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| (... unless, they are the PCs, in which case they will probably just shelve the need.) I'm seeing pushback on the issue of revenue tools for public transit in the GTA which seems to boil down to "2 billion a year is a small part of the provincial budget. Surely they can find it through efficiencies or reallocation?". Well, they can't. Maybe in a world in which no Harris tax cuts had taken place, but not here and now. Most of the Ontario budget is tied up with education (mostly schools, some universities -- 18.9%), health care(38.3%), Children's Services(11.2%) and interest on the debt (10.6%). Much of the rest is tied up in fixed costs and programs such as welfare (Ontario Works, in newspeak). Even the courts take 4.1 Billion (3.2%). When I look at the news, I see signs of all these areas being under considerable financial stress. Hospitals are struggling to meet their budgets; the TDSB has just been fingered as diverting most of a flow of funds intended to help disadvantaged children into general revenues to make ends meet, and universities are strapped for funds; the courts have unacceptable backlogs. It has been big news that the most recent budget has made the first structural improvements to Ontario Works since the Harris years. Plus, the Ontario economy is still faltering, relative to the strength it had for decades, so revenues are not as high as they might be. There are, of course, always inefficiencies, though fewer than some people might think. Some "inefficiencies" provide needed redundancies to allow systems to be able to handle variations in need that can surge unpredictably. (How much do we have to provide in the way of space capacity in case H7N9 starts to spread? How much would it take to clean up after a tornado hits some not-too-sparsely populated area, as one does every few years?) And some are one-time items: it's all very well to point at ORNGE and E-Health, but (a) they're in the past and (b) they're over. (And E-Health was small change compared to the really big computerization / health care fiascos, like the one in the UK). But even if a magic Revenue Fairy were to drop 2 billion dollars on the Ontario Government via "efficiencies", how much would go to transit? Is transit more important than all those other underfunded areas? So, no funding through "efficiencies", or not enough. The only way to fund it is to raise revenues. What we probably should be doing is raising most of the additional revenues we need by the most general mechanisms possible, like the HST (suitably adjusted to avoid regressive effects) and income taxes. The cost overheads of collecting incremental increases are low, equitable effects are easier to achieve. The Fords of the world may proclaim that people can't afford any more taxes, but people who casually take vacations in Florida can, in fact, afford to pay more. (Ontario has no tax bracket between 78,000 and 500,000 (the health premium has a level at 200,000 but not 500,000) ; if it introduced brackets at, say, 200,000, 300,000 and 400,000 it could raise rather more from people who could "afford it"). (There's an argument for some revenue tools in terms of their discouraging unwanted behaviours (e.g. a surtax on gas guzzlers), but as my Income Tax professor used to say, tax codes are a poor way to provide incentives: direct subsidies and regulation is more effective and ends up with a lower overhead). The problem with (re-)raising general revenues is political: it hits everyone, and many people object to paying more money for benefits which don't affect them except maybe indirectly. Redistribution has become a bad word, even though there are all sorts of studies which show that broadly redistributionist policies which lower the GINI index benefit everyone. The idea of increasing taxes targeted to areas where people see an immediate need gets more support, which is why there's the current debate over transit-oriented tools, and why the Liberals added a health-directed surtax a few years ago. (The surtax is not actually directed directly to health funding -- it's general revenues; but given the size of the health chunk in the budget, it's reasonable to treat it as though it is.) User fees, by the way, are a non-starter: partly because effective public transit from a policy perspective requires a low-fare barrier (transit users skew to the less well-off, and the benefits in reducing gridlock can be maximized only by making transit both reasonably comfortable to take and reasonably cheap), and partly because everyone benefits from effective transit in reduced gridlock and better traffic flow. Those costs which are estimated to accrue to gridlock in the Toronto area are broadly spread around, showing up (e.g.) in the cost of goods (via increased transportation costs). So, yeah, "revenue tools" with a regional application and a dedicated application to transit. It's not what an economist or a tax lawyer would advise, but it seems to be the only marginally workable political answer to the problem. | ||||||||||
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Sunt Lacrimae Rerum
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May 8th, 2013
April 24th, 2013
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| The last few weeks, culminating in yesterday's Executive Committee meeting, suggest that Ford has completely abandoned trying to govern and is trying to stake out strong positions on topics where he will go down in flames before Council -- the Casino, the Airport extension, no transit funding -- and will then use to define himself in the next Election. The only problem is that these are topics which I expect the centre-left would love him to run on. If he runs (or can be positioned as running) as someone who wants to turn Toronto into an Atlantic City with extra gridlock and jets whizzing by overhead, that looks to me like running with a large target painted on his back. These may play to his core supporters, but these issues (the Casino and Transit funding in particular) are not ones which play well to the suburban/urban split he has based his image on (the airport does pit downtown against the suburbs in the sense that Downtown cares about it, but the petit-bourgeois suburban voters who are his core supporters are not generally the otherwise conservative business types who fly regularly out of Porter (who are better represented by the Board of Trade, which he ignored yesterday) and probably don't care very much about it. | ||||||||||
