How could it not? "What's happening in a certain area in Alberta is going to make it difficult for all of us to breathe in the near future,” said Andy Cobb, one of the film's producers. Indeed.

They recently posted a trailer for the documentary on YouTube, raising the ire of Travel Alberta. Lawyers were informed and YouTube agreed to pull the video. Banned in Boston, you say? This time it was banned on YouTube. The results were much the same, however. The publicity helped the filmmakers raise over $20,000, which they claim will allow them to travel to Fort McMurray to finish the documentary.

Travel Alberta CEO Bruce Okabe says they are only trying to protect their brand. Nonetheless, the comics are fighting back. “Being a satirist, we take certain liberties with material in order to make fun of it or to make fun of the people who produce it,” said Mr. Cobb, “That's one of our rights and gosh darnit, we love it.” He is of course defending a traditional and important exercise in freedom of speech.

Nonetheless, on one thing I agree with Travel Alberta: the tar sands aren't funny. Yet I can't wait for the documentary.

Raising taxes on credit unions is a retrograde step

Prior to 1972, Canadian credit unions were exempt from all income and capital taxes. In many countries, including the United States, they remain tax exempt at both the state and federal levels. The justification is their non-profit nature.

In 1972, credit unions were brought into the tax syatem, paying the small business rate. The federal small business rate is now 11 per cent compared to the general corporate rate of 15 per cent. The ceiling is $500,000, however credit unions receive a special exemption for amounts over this up to a certain limit. The federal government's spring budget intended to phase out this exemption, bringing credit unions under the general rate. (Actually, through an error it would have raised credit union rates much higher but it has promised to correct the error.)

Taxing credit unions like private corporations is a retrograde step on at least two grounds. First, credit unions are one-member/one-vote democracies unlike the plutocratic one-share/one-vote structure of private corporations. If we believe in democracy, we should encourage democratic institutions over plutocratic ones.

Second, in a world riven by competition, co-operation is to be enscouraged as a superior moral value over competition. How much nobler a national and international motto "we must co-operate in the global society" would be rather than the currently rampant "we must compete in the global marketplace."

Rather than raise taxes on credit unions, we ought to be returning to the pre-1972 regime of tax exemption. If the highly competitive Americans can recognize their special nature, so can we. I fear, however, our current federal government will not have much time for either the democratic argument or the co-operative one.

Inequality of Canadian justice bothers Bar

I recently read the Canadian Bar Association report Reaching Equal Justice (I ran out of mysteries) and was surprised at the strength of the language. A sampling of the phrases describing justice in Canada today includes, "abysmal state of access to justice" and "huge discrepancies between the promise of justice and the lived reality."

Some of the statistics presented don't flatter this country either. For example, "the World Justice Project found that on civil justice, Canada ranked ninth out of 16 North American and Western European nations and 13th among the world’s high-income countries, just ahead of Estonia," and "For civil legal aid, Canada ranks a shocking 54th in the world, well behind many countries with lower gross domestic products." We even fall behind the U.S., ranked at 50th.

The report claims that the simple answer is that justice in this country has been devalued: "We see justice as a luxury that we can no longer afford, not an integral part of our democracy." Furthermore, it's getting worse: the justice system is "aggregating" inequality rather than mitigating it.

Stating that legal aid is our most important program for equal access to justice, the report pointed out that it has economic as well as legal and moral value. It can "save public money by reducing domestic violence, helping children leave foster care more quickly, reducing evictions and alleviating homelessness, protecting patients health and helping low-income people participate in federal safety-net programs." Apparently, studies in Australia, the U.K and the U.S. have shown a social return on investment of six dollars for every dollar spent on legal aid.

The Bar Association suggests a range of measures to deal with the justice deficit, including improving the legal capabilities of people in school such that law becomes a life skill, promoting legal expense insurance, a national justice care system for lower income Canadians, requiring volunteer service by all lawyers, and teaching law students that "fostering access to justice is an integral part of their professional responsibility." The report sets out an impressive action plan, involving participation by justice professionals, governments and the public, complete with milestones and targets.

Supreme Court of Canada Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin shares the Association's concerns, lamenting that, "People just swallow their pain and their loss and live with it, I guess, in some unsatisfactory way feeling they can't get justice."

The Bar Association states "Our goal is an equal, inclusive justice system everyone can take part
in." A very worthy goal indeed, and one essential to a healthy democracy. Bravo for the Bar.

Will India defeat malnutrition?

India has a lot of a lot of things, including hungry people. It has the world's second largest population and the world's second highest percentage of malnourished children.

It also has the world's largest food distribution system. Unfortunately the system has been largely ineffective, riddled as it is with incompetence and corruption. Now the ruling Congress Party has passed the Food Security Bill, a massive $22-billion program that will entitle 67 per cent of Indians to highly subsidized food. The Bill has yet to pass India's upper house but that is not expected to be a problem.

"The big message which will go out to the country and rest of the world," stated Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi," is clear and concrete: that India is taking the responsibility of providing food security to all its citizens." Let us hope the Food Security Bill does just that.

As India's burgeoning economy brings it into the modern world, many in its multitude of poor are being left behind. This measure could help ensure that their boats, too, rise with the rising economic tide. Or at least that their children don't go hungry.

I'd rather have Justin Trudeau stoned than Stephen Harper sober

Justin Trudeau's admission that he had smoked the occasional joint had the Conservatives at their huffing and puffing best this week. His "actions speak for themselves" offered the Prime Minister while Justice Minister Peter MacKay accused Mr. Trudeau of setting "a poor example for all Canadians, particularly young ones" and went on to declare that "Justin Trudeau is simply not the kind of leader our country needs."

That last comment of Mr. MacKay's particularly caught my eye. I couldn't help thinking of Canada's greatest conservative of all, sometimes referred to as the father of our country—John A. Macdonald. Canada's first prime minister did not, to my knowledge, smoke marijuana but he was a serious boozer. While true that smoking pot is illegal (although trivially so) and drinking wasn't, Trudeau's occasional joint hardly compares to Macdonald's binge drinking.

But old John A might be excused—he had his personal problems and, in any case, he did his country great service. As to his drinking, he famously said, "The people would rather have John A. drunk than Brown sober," referring to his Liberal rival George Brown. I'm sure Mr. MacKay would never suggest that he was simply not the kind of leader our country needed. Or would he?

The U.S. war against democracy in the Middle East

The CIA's recent public admission that it masterminded the 1953 military coup against Iran's democratically elected government reminded me once again of the fickle U.S. support for democracy in the Middle East. American involvement was well-known—books have been written about it—but the publishing of previously classified documents by the U.S. National Security Archive amounts to a public confession. The Americans and the British, desirous of maintaining a source of cheap oil, conspired with the Iranian military to depose Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and install the dictator  Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Choosing between democracy and oil, Britain and the U.S. chose the latter.