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April 8th, 2013
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| I have read three books in the last few months which seem to me to be missing something in such a way that "fixing" what they were missing would make them something else, structurally. All of them are good books, but each of them leaves this niggling sense that somewhere out there in the phase space of possible works is something that's related but without this structural gap, and possibly much more interesting as a result (not necessarily better, but more interesting). The first one is the odd one out: Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. This is not in any way a bad book. It's well-written, a good read, and much better than either Diplomatic Immunity or Cryoburn. But I realized, after finishing it, that unlike any other of Lois's work it's not structurally an SF book; rather, it's a bit like an Anthony Hope novel in space. Let me unpack this a bit. Lois' other SF books are all irreducibly SFnal. You can't have DI or Barrayar without uterine replicators, or Cryoburn or Mirror Dance without cold sleep, or Brothers in Arms or Mirror Dance without highly effective cloning. Memory depends on Illyan's chip, and Komarr on the Komarran terraforming technology as well as wormhole physics. But you can transfer the plot of CVA to some Ruritanian monarchy without losing anything of its structure, although you would have to fiddle some minor details. (You can even do some handwaving about latent crustal faults and riverine effects and have the subsidance of Cockroach Central.) The other two works are lacking in a different way. American Elsewhere, by Robert Jackson Bennett, has all sorts of good things going for it: good writing, strong characterization, an interesting concept. But... it depends on Lovecraftian beings whose very appearance will drive unprotected normal humans insane, and then ends up centring around interactions which assimilate their motivations and thoughts to those of a recognizably human, familial, dynamic. The whole point of Lovecraftian eldritch horrors, though, is that they're starkly incomprehensible to us -- as beyond our comprehension as we are to a fly. But if you restore that key trait of the Great Old Ones, then the whole plot of the book collapses. It has a flaw which can't be repaired without destroying the whole structure of the book. Finally, Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue, (and her other Toby Daye novels) are also well-written have an engaging narrator, and are generally good examples of urban fantasy. But her fae are entirely too comprehensible -- too much humans with extra powers and longer lives, but with entirely understandable motivations and thought processes. Their ambitions and interests are ours, maybe slightly magnified or adjusted by their levels of power. Elves / fae / etc. are supposed to be inscrutable, with motivations that don't make sense, hovering around the very edges of what can pass for human given a narrow area of interaction. (The obvious examples are Tolkien (he's careful to note, especially in the Silmarillion, that the elven stories have been heavily anthropomorphized in the passing on, and that the Valar are not very much like us), Crowley (Little, Big) and Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell). However, McGuire's books, told from the standpoint of a changeling whose primary interactions are with the fae, would be a mess if we couldn't understand the majority of the figures with whom the narrator interacts. So again the very structure of the works means that the conceptual gap resists "fixing". | ||||||||||
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April 3rd, 2013
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| It's Hugo nomination season, and we have another crop of complaints about the nominees. Most notably, about the nomination of the same authors regularly, coupled with the complaint that the Hugos award popularity rather than quality. Let's tackle the first complaint first. Yes, it is problematic that very weak works by popular authors get nominated (I'll let Captain Vorpatril's Alliance pass, for the moment, but the nomination of Diplomatic Immunity a few years ago was definitely offbeat. [ETA: I checked, and realize that DI was nominated for the Nebulas but not the Hugos. However, Cryoburn, which was almost as weak, was a Hugo nominee.] And as for Willis' Blackout/All Clear...). However, every cure I've seen is worse than the disease. There is a very real likelihood, given the power-law relation between authors in skill as well as popularity, that one would expect the very best authors, at the height of their powers, to produce their best works in a relatively tight cluster, and to produce excellent candidates several times within a short period. (Note, too, that in a weak year, even a medium book by a good author may be a comparative best of the year.) So just barring authors for several years after a win seems to be a poor way to go. After all, the Best Novel award (which is what most people complain about) is not for a body of work, and every novel theoretically has an equal right to be considered regardless of its author's past history. (And, let's face it, any voting-based award is going to feature "campaigning": if not by authors, then by their readers. This isn't a nolo episcopari type of situation, and the payoffs can be significant in terms of exposure even to be nominated. My advice to anyone who is upset by the presence of campaigning for Hugo votes is to get over it.) The real complaint would seem to be about quality, and I think it's worth saying that if the Worldcon members skew in reading habits anywhere near where I think they do, they are choosing, in part, based on quality as opposed to popularity. I'm betting that a lot of them read Weber, Flint, Carriger and other popular ("Bestselling") writers whose aim is to entertain their audience rather than to produce major works (and I think many of them would agree with that