In a more recent free and fair election, the Palestinians voted in Hamas over the incumbent Fatah. But Hamas refused to recognize Israel and stated that it wouldn't honour past agreements between Israel and the Palestinian government. Israel, the U.S. and the EU subsequently cut off aid to Gaza, and the U.S. and Israel attempted to undermine Hamas. This time, the U.S. (supported, to our shame, by Canada) chose to support Israel's perceived interest even if it meant sabotaging Palestinian democracy.

And now we have Egypt and the brutal crushing of democracy by the army. The United States has cancelled joint military exercises and delayed the delivery of fighter jets, but may still provide most of its annual $1.3-billion in military aid for 2014. Having been amenable to U.S. policy objectives in the region, The Egyptian military, the source of dictators for generations, has long been a major beneficiary of American arms largesse. As have various tyrannical regimes such as Saudi Arabia.

Despite whack-a-moling democracy when it pops up in the Middle East, the United States persists in claiming it supports freedom and democracy in the region. Perhaps it does, but obviously not if it doesn't benefit American interests. As for American principles, well, apparently they too are servants of realpolitik.

Is flood amnesia setting in?

Immediately after the big water in June, two truisms were out and about in Calgary. One stated the flood had been so catastrophic that finally Albertans would take significant measures to mitigate damage from future floods. The other said that it wouldn't be long before the disaster was put out of mind and things would return to the complacent normal.

Reading recently about the province backing off on one significant measure, I wonder if the second truism won't turn out to be truer than the first.

Call for flood volunteers brought an overwhelming response

The province had stated that all titles for properties in flood-risk zones would henceforth be required to carry warnings. While recognizing this as a very good idea, I must admit that, as owner of a property in a flood-risk zone myself, I selfishly worried about what this would do to my property value. As it turns out, I have no need to worry—the province has dropped the idea.

Rather than put warnings on land titles for properties in flood-risk zones, the government will instead, according to CBC News, "work with the real estate industry to ensure prospective homeowners get the information they need before buying property at risk of flooding." When a government says it will "work with industry" rather than set regulations, scepticism is in order.

Or maybe the warning on the land title is just a bad idea after all. Or so my selfish self might like to believe. It will be interesting to see if that's all there was to this change of mind or if it's a first step to flood amnesia, and nothing much changes.

Undoing democracy democratically

As the Egyptian military brutally dismantles democracy in their country, other losses of democracy tend to pale in comparison. Yet when they involve people electing to disband their own democracy, they are nonetheless disheartening. At least to a democrat such as myself. Thus I felt no little disappointment when I read in the news of workers at Canada's only unionized Walmart, in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, voting to decertify their union.

Weyburn union-buster

The union—United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 1400—was certified as the bargaining agent for the employees in 2008, but fierce resistance from Walmart (at one point it was found guilty of unfair labour practices) precluded reaching a collective agreement. With new labour laws in place in the province, a decertification drive was launched at the store and a vote held. The union sought to block the counting of the ballots, claiming the process was unfair, however the courts ruled against them. They have now been counted and the vote went overwhelmingly for decertification.

Other than worker co-ops, unions represent the only democracy in Canadian workplaces. Why, one wonders, would workers reject democracy? Is a giant corporation such as Walmart just too formidable? Do unions demand too much effort? Were these particular workers philosophically opposed to unions? Did they trust management more than their colleagues? Or did they just not give a damn? One clue may be that out of the 69 who voted in December 2010, only about 10 remain employed at the store.

In any case, perhaps we should not be surprised by the vote. Canadians are not, after all, terribly interested in democracy. Barely 60 per cent bothered to vote in the last federal election. In civic elections, it's often barely 30 per cent. And we persist in using probably the world's most undemocratic voting system at both the provincial and federal levels. So indifference to democracy in a Canadian workplace isn't unexpected.

The United Food and Commercial Workers aren't indifferent however. They have vowed to continue the organizing efforts at Walmart. I wish them, and workplace democracy, all possible luck.

A mustache to die for

The things that worry religious fundamentalists never fail to amaze and amuse me. For example, Muslim fundamentalists have threatened to kill Malik Afridi because of his mustache. Admittedly, Mr. Afridi's version of the handlebar is rather extravagant, but considering that the fundamentalists are big on facial hair themselves, you might think they would be more tolerant.

Malik Afridi and friends

On one occasion, Lashkar-e-Islam, an ally of the Taliban, declared his impressive display to be "un-Islamic" and demanded protection money. When he refused to pay, they kidnapped him and held him hostage until he shaved off the hairy outrage. But he has regrown it and is now being subjected to death threats, forcing him to leave his wife and ten children and take to life on the road.

His family wants him home but, ever faithful to his mustachios, he declares, "I can leave my family, I can leave Pakistan, but I can never cut my mustache again." Placing your facial adornment above family and country is a curious sense of values indeed, but killing a man because you don't like his mustache is just downright weird. But then religion has no shortage of weird.

I have met the enemy and they ain't all capitalists

I am no fan of capitalism. An economic system based on greed and founded in patriarchal values is flawed at its roots. But the tendency of so many on the left to blame all our problems on capitalists is simplistic, unfair and false. It is scapegoating. Despite the system, like most other classes of people, there are good capitalists and bad capitalists.

Tom Steyer

I was reminded of this recently when reading about American billionaire Tom Steyer's challenge to TransCanada CEO Russ Girling to publicly debate the Keystone XL pipeline. Although capitalists are frequently blamed for our environmental woes, Steyer, employee of both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs in his early years and founder of Farallon Capital Management, is an ardent environmentalist who has put his money where his mouth is. He and his wife gave $40-million to create the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford University. According to Wikipedia, "The center focuses on the development of affordable renewable energy technologies and promotion of public policies that make renewable energy more accessible."

This is only one of Steyer's philanthropic ventures and he is one of 40 billionaires, including Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, who in 2010 pledged to give away at least half their fortunes to worthwhile causes.

When it comes to the environment, to say nothing of most of our other prolems, I am inclined to accept Pogo's famous dictum, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Pogo was not, I think, referring to possums—the anthropomorphized little cartoon character was referring to we human beings. We are all, or at least the great majority of us, responsible for the despoiling of our planet. Not only capitalists drive their cars too much, buy homes bigger than they need or buy too much stuff—most of us do, capitalists, communists, conservatives, liberals and socialists alike. Capitalists have far too much power, but that's largely the fault of our democratic laziness, not their fault for taking what we allow them to have. We may not have voted for the corporate-friendly Harper government, but we supinely accept the corrupt electoral system that put it in power.

Scapegoating the capitalist class may allow us to absolve our favourite classes, the middle and the poor, of responsibility and help us evade our own guilt, but it won't help us deal with the environmental challenge because it doesn't face the truth. Pogo did, and ultimately so must all of us.

REAL Women's real bigotry

John Baird - doing the right thing

 

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has done a commendable job of defending gay rights everywhere from Uganda to Russia. Not everyone agrees, however, with his initiatives. REAL Women of Canada, a group that describes itself as a "pro-family conservative women's movement," has roundly criticized Mr. Baird for his attention to gays' human rights.  Referring to him as a "left-wing elitist," thus bending the term "left-wing" into an entirely new shape, they accuse him of attempting to impose his personal values on other sovereign states. (One assumes these venerable ladies would be above transporting their ideas about family values, or Christian values generally, to foreign lands.)

When it comes to homosexuality, most Christians are content with St. Augustine's dictum. "Love the sinner, hate the sin," a problematic but morally rational approach. REAL Women's attack on Mr Baird for opposing legislation such as Uganda's, which imposes 14-year sentences for homosexual behaviour, strongly suggest they hate both sin and sinner, and this is inclined less to morality than it is to simple bigotry.

REAL Women claim the Minister's actions are destructive to the conservative base in Canada, and they may be right. If they are, then Mr. Baird deserves even greater credit for his principled stand. I applaud his efforts and encourage him to keep up the good work.

Stephen Harper's private army

It is known as the Canadian Special Forces Command, or CANSOFCOM. It commands a secret army, comprised of four units: the Joint Task Force-2 (JTF2), the Canadian Special Operations Regiment (CSOR), the Canadian Joint Incident Response Unit—Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CJIRU-CBRN), and the 427 Special Operations Aviation Squadron (427 SOAS) which provides support to the other three. This little army is Canadian but it doesn't answer to Parliament, i.e. to the people of Canada. It answers only to the Minister of Defence and the Prime Minister. It is, in effect, their army, to be deployed at their pleasure. Or so I read, with no little surprise, in the July/August issue of the CCPA Monitor.

Not only does this force do its nasty business in secret, its budget is secret. We don't even know what it's costing us to put a private military force at the Prime Minister's disposal.

I was aware that we had a special forces unit, the JTF2, but I didn't know that the Conservatives had added three new ones. Frankly, I don't like secrecy in government and don't trust governments when they practice it. If we must have government agencies that operate in the dark, they should at least be subject to Parliamentary oversight.

I would hate to think that our Prime Minister would use this secret army for something like, say, furthering the interests of Canadian companies operating in the Third World. But perhaps that is naive. PM Harper's pet policy is the promotion of resource extraction, including the operations of Canadian mining companies abroad. Not infrequently, these operations meet with opposition from local people, occasionally violent opposition. Is it possible that Mr. Harper might use his special forces to quell that opposition? Not directly, of course, no Canadians shooting at the locals, but rather Canadians training an indigenous special forces to do the dirty work for us, a much cheaper and politically cleaner way to do it.

This would be the suspicion of a cynic if it wasn't for the fact that secret forces—the CIA being an excellent example—often get into devilry the citizenry would not approve but which that citizenry may ultimately have to stand accountable for. In any case, when governments act in secret, citizens are entitled to think rthe worst.

Our spymaster, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), has a parliamentary committee to oversee its behaviour even though, unlike the Special Forces, it doesn't have a licence to kill. If we must have a secret army, it damned well ought to be accountable to Parliament and under its scrutiny. It may have legitimate reasons to act in secrecy but it ought to be accountable to us nonetheless. The need for accountability from a killing agency is obviously much greater than from a spy agency. It is also more important that the public be fully aware we have such an outfit. After all we, the public, will be ultimately held to account for its actions. The government must justify the existence of this agency, if it can, and put it on a parliamentary leash.

The need for a global no-growth agreement

Trade agreements are all the rage among nations these days. And that might not be a bad thing if they were principally about trade rather than about empowering corporations at the expense of workers and governments.

In any case, what the world really needs is not global trade agreements but a global no-growth agreement. Sensibly, we cannot continue to use up ever more resources when the planet contains only a finite amount. We can substitute new resources for old ones, or use resources more efficiently, but the trend since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution has been a relentless march of ever increasing demands on the Earth.

Another form of unrestrained growth

And then there is the other side of resource depletion: pollution. Using resources creates waste, and just as we are using up the Earth's resources faster than it can replenish them, we are creating waste faster than it can absorb it. We are, for instance, creating so much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses we are causing the very planet to warm up. Climate scientists warn us that we have only a very few decades to halt this nonsense or the warming will be irreversible, and it is doubtful global civilization can survive global warming if it runs out of control. We must, therefore, come to terms globally about how to end growth.

Ending it will, as they say, require a new economic paradigm. We are, under our current economic regime, caught in a growth trap. For the last 250 years or so, advancing technology has made production ever more efficient, allowing for more production with less labour.  But less labour means fewer people working and the unemployed cannot buy much. Increase unemployment and the economy slows, tipping into recession or even depression. This is to be avoided at all costs. The inevitable answer is to produce more products, or create new ones, thereby creating jobs. In short, the answer is growth. To end growth, we must escape this trap. We must stop consuming ever larger amounts of stuff.

Various possibilities present themselves. For example, we could work less, accepting lower incomes--buying less stuff, but compensating ourselves with more time for family, community and pleasure.

In his book Alternatives to Growth: Efficiency Shifting, Conrad Schmidt offers the intriguing idea of reducing overall labour efficiency by creating jobs that are more labour-intensive. For example, if teachers average 30 students to a class, reduce class size to 25 or 20, or whatever the optimum teaching size is, and hire more teachers.

We might also make work more interesting at the expense of making it less efficient. When Henry Ford increased efficiency in his factories by setting up assembly lines where each worker installed one part over and over and over again, replacing groups of mechanics that made a whole car, he turned skilled workers into robots. More efficient it certainly was, but much less humane. It is time to put job satisfaction over job efficiency. Ending quantity growth, i.e. GDP growth, does not mean ending quality growth.

In the West, we have long passed the point where we create enough wealth to allow every person a comfortable living. We have to allow the undeveloped world some catch-up, but we are now well-positioned to tame growth.

There are solutions out there. What is not out there is serious political discussion of the issue. Meanwhile we race on toward the plundering of our Earth, sucking it dry of resources and defiling it with our waste. The clock is ticking on global civilization.

400 ppm

Of all the events that occurred during my blogging hiatus, the one that struck me as the most significant, even including the massive flooding of my hometown, was the Earth experiencing for the first time in millions of years an atmosphere containing 400 ppm carbon dioxide, as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii on May 10th.