characterization). People nominate weaker works by Bujold, Willis, Miéville et al. because they thought that they were better works than the latest Safehold or Honor Harrington novel, even if they're happy to buy and read Weber. Which brings us to exposure. There's a publishing industry problem with exposure. It hasn't been helped by the dominance of Amazon (see Tom Slee's discussion of the recommendation system), which tends to enhance the popularity effects, or promotional approaches which push already popular works at the expense of less popular but potentially equally good ones. Yesterday I was passing an Indigo store and noticed that Guy Kay's latest book (River of Stars), which has been out for two days, is already featured at a 30% discount. I don't begrudge this to Kay, who is a topnotch writer, but it's a good example of a focus on potential or actual bestsellers. (Kay has won the World Fantasy Award, BTW, and has been a nominee for the John W. Campbell Award, but has never been nominated for a Hugo: was The Lions of Al-Rassan really worse than Remake or Brightness Reef?) There's also a problem with the splitting up of SF into subgenres: even if a really great urban fantasy book came out, readers who scan shelves or even review sites might blip over it if their interest lies elsewhere and they've been put off by masses of mediocre urban fantasy. The John W. Campbell awards help here: I have to say that I haven't read anything by Zen Cho, Max Gladstone, Mur Lafferty, Stina Leicht, or Chuck Wendig, but I will certainly look them up. (And speaking of which, I notice that Leicht and Lafferty are both urban fantasists and Cho writes (short) steampunk, which meshes with the subgenre issue.) Defining "best" is a complex endeavour. Juried awards can have specific criteria to define "best", but given that many SF fans seem to react with strong allergies to the sorts of works that juried awards tend to select I doubt that any award voted on by a large number of readers will skew towards works which critics will tend to see as "best". The Hugos can't be fixed because they aren't broken -- their weaknesses are inherent in the very nature of the award: the very thing that gives them their heft (a broad fan base as the deciders) pretty well ensures a power-law distribution of authors, a tendency for approachable but "safe" books to edge out interesting but niche ones, and a criterion for inclusion which hovers somewhere between popularity and quality. | ||||||||||
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March 13th, 2013
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| I have seen several references to Francis I as "the first non-European pope". Surely St. Peter gets a look-in? Also, Miltiades is recorded as a North African. | ||||||||||
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November 9th, 2012
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| Two (quoted) thoughts: God of our fathers, known of old— Lord of our far-flung battle line— Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies— The Captains and the Kings depart— Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called our navies melt away— On dune and headland sinks the fire— Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe— Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard— All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding calls not Thee to guard. For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord! ****************** It's difficult with the weight of the rifle. Leave it--under the oak. Leave it for a salvage-bloke let it lie bruised for a monument dispense the authenticated fragments to the faithful. It's the thunder-besom for us it's the bright bough borne it's the tensioned yew for a Genoese jammed arbalest and a scarlet square for a mounted mareschal, it's that county-mob back to back. Majuba mountain and Mons Cherubim and spreaded mats for Sydney Street East, and come to Bisley for a Silver Dish. It's R.SM. O'Grady says, it's the soldier's best friend if you care for the working parts and let us be 'av-ing those springs released smartly in Company billets on wet forenoons and clickerty-click and one up the spout and you men must really cultivate the habit of treating this weapon with the very greatest care and there should be a healthy rivalry among you--it should be a matter of very proper pride and Marry it man! Marry it! Cherish her, she's your very own. Coax it man coax it--it's delicately and ingeniously made--it's an instrument of precision--it costs us tax-payers, money-I want you men to remember that. Fondle it like a granny--talk to it--consider it as you would a friend - and when you ground these arms she's not a rooky's gas-pipe for greenhorns to tarnish. You've known her hot and cold. You would choose her from among many. You know her by her bias, and by her exact error at 300, and by the deep scar at the small, by the fair flaw in the grain, above the lower sling-swivel-- but leave it under the oak. ........ The Queen of the Woods has cut bright boughs of various flowering. These knew her influential eyes. Her awarding hands can pluck for each their fragile prize. She speaks to them according to precedence. She knows what's due to this elect society. She can choose twelve gentle-men. She knows who is most lord between the high trees and on the open down. Some she gives white berries some she gives brown Emil has a curious crown it's made of golden saxifrage. Fatty wears sweet-briar, he will reign with her for a thousand years. For Balder she reaches to fetch his. Ulrich smiles for his myrtle wand. That swine Lillywhite has daisies to his chain - you'd hardly credit it. She plaits torques of equal splendour for Mr Jenkins and Billy Crower. Hansel with Gronwy share dog-violets for a palm, where they lie in serious embrace beneath the twisted tripod. Sion gets St. John's Wort -- that's fair enough. Dai Great-coat, she can't find him anywhere -- she calls both high and low, she had a very special one for him. She carries to Aneirin-in-the-nullah a rowan sprig, for the glory of Guenedota. You couldn't hear what she said to him, because she was careful for the Disciplines of the Wars. At the gate of the wood you try a last adjustment, but slung so, it's an impediment, it's of detriment to your hopes, you had best be rid of it -- the sagging webbing and all and what's left of your two-fifty -- but it were wise to hold on to your mask. - with credit to Rudyard Kipling and David Jones. (Edited to correct lineation.). | ||||||||