As important as the Calgary flood was, it was a local event. Reaching an atmospheric CO2 of 400 ppm was a global event, important to every member of our species and to many other species as well.

It is an arbitrary number of course, 400 ppm is hardly worse than 399 ppm, but round figures catch the eye. This round figure tells us we are going in the wrong direction and fast, from 315 ppm to 400 in little over half a century. We are on the fast track to hit 450 ppm, the UN's official red line, by mid-century.

To quote leading climate scientist James Hansen, "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted … carbon dioxide will need to be reduced … to at most 350 ppm." Climate scientists such as Hansen are the people who know what they are talking about on the issue of global warming, the ones we ought to be paying attention to. So, yes, 400 ppm, as arbitrary as it is, demands our attention. It speaks to the survival of civilization as we know it, and indeed to life on Earth itself. Significant indeed.

I participate in an historic event

For my first posting in seven months, I can hardly do better than comment on my participation in a truly historic event. I not only observed but became a fully-fledged, if highly reluctant, participant. The event I refer to is the greatest flood in Alberta's history, perhaps in Canada's history, the great flood of 2013.

I live in an apartment building beside the Elbow River, a normally gentle, sparkling stream fresh  from the mountains that once a year transforms into a roiling brown monster. This year it broke 80 years of relatively benign behaviour and went rogue, 80 years that lulled those who live along its banks, enjoying its many delights, into a complacency now deeply buried. Joined by its big brother, the Bow, it went on a rampage that drew international attention. Between them, they caused the evacuation of 75,000 Calgarians, eight per cent of the city's population.

It stormed through our building, turning everything on the ground floor, including three apartments and the furnace and utility rooms, into garbage. Fortunately my apartment is on the fourth floor and so escaped the ruination. Nonetheless, as I form these words I have been homeless for four weeks, displaced until the building is appropriately repaired and declared safe.

As the Elbow, still my favourite river despite its misbehaviour, puts its ill-tempered outburst behind it and returns to its gentle summer self, Albertans struggle to learn the lessons the flood has taught us. We must first recognize that rivers flood and the Elbow and Bow have flooded worse in the past. We have not taken them seriously enough, providing insufficient safeguards and allowing excessive building with inadequate codes to proliferate in the flood plains. This must be dealt with if damage from future floods, and there will be many, is to be significantly mitigated.

We might also keep in mind our reckless attitude toward our environment. We are Canada's pollution province, pumping more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than any other. We are the major contributor to global warming and thus to the increase in extreme weather events. It is quite possible that our mischief contributed to the flood. The price of disrespecting nature may be the most important lesson we can learn.

World losing confidence in Obama

Most of the world breathed easier when Barack Obama was re-elected, but it would seem more a sigh of relief than enthusiasm for the man everyone fell in love with four years ago. Confidence in the president on a variety of issues has declined precipitously since 2009.

For example, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey of 20 countries from across the world, "in 2009, large majorities in France, Germany, Britain and Spain believed Obama would take significant measures to control climate change," however by 2012, "fewer than three-in-ten in these countries said Obama had, in fact, done this."

Western Europeans also feel he has "failed to meet expectations on his handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." The decline in confidence was not quite as sharp as with climate change, however the U.S. "no" vote in the UN on Palestinian statehood will almost certainly add to the disillusionment. In Muslim countries only a minority expected fairness to begin with and that expectation has now dropped to new lows.

Yet another issue of concern is Obama's use of drone attacks. The most supportive nation is Great Britain where 44 per cent support the strikes but even there 47 per cent disapprove. After Britain disapproval increases from 59 per cent in Germany to 89 per cent in Egypt.

What all this means is hard to say. It may be just another sign of declining American influence in the world. It seems that on keys issues, the world is now going to have to lead the former leader.

Starbucks sticks it to the Brits

I always look forward to reading yet another story about how multinational corporations slither out of their tax responsibilities and was, therefore, duly amused by a piece I encountered in Al Jazeera about the world's favourite coffee shop. It appears Starbucks, while selling £643-million worth of goods in the U.K. last year, paid not a cent in corporate taxes.

This was nothing new for the coffee giant. Despite handling a third of Britain's coffee shop trade, and boasting to investors the U.K. was among the best performing of its overseas markets, Starbucks has reported 13 years of losses to the taxman. Apparently it pulls this off by such sleight of hand as transferring funds to a sister company in the Netherlands as royalty payments and paying high interest rates on money borrowed from other parts of the corporation.

Her Majesty's tax collectors are not amused. The U.K. finance ministry announced it will provide £76-million of new money to track down wealthy individuals and companies who try to avoid paying tax. (Starbucks is by no means alone.) How much good this will do is moot. According to U.S. attorney David Spencer, consultant to Tax Justice Network, "There is more and more evidence of the fact that multinationals are shifting substantial income from high tax to low tax jurisdictions. This is because the OECD's [rules] are very complex and very difficult to enforce."

Public reaction may be more effective. Outraged Brits are calling for a boycott of Starbucks and protests at its shops. A spokesperson for the company stated, "We have listened to feedback from our customers and employees, and understand that to maintain and further build public trust we need to do more." Indeed—many millions of pounds more.

The free trade bust

Judging by the editorial hype in the corporate press and among Conservative politicians, the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was the greatest boon to this country since the fur trade. When the agreement celebrated its 25th anniversary in October, International Trade Minister Ed Fast claimed opponents of such agreements are "denying Canadians an opportunity to benefit from economic growth and long-term prosperity.”

A recent article in the CCPA Monitor by economist Jim Stanford begs to disagree. Accusing the boosters of being long on self-congratulation and short on facts, Stanford took a different approach and adduced a few pertinent facts re before and after:

• Our exports to the U.S. today account for the same share of our GDP (19 per cent) as before the agreement was signed.
• Our exports to the U.S. are now mostly unprocessed or minimally processed natural resources whereas in the mid-1980s they were mostly relatively sophisticated manufactured goods.
• Our share of U.S. imports has declined from 19 per cent to 14 per cent.
• Our productivity has declined as a per cent of U.S. rates.
• Our inflation-adjusted family income levels are the same as in 1980.

In summary, the agreement did not boost our GDP, did not increase our share of U.S. imports or the quality of goods exported, did not improve our competitiveness, and did not increase our incomes. By Stanford's reckoning, the agreement was more bust than boon. Something to keep in mind as our government rushes madly about the globe eager to sign a free trade agreement with anyone who has a pen.

Canada's shameful vote against Palestinian statehood

Yesterday marked a shameful moment in the history of this country's foreign policy. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas asked the UN General Assembly to recognize Palestine as an observer state ... and Canada voted no.