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September 25th, 2012
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| President Ahmadinejad of Iran has been quoted as saying: "Iran has been around for the last seven, 10 thousand years". Ignoring entirely the validity of considering, say, continuity from Cyrus[1] to the present as meaningful or useful for anything other than linguistic research, I seem to recall that the entire Indo-Iranian branch broke off PIE (one of the latest subgroups before PIE can be considered to have vanished forever) maybe five thousand years ago or a little less (and presumably did so not in the area of what is now Persia but more likely in the steppe areas of what is now southern Russia). So neither seven nor ten thousand is even possible. Continuity in the Middle East (well. actually anywhere) based on language is a slippery concept even when not blurred by modern ideological aims, whether those of Iran or those of the State of Israel. Linguistic transfer has regularly happened without significant genetic admixture (obvious examples being the transfer of various branches of IE to Europe and the transfer of Arabic to Syriac-speaking populations in the Middle East). Likewise, Persian was a high-status language which spread over considerable areas previously using non-IE languages. (Speaking of ahistoricity, religion, and politics, it would be interesting to ask Romney exactly what his views of the history of North America are in the light of current archaeological knowledge.) [1]I.e. about the time of the Book of Ezra. Prior to Cyrus the area certainly had speakers of some variant of Persian/Iranian, but they were not a dominant political unit. | ||||||||||
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September 14th, 2012
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| A couple of points to make regarding Ontario teachers (and BC ones, for that matter) pulling extracurricular activities: Extracurricular activities have come up before in labour negotiations with teachers. Boards / governments don't want to pay for them, but still want to treat them as a "part of the job". When this goes to adjudication, these activities are regularly stated to be "voluntary" (even though at normal times there is intense social pressure on teachers from their colleagues as well as their superiors to engage in them). Unions have in the past been willing to trade this for pay; school boards and governments have been unwilling to fork out the additional funds. If governments really want to treat extracurricular activities as essential to school -- there was a Toronto Board member on Metro Morning this morning talking about how important they were -- the solution is simple: pay for them on an hourly basis and thereby include the activity in the contract. (I say "on an hourly basis" because some types of activity -- e.g. being the staff member who helps with the Philately Club -- will have very well-defined hours of X hours after school each week and some (Drama productions, school sports which can go to inter-school championships at regional and provincial levels) will both be less well defined and will sometimes spill over into weekends.) If they refuse to pay the extra money, they are implicitly agreeing that the activities are non-essential. And if they're non-essential, then it's entirely reasonable for teachers to withdraw their support. And if this inconveniences the public, then it should properly result in the public applying political pressure on the government to change the status quo by behaving fairly. In the situations in both BC and Ontario, it also needs to be recognized that the teachers have very few options. They have had their right to strike removed without the usual compensatory allocation of decision-making regarding a collective agreement to an adjudicator. Instead, governments have taken the ability to determine core elements of the contracts out of all parties' hands by legslation. (As a side note, I'll add that bankable sick days were popular with employers in the past because they allowed benefits to be provided which (1) were quantifiable with employees who did become sick -- there was no grey area regarding how much time might be charged to sick days; (2) generally did not have costs accrue until the far future (most employees aren't sick for the full number of their allocated sick days, so payment of the benefit gets put off); (3) tended to accumulate to the benefit of employees later in their careers -- a healthy employee at age 26 is more likely to have health issues at 55, when the accumulated benefits will be there. Even in the event that an employee retires with unused days and receives a payment in lieu at retirement, that cost has to be considered in terms of the present value at the time that each day was earned. It's a biggish lump sum, but it's earned over the course of many years, with siginificant deferrals from (some of) the periods when it was earned. These rights were bargained for and given in trade-off for other benefits of the same actuarial value -- that is, it's reasonable to assume that had these benefits not been granted in bargaining other benefits of equivalent worth to the estimated actuarial present value of the benefits would have been -- for example, a larger number of sick days of the sort that vanish at the end of the year, along with a possibly better short-term disability plan to offset the likely effects on older employees.) In the long term, of course this sort of thing (legislated imposition of contractual terms) brings in its own revenge. There's currently a glut of new teachers (caused in part by clumsy manipulation of the market by expanding spaces in colleges in the early 2000s), which tends to make it easier to impose harsher conditions on teachers now, but in the early 2000s there was a shortage of teachers across the board. (It isn't necessarliy an entire coincidence that this followed the Harris years in Ontario.) However, a shortage of qualified math and physics teachers seems to have become a fact of life -- the required skills can translate into better-paying jobs elsewhere. If conditions become less attractive, or are perceived as such, supply will fall and even where supply doesn't fall quality will. (There have been other straws in the wind indicating that the Ontario government, at least, is leaning to spending relatively more on health and less on education for political reasons. The net effect of this -- higher fees and lower quality at the tertiary level, lower quality at the primary and secondary level -- will take a long time to build and a long time to reverse.) In the end, a society gets the school programmes, and teaching quality, it's willing to pay for. Feeling outraged because teachers are threatening the (partial, in Ontario) withdrawal of services which society has basically signalled it's unwilling to pay for is irrational and short-sighted. | ||||||||||