Our vote puts the lie to our claim that we believe in a two-state solution, or at least that we believe in a just two-state solution. If we do, how can we possibly object to the Palestinians making a significant step in that direction by a peaceful process supported by a solid majority of the world's nations?

I suspect the answer to that question is that this approach undermines the power of Israel to completely dominate the process and thus the resolution of the issue. Given the situation on the ground, it has all the leverage, the Palestinians virtually none. It has the most powerful military in the region, equipped with nuclear weapons and backed unconditionally by the most powerful nation in the world; and it controls all of the territory in question in one way or another and steals more of it every day while further segregating the Palestinians.

Coercing the Palestinians into negotiations by rejecting any other approach means condemning them into accepting whatever crumbs the Israelis condescend to offer. And this may be exactly what Israel and the United States, and apparently Canada, have in mind.

Ultimately, negotiations will of course be necessary. However, currently they are going nowhere, and if the Palestinians can gain more leverage by other means, this can only lead to fairer negotiations in the long run. They will, furthermore, receive a fairer hearing in the UN where Third World countries, who have a view of colonization from the perspective of native peoples, will have more sympathy, even empathy, for the Palestinians than they can expect from the West, still burdened by imperial thinking.

The Jews have their state. It is churlish of us to deny the Palestinians any legal, peaceful means to achieving theirs. Our vote yesterday indicated rather than a just settlement between two equal states, we seek a Palestine defined by and solely in the interests of Israel. This is a policy as dangerous as it is hypocritical.

Wildrose has this one right

To say I rarely agree with the Wildrose Party would be an understatement. Yet they have recently stated a policy which I heartily support and have heartily supported for a long time. Party leader Danielle Smith reported this week that her party wants Alberta's election financing laws to ban donations to political parties from unions and corporations. The party joins the Alberta Liberals and NDP who have long supported a ban.

The measure would have cost Wildrose $870,000 in the last provincial election, 28 per cent of their total fundraising. However, this is a lower percentage than would have been lost by the other three parties. The Conservatives, for example, who are heavily dependent on corporate largesse, would have lost 78 per cent.

Prohibiting political contributions from corporations should be automatic— democracy is for citizens, not organizations—yet in this country only Manitoba, Quebec, Nova Scotia, the City of Toronto and the federal government do so.

And it won't happen in Alberta soon. For obvious reasons, the Conservative government opposes the idea. House Leader Dave Hancock insists that campaign contributions don't come with expectations of favours. The Conservatives also intend to keep the individual contribution limit at the remarkably generous level of $30,000. Wildrose advocates reducing it to $10,000, still much too high but at least in the right direction. The federal limit is $1,000.

The fact that Wildrose, judging by the 2012 election figures, would benefit most from the ban on corporate and union contributions suggests their position isn't entirely altruistic. Nonetheless, they have done the right thing, and for that I salute them.

Canadian democracy—always good for a laugh

Headline: Conservative Joan Crockatt wins Calgary Centre by-election with 37 per cent of the vote.

So ... I will now have an MP most of my fellow constituents don't want in a government that most Canadians don't want.

Ah, Canadian democracy, you've got to love it.

Here's a headline I'd rather not see

Checking The Guardian on my morning round of news websites, I encountered the following headline: "Canada, the surprise "pariah" of the Kyoto protocol." The subhead went on to add, "Some Canadians doubt whether their country should have any say in negotiating the second Kyoto protocol after it became the only nation to reject the first one."

One of those doubters, Green party leader Elizabeth May, is quoted as saying, "I can't imagine how anybody would want us in the room." Ms. May suggested that might be because we were negotiating to weaken the second Kyoto, have already signaled we will not take on new targets in the second period, and have legally withdrawn from the protocol.

She is of course quite right. We are an environmental slacker of the first order. As the article points out, we are not just the only country to have repudiated Kyoto, the sole legally binding international policy tool to deal with carbon emissions, we rank immediately behind the U.S. and Australia as the worst global emitters per capita.

After years of seeing Canada portrayed as a constructive participant in international affairs, it's a bit of a shock to see us headlined as a pariah. I guess I will just have to get used to it.

Sun suckers the rest of the media ... again

As the NDP rapidly and somewhat surprisingly closed in on the Conservatives during the last federal election campaign, Sun Media dug deep into Jack Layton's past to find something to smear him with and then flaunted it just days before the election. The rest of the media instinctively jumped on the bone and escalated the story to great heights.

Now as the Liberals, again somewhat surprisingly, close in on the Conservatives in the Calgary Centre by-election, Sun Media digs up an item from the past to smear Justin Trudeau. And again the rest of the media obediently follows the Sun lead.

This lack of savvy, of sophistication, on the part of the Canadian media, including the CBC, is disappointing if not pathetic.

The irony, of course, is that what Trudeau said was true. The gist of his message was that the problem with Canada is that it is being run from Alberta and Albertans don't represent Canadian values. Well ... they don't, do they? Albertans vote overwhelmingly Conservative (there is only one non-Conservative MP) and in the last federal election 60 per cent of Canadian voters made it abundantly clear that the Conservatives do not represent Canadian values. At least not if values are defined by a solid majority. Trudeau is being pilloried for stating the truth, and that doesn't do the media much credit either. Sun Media types must be grinning like Cheshire cats.

Sun has become to the Conservatives what Fox News is to the Republicans. Perhaps the rest of the media ought to be investigating that relationship rather than allowing themselves to be manipulated by a propaganda machine.

Time to disestablish the Church of England

The Anglican Church, as the nation's officially "established" church, has had a privileged position in England since the Act of Supremacy in 1534. It isn't called the Church of England for nothing. For example, the 26 most senior bishops of the Church have by right a seat in the House of Lords. The head of state must be a member of the Church and may not marry a Catholic (although presumably he or she might marry a Muslim, Hindu or Jew). Monarchs are required to swear that they will "maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion [the Anglican Church] as established by law."

The connection to the state is strong. Archbishops, bishops and deans of cathedrals are appointed by the monarch on the advice of the prime minister. Measures proposed by the Church affecting its governance or worship must be approved by the British Parliament. Church assets are managed by 33 Commissioners, including the British prime minister, who are responsible to Parliament.

As a result of its favoured status, it has prospered mightily. In 2007, its land, property and stock market assets were valued at $9-billion, generating $285-million in annual revenue. Its investment fund originated in money accrued by Henry VIII and given to the Church in 1704 by Queen Anne.

Despite its status as the established church of the nation and its great wealth, it is losing its credibility among the British people. Although it has nominally 24 million members, only 1.1 regularly attend weekly services. Attendance declines as the average age of churchgoers increases.