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September 11th, 2012
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| "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there" Since readers can please themselves - de gustibus, and all that -- there's no immutable law that says that you have to recognize this. But it is true that if you can't put aside your own current views you will be cutting yourself off from most of the past. Jane Austen valorized an absence of agency in women (Mansfield Park is the high point of this). Charlotte Bronte had a serious anti-Catholic prejudice. The assumptions underlying Tom Jones are irretrievably sexist. Sayers, Chesterton, Heyer and Eliot all incorporate ant-semitic caricatures in their fiction. Almost all of Shakespeare, Jonson, Pope, Austen, Trollope, and Heyer assume that the higher your birth the better a person you are likely to be (not will necessarily be, but are likely to be). As for any classical author, the list will be by definition very long indeed. It can also be worth remembering that in terms of material culture no culture prior to the Twentieth Century was better than a very poor developing country of the late Twentieth Century, and in some ways was almost certainly always worse (notably in medicine and public health). There were no antibiotics, no modern detergents or synthetic fabrics, and few paved roads (and those were surfaces for horse dander). Hygeine was low by modern standards until the germ theory of disease started to perclate through the populace (and through advertising) in the early 20th century. Food was expensive: for most of the population of England for most of its history the cost of food was vastly greater than the cost of lodgings. The historical novel begins with Scott, and we've now had nearly two centuries of them. (Waverley was published in 1814.) So it's remarkable how few genuinely great examples there are of historical novels/novelists (not quite the same thing: it's arguable that Heyer was a great historical novelist but rather harder to argue for any one of her novels as being great). There's Scott himself, and Tolstoy, and Dunnett, and Eco, for Il Nomme Della Rosa, and maybe Fraser and Heyer based on their entire corpuses. Iain Pears and Hilary Mantel, perhaps, but they're still pretty recent. (Stendahl is out: La Chartreuse de Parme reflects a period he lived through; ditto for Balzac and La Comedie Humaine.) It's interesting to note, however, the number of historical novels on the top ten bestseller lists of the past which haven't had much staying power. Sabatini, Douglas, Asch, Shellabarger, Goudge, Costain, Waltari ... It's also noticeable that some historical novels which have remained in print -- notably Doyle's The White Company, Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, and I can remember having a copy of Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days Of Pompeii in my school library -- aren't exactly well thought of critically. Let's face it, it's difficult to write a genuinely good historical novel. You have to do a ton of research to avoid just making elementary bloopers, and a ton more to really be able to provide a feel of the period. You then have to write a genuinely good novel, which is difficult in itself. And finally, if the novel isn't just going to be a costume drama but have structural integrity, there has to be a good reason for it to occur in the past rather than the present. Some people want historical novels because they give a candy-coated view of the past -- they strip out the hard edges of differentness which are in actual authors from the period and replace them with characters who have modern motivations and attitudes who are therefore more acceptable to the reader. I note in particular Jack Whyte and Ellis Peters here. These novels pretend to be "historical" and may reflect physical events that really took place, but they are just as much fantasy as The Lord of the Rings. | ||||||||||
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September 6th, 2012
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| When I was taking Criminal Law, I was taught that in general criminal offences required some form of guilty mentality (mens rea: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea) -- not necessarily intent, as negligence served this purpose in some cases. You can't assault somebody or steal chattels without intent, and you can't commit manslaughter without being negligent (if you kill somebody purely by accident with no negligence on your part, that's "non-culpable homicide"). However, there is, we were told. a subcategory of what were called "strict liability offences" which required no intent whatsoever on the part of the person committing the offence. The classic example was weights and measures legislation: a merchant can be fined for having a scale which weighs inaccurately with neither intent nor negligence. These offences are generally, but not invariably, offences created as a side effect of regulatory schemes which are not criminal in their principal intent -- so called "quasi-criminal law". (This category is important in Canada, by the way, because it allows provinces, which have no jurisdiction to enact criminal statutes, to attach penalties to violations of regulatory schemes.) Note that the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act in Ontario is a