This week the Church fell further in the esteem of modern Britons when its house of laity voted against the ordination of women bishops. (The house of bishops, to its credit, voted massively in favour.) Politicians from all parties expressed their displeasure and Prime Minister David Cameron lamented, "The church needs to get on with it and get with the program."

The Church may simply have been taking instruction from St Paul: "But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence," (1 Timothy 2:12). However this bit of misogyny no longer has credibility even with Christian women, and the Church's failure to "get with the program" should have consequences. It is an appropriate time to take the long overdue step of ending the Church's special relationship and attendant privileges with the British state. It is time to disestablish the Church of England.

Why can't we be more like Norway?

Canada and Norway are a lot alike. We are both prosperous, free-market democracies. But as Bruce Campbell points out in his series of articles in the CCPA Monitor, there are also some significant differences.

For example, the way it manages its oil resources which, as an Albertan, I cannot but envy. Even though Canada produces more oil, Norway has accumulated a sovereign wealth fund of $656-billion compared to the Alberta's Heritage Fund's measly $16-billion.

While Norway is a major oil exporter, it also manages to be an environmental leader, ranking third on Yale University's Environmental Performance Index which considers a range of issues, including water and air pollution, biodiversity and climate change. We rank 37th.

Norway also does better than us on the UN Human Development Index, a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and income. Norway ranks first, Canada sixth, although when adjusted for inequality, Norway is still first but we drop to 12th.

We do well on the Economist's Democracy Index, ranking eighth. The index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture. Norway, once again, is number one. Frankly, given our archaic electoral system, I think we are lucky to rank eighth.

In summary, Norway does a better job than Canada managing its good fortune, sharing the wealth among its people, taking care of Mother Earth, and running its affairs equitably and democratically. I believe we could learn a lesson or two here.

Federal environment minister joins the real world

When I worked in the oil industry many years ago, we used to refer to those politicians, academics, media people, etc. who didn't fully appreciate our interests as not living in the real world. The real world was of course our world, the world of industry. Ironically, now many people in the oil industry and their political acolytes are not living in the real world.

The real "real world" is of course the world as described by science. And science is telling us this world is being warmed up by human activity and if we don't stop doing it rather quickly, we will reach the point where the warming will be out of our control. And if that should happen, civilization as we know it is likely to succumb to catastrophe and collapse.

you don’t have to convince me that climate change is a very real and present danger and I think that we need to address it. We need to address it by bringing the rest of the world on board to do something about it.

Read more: http://www.canada.com/Hurricane+Sandy+another+sign+danger+global+warming+Peter+Kent+says/7572645/story.html#ixzz2CnLdnlIU

Much of the oil industry and its boosters in the federal cabinet have been averse to this reality. Now, to my relief, federal Environment Minister Peter Kent has decided to at least recognize it. Discussing the devastation of Hurricane Sandy recently, he observed, "You don't have to convince me that climate change is a very real and present danger and we need to address it." I had to read that quote a dozen times and check other sources before I believed it, but he does indeed seem to have made precisely that statement.

He went on to say, and I hope he wasn't switching to comic mode, that we would have to address it by, "bringing the rest of the world on board to do something about it." A bit rich for a government that has created an international reputation for this country as an environmental slacker, but encouraging at least in entertaining the possibility of leadership.

We need to address it by bringing the rest of the world on board to do something about it.”

Read more: http://www.canada.com/Hurricane+Sandy+another+sign+danger+global+warming+Peter+Kent+says/7572645/story.html#ixzz2CnNFHsU6

So will the Conservatives abandon their commitment to eternal growth and boundless production of dirty oil? Highly unlikely I think. They may have recognized the real world, however I doubt they are yet ready to live in it. But I won't quibble—recognition alone is progress. Let us be optimistic as we welcome Mr. Kent to the 21st century.

Read more: http://www.canada.com/Hurricane+Sandy+another+sign+danger+global+warming+Peter+Kent+says/7572645/story.html#ixzz2CnLdnlIU

you don’t have to convince me that climate change is a very real and present danger and I think that we need to address it. We need to address it by bringing the rest of the world on board to do something about it.

Read more: http://www.canada.com/Hurricane+Sandy+another+sign+danger+global+warming+Peter+Kent+says/7572645/story.html#ixzz2CnLdnlIU

Read more: http://www.canada.com/Hurricane+Sandy+another+sign+danger+global+warming+Peter+Kent+says/7572645/story.html#ixzz2CnLdnlIU

you don’t have to convince me that climate change is a very real and present danger and I think that we need to address it. We need to address it by bringing the rest of the world on board to do something about it.

Read more: http://www.canada.com/Hurricane+Sandy+another+sign+danger+global+warming+Peter+Kent+says/7572645/story.html#ixzz2CnLdnlIU

Read more: http://www.canada.com/Hurricane+Sandy+another+sign+danger+global+warming+Peter+Kent+says/7572645/story.html#ixzz2CnLdnlIU

Read more: http://www.canada.com/Hurricane+Sandy+another+sign+danger+global+warming+Peter+Kent+says/7572645/story.html#ixzz2CnLdnlIU

you don’t have to convince me that climate change is a very real and present danger and I think that we need to address it. We need to address it by bringing the rest of the world on board to do something about it.

Read more: http://www.canada.com/Hurricane+Sandy+another+sign+danger+global+warming+Peter+Kent+says/7572645/story.html#ixzz2CnLdnlIU

The corporate counterrevolution rolls on

In the 1960s, a phrase was being bandied about that included the two words that most terrify corporate executives: consume less. A substantial number of people, particularly young people, were coming to the conclusion that the road to nirvana may not necessarily lie through endlessly consuming more stuff. Indeed, consuming ever more stuff might just be fouling our nest—despoiling the very environment we depend upon for our sustenance. A cultural revolution was taking place.

Corporations and wealthy individuals decided that this consume less nonsense had to be stopped. In the 1970s, they swung into action. They began a process of pooling funds and investing them in think tanks, media outlets and lobby organizations to promote their agenda. The 1970s saw the birth of such conservative organizations as the Business Roundtable and The Heritage Foundation in the United States and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (formerly the Business Council on National Issues) and the Fraser Institute in Canada. The number of registered lobbyists in Washington rose from 175 in 1971 to 2,500 in 1982 to almost 35,000 today.

In order to restore the dominance of the consumer society and relentless growth, corporations have worked to undermine the role of government, reduce the power of organized labour, and deregulate markets. They are doing very well in achieving their goals.

Trade agreements alone have done much to enhance their power over governments and weaken the bargaining power of workers. The agreements restrict government’s ability to regulate corporate behaviour while freeing corporations to leverage workers in developed nations against cheap, non-union labour in developing nations. Union membership in North America has fallen precipitously, to 31 per cent in Canada and 11 per cent in the U.S. Capital is winning the war with Labour.

The mass media have become increasingly the instrument of oligarchs. Rupert Murdoch dominates  the press in Britain and has created an entire TV network in the U.S. dedicated to right-wing propaganda. In Australia, he owns eight of the 12 major daily papers and mining interests are buying control of three of the remaining four.

Corporations have done well, too, in deregulating markets. Deregulation in the U.S. brought catastrophe to the financial markets, but the bankers continue to roll in money, and regulation they face as a result will be much weaker than what was in effect before Bill Clinton trashed the Glass–Steagall Act. Considering that Barack Obama depends heavily on election funding from the financial industry, we should not be surprised.

American corporations have even captured the U.S. Supreme Court. Its Citizens United decision, a case sponsored in part by the infamous Koch brothers, freed up corporations to buy elections as never before. Corporations even fund their own grass roots movements as we saw with the same Koch brothers and the Tea Party Movement.

 Sometimes the blatant bowing of politicians to corporate power is cringe-inducing: Tony Blair, as one of his first acts when he became leader of his party, traveling to the other side of the world to genuflect before Rupert Murdoch; Barak Obama placating the insurance and pharmaceutical industries in order to get his health care bill passed.

According to Pulitzer Prize-winning Steve Coll in his book Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, since 1998, when Exxon merged with Mobil to create the world’s largest company, it has netted a cash flow of $493-billion and maintains an AAA credit rating. During the same period the United States government has seen a net cash flow of minus $5,700-billion and its credit rating has dropped to AA+. Governments struggle while the corporate counterrevolution rolls on.

New leaders face challenge as U.S. and China mistrust grows

With Xi Jinping assuming leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, China and the United States have both now chosen their leaders for the near future. They both face considerable challenges, not the least of which is the growing mistrust between the people of the two superpowers.

According to a Pew survey, although two-thirds of Americans think relations between their country and China are good, a similar number believe China can't be trusted. Furthermore, while a year ago more Americans thought the U.S. should build stronger relations with China rather than "get tough," that has now reversed.

Chinese attitudes toward the U.S. are also hardening. In the last two years, the number of Chinese who view the U.S. favourably has dropped from a majority (58 per cent) to a minority (43 per cent), while those who have confidence in President Obama's international policies has dropped by similar numbers.

Despite the mistrust, the Chinese appreciate the American way of doing business, greatly admire U.S. science and technology and approve of American ideas about democracy. Clearly, there is a solid basis for improving the relations between the two nations. Let us hope their newly confirmed leaders take advantage. Harmony between the two would be good for them, and good for the rest of us.

Climate predictions are getting better ... and hotter

Arguably, the biggest winner on election night in the U.S. wasn't Barack Obama, but the nerdy Nate Silver. Silver is of course the statistician who fed reams of polling data into his laptop and correctly predicted how every state voted, including the tie in Florida that eventually flipped to Obama.

But as remarkable as Silver's predictions were, he insisted it was nothing compared to what meteorologists did with Sandy, the monster storm that devastated New York and New Jersey. When the National Weather Service's computer model alerted meteorologists to a suspicious bunch of clouds gathering in the Caribbean, they projected it into an extremely accurate prediction of the hurricane, including the once-in-a-century veer west into New Jersey.

These highly accurate predictions aren't surprising as data becomes more accessible and computer power rapidly increases. Thirty years ago, the first climate models simulated only the Earth’s atmosphere. Now they include the effects of ocean currents, the shrinking of the planet's ice cover, even how plants and animals absorb and release carbon. Nonetheless, due to various uncertainties, predictions of global temperature increases range from three to eight or more degrees by 2100.

One source of uncertainty has been cloud cover, important to climate, particularly in the tropics, but hard to predict. Now, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado have found a way around the problem by examining the accuracy of humidity predictions. Humidity is a good proxy for cloud cover. Examining ten years of atmospheric humidity data from satellites, they tested two dozen of the world’s most sophisticated climate simulations. They found that, “The models at the higher end of temperature predictions uniformly did a better job." The simulations that predicted smaller temperature rises "should be outright discounted.”

In other words, we should expect a global temperature increase of eight degrees or more by the end of the century if we don't rapidly mend our ways. And that will mean dramatically higher sea levels, disappearing coastlines, more severe droughts, bigger floods, more intense storms, and quite possibly global warming beyond our control. It will mean Armageddon.

Is the U.S. right rigging elections?

After reading an article in the November 2012 issue of Harper's ("How to Rig an Election" by Victoria Collier), I'm not as surprised that Barack Obama won the recent presidential election as I'm surprised he was allowed to win. The article points out that most votes in the U.S. are now tallied by voting machines, a technology with "enormous potential for electronic skulduggery." Furthermore, this technology has been outsourced to "a handful of secretive corporations with interlocking ownership, strong partisan ties to the far right, and executives who revolve among them like beans in a shell game."

The Election Defense Alliance—a nonprofit organization specializing in election forensics—working with independent statisticians who have compared decades of computer-vote results to exit polls, tracking polls, and hand counts, found that "when disparities occur, they benefit Republicans and right-wing issues far beyond the bounds of probability." The combination of privatization and computer technology is, it seems, corrupting American democracy.

In addition to the rigging, the author insists that Americans "have actually lost the ability to verify election results." And all this has happened "without public knowledge or consent."

As a student of democracy, I found the article fascinating. It is either the epitome of paranoia or an exposé of "one of the most dangerous and least understood crises in the history of American democracy." Read it here and take your pick.

Why does Britain have nuclear weapons?

There's a lot of talk these days about the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Britain's government is one of the voices adamant that it must not be allowed to do so. Oddly, no one has raised the obvious question, Why does the UK have nuclear weapons?

Iran, although insisting it has no intention of making a weapon, could make a good case for one. It lives in a dangerous neighbourhood. It is surrounded by nuclear-armed powers. Its two main antagonists, Israel and the United States, are both nuclear armed. And so on. It has solid justification for paranoia.

Britain, on the other hand, is surrounded by friends. Furthermore, it is good buddies with the most powerful nation in the world whose nuclear umbrella it would be welcome to shelter under.

One might argue further that Britain is a much more belligerent nation than Iran and is therefore less trustworthy with dangerous toys. Iran has not invaded another country in centuries. Britain has made a habit of it. Indeed, it invaded Iran twice in the 20th century and collaborated in destroying Iran's democracy in the 1950s. In 2003, under false pretences, it participated in the invasion of Iran's neighbour Iraq wreaking widespread death and destruction.

Britain currently has a Vanguard submarine drifting deep through the world's oceans armed with 40 nuclear-tipped Trident missiles, collectively possessing destructive power 300 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Although ordinarily only the prime minister has the authority to order a nuclear attack, if a submarine commander loses radio contact and suspects Britain has been destroyed, he can fire away. This scares me a hell of a lot more than the possibility Iran may make a weapon.