provincial statute. I'm sure you see where I'm going, here... Quite aside from the general maxim that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" (ignorantia juris non excusat) the Act specifically does not require a fraudulent intent. There's a reason for this: in the execution of public affairs not only is the appearance of probity in public officials important, but one of the very things the law was enacted to deal with was the kind of cozy web of implicit understandings where nobody on the inside thinks that things are really wrong; the same intention lies behind the strict limitations on gifts that public officials can receive from constituents. There are two types of exceptions: some sorts of benefits are not included (e.g. votes on raising the office allowance for councillors give them a pecuiniary interest but would be excluded under s. 4(b); tiny benefits, e.g. participation in a vote that saves you coffee money once a quarter are excluded under s. 4 (k)); and "errors of judgement", which is a much smaller exception than just negligence (s. 10(2)) -- note that this does not mean that the judge will not declare a conflict of interest, but merely that the penalty can be avoided. This is why the defense is playing up Ford's deliberate refusal to pay attention to either his orientation handbook or the Integrity Commissioner or his advisors: it would qualify quite well as wilful negligence, but being Too Stupid To Live can, conceivably, qualify as "an error of judgement" on the defense arguments. (The actual phrasing of the Act is "inadvertence or by reason of an error in judgment"). In the case law on the matter, a typical error of judgement would be to rely on a legal opinion which the court later found to be incorrect. On the other hand, there are cases which state that "the judge could not find inadvertence or bona fide error because, at the very least, in not seeking legal advice, the respondent was deliberately and wilfully blind", which seems to map fairly neatly onto Ford's pattern of behaviour. I have real difficulty in seeing how any judge can reasonably view the entire pattern of behaviour as an "error in judgment". It might arguably be true of Ford (although the conditions which must apply to his thought processes, if this is true, are such as to make for a strong argument that he should be disqualified from running anything more complex than a hot-dog stand), but it would open up a hole in the statute wide enough to drive a truck through. The statute, especially by pairing it with "inadvertence" would normally be construed as meaning a one-time blip that might happen to a reasonable man, not an ongoing pattern of behaviour; nor can I think that a deliberate refusal to read the guidelines over the course of many years can count as a single "error of judgment". There are cases supporting the view that just not being aware of the rules may mean that removal from office does not occur, but I can't find any cases where this covered a continued and deliberate refusal to acquaint oneself with the rules. | ||||||||||
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July 16th, 2012
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| From Wisse Words:: Which one of those below have you read (italics), do you own (bold) or dislike (struck through)? ( Cut for length...Collapse ) I'm rather dubious about the list. Some of the works I have read don't seem to me to be candidates for the best books in that 25-year period (The Golden Age, for example). The structure also suggests that it's been constructed by choosing 100 different authors and then choosing one novel per author; this means that by definition it's going to exclude many novels which should be on the list, those produced by the really good authors who have produced several works at the height of their powers during that time frame. Even then, the works selected are not always the best choice for that author: The Diamond Age instead of Cryptonomicon? Is A Fire Upon the Deep really better than A Deepness in the Sky? If you're going to have one Bujold, then Mirror Dance would be a better choice than Barrayar, and I can think of several Stross books which I'd consider to be better than Accelerando (notably Halting State). I haven't marked any works as "disliked", although I think some of them rather weak (e.g. The Golden Age (I read that, but have successfully avoided the third novel of the trilogy, which I understand goes all wonky and Objectivist, which may give me an unduly positive view of the first volume on its own)). | ||||||||||
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July 9th, 2012
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| Not a review of The Apocalypse Codex, but contains series arc spoilers: ( Where the tropes seem to be going...Collapse ) | ||||||||||
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July 4th, 2012
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| I had to go up to the Eaton Centre at lunch today and thought I'd check whether Charlie Stross' The Apocalypse Codex was in at either Indigo or WBB. Three copies showed up at Indigo, none at WBB, so I went up and checked. None on the shelves. I asked an employee, who looked it up in the actual store database and said "They just got in and it should be up tomorrow". I've previously been in the same situation with Indigo staff, and others have voluntarily gone to the stock room to find a copy of what I was looking for. I have an errand taking me into the vicinity of Bakka on Friday. IMHO, having a website say "available" should mean "available", not "still in a box in the stock room and inaccessible". If he had gone to the stockroom and come back with a copy, I would have bought it on the spot. If he had gone to the stockroom and couldn't find it, I'd have come back tomorrow to get it a day earlier than I otherwise would, as payback for his effort. As it is ... I'll wait until Friday. (I prefer to support Bakka in any case, all other things being equal). | ||||||||||
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June 29th, 2012
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1) This Wired article on The Avengers Homework Assignments has several questions along the lines of:In case you don't recall, S.H.I.E.L.D. built a special container for The Hulk. The idea was that no one could break through the glass (it was probably transparent aluminum) – but if someone DID, they could just drop the whole thing out of the helicopter. Loki ends of tricking Thor to get him trapped in there and then drops it. Bzzt. There's a basic physics literacy issue here: acceleration/velocity of a falling object is independent of mass. It's completely irrelevant what the mass is. We do not live in an Aristotelian universe. I give the assignment itself an F based on this alone (note that there are several questions which have the same view of mass in relation to velocity of a falling body). 2) Some things never change: I was reminded of the following by a post on Slacktivist (one irony being that Slacktivist (properly) paints the British Evangelical tradition as more flexible than the American one. "There is a section of the church, numbering perhaps a quarter of its members, the 'Evangelical' party, whose set and fixed practice, if not principle, is opposition to the recognition of any sort of change in the status quo in the church. (They themselves have changed considerably both in teaching and practice since the time of Charles Simeon. It is not so much change as the acknowledgement of it that they dislike.) The nineteenth century bishops were so preoccupied with opposing the Oxford Movement that they took no steps to prevent what the Elizabethan bishops in their own day more wisely foresaw must be a danger to the cohesion of the church -- the formation of a puritan imperium in imperio within the church, permanently impenetrable behind a financial rampart to any ideas current in the rest of the church. By the system of Evangelical schools, Evangelical halls at the Universities, Evangelical theological colleges and Evangelical patronage trusts, it is now quite possible for a boy to be educated and grow up, take a degree, be ordained and serve a ministerial lifetime, without once encountering directly any theological idea unacceptable to the founders of the party in the period of the Crimean War." The quotation is from Dom Gregory Dix's Shape of the Liturgy, published in 1945. You can see already the kernel of what has become the Anglican Network; if its current impetus derives from more recent changes, the first thing to galvanize the subgroups which later made it up was the introduction of non-BCP liturgies in the 1970s and 1980s. (Note that "Evangelical" in the Anglican context does not mean the same thing as it does in the American context, although if you look at Network fora based in the US you will find considerable overlap between the two groups as far as political and moral opinions goes -- i.e. conservative Episcopalian Evangelicals (Anglican meaning) heavily resemble antinomian American Evangelicals (second meaning) in many areas not having to do with liturgy (and class -- Episcopalians are usually from further up the class hierarchy)). 3) There is a CBC Radio tagline about providing 100% of your music listening requirements. I have news for them: unless they start playing a lot more pre-baroque and baroque music, they're nowhere near 50%, let alone 100%. | ||||||||
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June 21st, 2012
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| A good article by Lev Grossman on the subject. | ||||||||||
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June 7th, 2012
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| So the City of Toronto is banning plastic grocery bags as of January 1. Once we get beyond the predictable political reactions (another defeat for Mayor Ford! who is reacting in a predictably over-the-top manner at his defeat[1]!) I'm seeing a lot of people reacting with objections regarding how this will affect them. Aside from noting that other cities have gone this route without major problems, I'll just make the following observations: 1) Plastic bags at point of sale: The charge for plastic bags had been set at 5 cents. Reusable bags seem to be available wholesale at about 50-70 cents per bag (depending on type of bag) with advertising included. I understand that the cost for large-scale retailers, like Loblaws, is probably more on the order of 25 cents a bag, which makes the 99-cent price at Loblaws gravy for them. (This sort of cost level is why.I see reusable bags regularly being given out as promotional items: a 1/7 of a page advertisement in the Life section of Toronto Star, one-time, is $6,173.47. At 70 cents a bag, that's about 8,800 bags.) Plain paper bags with handles seem to run from 19 to 30 cents wholesale; plain grocery bags made of recycled paper are between 3 and 6 cents a bag, depending on strength. There are two separate concerns here: those of the consumer, and those of the retailer. On the consumer side, the simplest thing is always to have at least one reusable bag. The kind sold by grocery stores has the advantage of being cheap, but relatively bulky -- you can stick one inside a backpack or a briefcase, but not anything much smaller. There are nylon (about $5.00) and string mesh (about $7.50) reusable bags sold as consumer goods which cost more but bundle up into much smaller packages;[2] if you can carry a paperback or e-book reader around[3] it's just as easy to carry one of these as an all-times backup. I grant that you would need to use a nylon bag 100 times to break even with paying a nickel a bag, but it's not that large a cost; the grocers' 99-cent bags need only 20 reuses to break even, but are more bulky.[4] If you're going out to buy groceries, it should be straightforward to carry the same number of empty bags to the store as you'll need to carry groceries back from the store. The alternative is to live with paper bags obtained at the check-out or buy reusable bags periodically as needed. The latter choice will be easier if the retailer prices the bags low. In general, individuals who use cars are going to care less about the quality of the bags -- they have to last from the store to the car and the car to the home -- and those who are on foot will care more. In my experience deliberately car-free people are far more likely to carry bags at all times in any case, as they're more likely to be ecologically concerned. On the retailer side, there are various possibilities.