So, why does Britain have nuclear weapons at all? For an obvious reason, really—status. Tony Blair said as much. In his memoirs, he admitted he could see the "common sense and practical argument" against renewing the Trident system but, "In the final analysis I thought giving it up too big a downgrading of our status as a nation."

He might also have mentioned that the UK is a signatory of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, under which the nuclear powers are obliged to rid themselves of their nukes, something Britain is not doing. Perhaps we should be pointing our fingers at the violators of the Treaty, rather than those who, at least to date, have kept their word.

The CBC—a very good deal

The Friends of Canadian Broadcasting recently sent me an email summarizing a few pertinent facts about the CBC, our national broadcaster and the only national medium not owned and controlled by the corporate sector. Some of these facts I would like to share.

For instance, we sometimes forget in these dumbing-down days of Harper conservatism that the CBC (actually its predecessor) was created by a Conservative government, specifically that of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett in 1932.

Surveys indicate that 83 per cent of Canadians believe the CBC is important in protecting Canadian identity and culture, and 78 per cent of Canadians would like to see CBC funding increased or maintained. In other words, the CBC enjoys very broad public support.

Governments, however are less supportive. Jean Chrétien's Liberals slashed the CBC’s budget by $400-million in the 1990s and funding continues to decline under the Conservatives. Only four of 26 western democracies (Portugal, Poland, New Zealand and the U.S.) spend less as a percentage of GDP than Canada on public broadcasting.

On average, government funding of public broadcasters in western democracies is $80 per capita per year. By comparison, funding of the CBC works out to a paltry $33 per Canadian per year or about eleven cents a day.

Keeping in mind we pay much, much more for corporate media via advertising, a little more than a dime a day is a bargain indeed for the only national medium that belongs to all of us, i.e. that is democratic—the only national medium that isn't run by corporate servants. Increasing that to a quarter a day would only bring us up to the average funding in western democracies, yet would allow for an even better CBC ... without the advertising.

Sorry for Romney? Save some pity for Adelson.

If you think Mitt Romney lost big on Tuesday night, give a thought to poor old Sheldon Adelson. The casino mogul is one of those very rich Americans trying to buy up the political system.

After backing Newt Gingrich in the Republican primaries (not much luck there for the gambler), he then swung hard behind Romney. According to Mother Jones, he and his wife invested more than $57-million in pro-Republican super-PACs.

And invest is the right word. If Romney had won and instituted his proposed tax cuts, Adelson could have saved an estimated $2-billion. That's billions, folks, not millions. Furthermore, his largesse could have proved valuable in solving his legal woes. Aside from three lawsuits he faces over his Macau operations, he is also involved in a bribery scandal and claims he violated U.S. anti-money laundering laws. With his businesses under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and other agencies, he could have used a friend in the White House.

Investing in politics is, as in business, often a gamble. The king of casinos rolled the dice ... and crapped out.

Iran and Israel negotiating nukes—will common sense break out?

Officials from both Iran and Israel attended a nuclear non-proliferation meeting in Brussels this week. The intent of the meeting was to set the stage for a full international conference on banning nuclear weapons from the Middle East.

The Iranian and Israeli officials are ostensibly attending as private citizens, yet they carry considerable clout and have the permission of their governments to participate. The Iranians were led by Ali Asghar Soltanieh, the country's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Israelis by Jeremy Issacharoff, an ambassador for strategic affairs at the foreign ministry.

The meeting's mood was described as "respectful and positive," quite in contrast to the provocative blustering of the two country's leaders: Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, a man so belligerent his generals have to rein him in; and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of the world's most offensive trash talkers.

The date of the international conference is still undecided and one cannot hope for much, but if the two main protagonists in this drama are at least meeting in an atmosphere of respect, one can hope for something, and even that is progress in the Middle East.

Work is making us crazy

 In 1991, Linda Duxbury of Carleton University and Christopher Higgins of the University of Western Ontario conducted the first national study of work-life conflict in Canada to “explore how the changing relationship between family and work affects organizations, families and employers.” They repeated the study in 2001 and in 2012 have completed a third round. The study examined the work-life experiences of over 25,000 Canadians employed full time in public, private and not-for-profit organizations.

The results are not encouraging. First, Canadians are working harder than ever. The amount of time spent in paid employment has increased dramatically with 68 per cent of men and 54 per cent of  women working more than 45 hours per week in 2011 compared to 55 per cent of men and 39 per cent of women in 2001.

While people are working more, apparently they are enjoying it less. Absenteeism over all increased seven per cent from 2001 to 2011 with people missing work due to emotional and mental fatigue increasing by 12 per cent. Workers reporting a high level of stress increased from 44 per cent in 1991 to 54 per cent in 2001 to 57 per cent in 2011, while those suffering from depressed mood, a state characterized by low energy and persistent feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, increased from 24 per cent in 1991 to 36 per cent in 2001 and 2011.

The Canadian workplace it seems is becoming a place of increasing unhappiness. It makes one wonder what all the remarkable technical progress of the last 20 years was for. Nor apparently has globalization brought the utopia corporations and their political servants promised.

The tragedy is not only a decline in the quality of work life. As we approach a time when growth must stop in order to preserve a future for both the health of the environment and the health of civilization, working less could make a major contribution. And we could enjoy the extra time for family, community and simply enjoying life. Yet we seem to be going in precisely the wrong direction. What, exactly, is the point?

An Allende returns to Chilean politics

Last Sunday, Maya Fernández Allende was elected mayor of Ñuñoa, a district of Chile's capital, Santiago. Ms. Allende is a granddaughter of Salvador Allende, the Chilean president who died when General Augusto Pinochet headed a coup that ended Chile's lengthy democracy and introduced a reign of torture and murder.

Democracy eventually returned after 16 years of brutal dictatorship and now an Allende has returned to politics as well. Raised in Cuba, where her family fled after the coup, she came home in 1992 and joined the Socialist party but didn't run for office until 2008 when she won her first election as a member of the local council. Her victory was part of a leftward swing in municipal elections across Chile with Allende herself winning in a district long held by right wing politicians.

An official photograph of Salvador Allende wearing the Chilean presidential sash decorates the new mayor's office. She was too small when he died to remember him but says she would loved to have known him as a grandfather and has promised to be faithful to his legacy.

"The dictatorship did not allow you to express yourself, you might talk and then be disappeared, so people stopped talking," said Ms. Allende. "There was lots of silence. This generation has changed, it has come back to the street, to knock on the door, to bang the table."

Olé for the new generation and olé for Mayor Allende.