2) Garbage bags: I've seen a lot of complaints about this. Kitchen garbage bags in batches of 100 cost about 5 cents each. Replacing grocery bags with kitchen garbage bags is a wash, financially. The same applies to bags for cat litter, scooping up dog faeces on a walk, etc. 3) Storage: I've occasionally used plastic bags to organize / separate items I've stored away. I've had to be careful, though, as I've sometimes found that I ended up using decomposable bags without knowing it, which turned into plastic flakes after a time. Better to use something else. [1]'“It’s the people’s fault,” Ford told AM640’s John Oakley. “Honestly, sometimes I get so frustrated because the people are just sitting back listening."' [2]I associate string bags with the mid-20th century; they weren't used for groceries (which at that time were invariably put in paper bags), but were general-purpose carrying tools, frequently used for women's dress shoes. [3]OK, I always carry a briefcase with a small library to give myself some choice in what I'm reading. Currently the first volume of Caro's biography of Johnson, Heyer's Cotillion, Cherryh's Downbelow Station, Kress's Beggars in Spain, Abraham's A Shadow in Summer, and Dunnet's Queen's Play. [4] On the environmental cost front, the Wikipedia entry on reusable bags indicates that a reusable bag needs to be used 171 times to break even on an environmental level, but I find that figure over-broad: I certainly suspect that the environmental cost of an organic cotton string mesh bag, a woven bag made from recycled products, a nylon bag, and a polypropylene bag are rather different. This Utne Reader article specifies a factor of 400 for canvas bags, but it seems to be going just by a comparative price factor. Using the 171 figure from the Wikipedia article, and assuming that one reusable bag holds as much as two plastic bags, then you would need to use a reusable bag from a grocery store (price one dollar) 10 times to break even financially based on the prior fees and 86 times to break even environmentally (or about a year and a half at one grocery run a week). For a five dollar nylon bag you would need to use the bag 100 times to break even financially, but the environmental costs are probably not the same as for the grocery bag, and for a string bag the number is about 150 times. However, the latter two types of bag would presumably be used several times a week for smaller purchases, and possibly for several purchases in a single day. The incremental cost of washing cotton bags when added to a laundry load is probably pretty small, so calculations regarding the environmental cost of keeping the bags clean is probably misplaced, since it seems to be based on washing each bag separately. The bottom line seems to be that using a bag until it wears out will almost certainly be better for the environment and less costly financially. Collecting reusable bags is lose/lose, although you can argue that if you get all your bags as promotional giveaways there is a financial win and that you aren't providing direct feedback to encourage the production of more bags. [5] A typical reusable grocery bag holds about twice what a disposable plastic bag does, and will also hold safely rather more than a disposable paper bag of the same size. In my experience, and allowing for variation in the make-up of a typical grocery load, a reusable bag carries about $20 worth of groceries. (Much more if I'm buying meat, and more again if I'm buying meat from Cumbrae's (I have a very nice quilted bag from Cumbrae's which provides some insulation for purchases, which I got for about $5.00.)) Most of the other things I buy cost rather more by bulk. Providing a reusable bag or a discount equivalent to its cost for every $50, say, would amount to a %1 (or less, for purchases over $50) discount and acts as a marketing strategy if the bag is marked with the retailer's advertising. | ||||||||||
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June 1st, 2012
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| So, making allowance for the additional two billion years to deal with the Fermi Paradox, what do we expect to happen six billion years from now? | ||||||||||
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May 31st, 2012
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The RC hierarchy in Ontario is getting more thoroughly involved in the tussle over Gay/Straight Alliances (see  rfmcdpei's post for the general background). What I find interesting from a more general perspective is what this type of reaction indicates about the shifting of the RCs on the church - sect spectrum.The Church of Rome has, for about a thousand years, give or take a few centuries[1] identified itself as "the Church", with some vague accommodations regarding the Eastern Orthodox and a detailed theory of church-like bodies coming out of the Reformation. Since the days of Theodosius it has (until recently) also assumed itself (at least in theory) to be coterminous with society -- a church in Troeltsch's classification. There have been irregularities locally -- e.g. the situation in England prior to the "late Roman aggression" where there was no local hierarchy and where the C of E made the same assumptions but only locally -- but broadly speaking the two positions have coexisted hand in hand. It continues to hold the first position: the relative thawing of oecumenical relations after Vatican II were accompanied by a clear delineation of the traditional view in the Council documents, restated in Dominus Iesus from the Sacred Congregation of the Faith in 2000. However, especially since the accession of Benedict to the papacy, it's possible to argue that it is moving deliberately in the direction of a remnant theology-driven view of the position of the church in (Western) society. It would like to be coterminous with society, and sees itself as the guardian of universal ethical values on which it has a duty to speak out, but much of Benedict's agenda can be seen as adjustments to make the distinction between inside and outside starker. Effectively, it is deliberately taking on more of the sociological shape of a sect and less that of a church. Put simply, Benedict's approach involves a willingness to pay the price of losing adherents in favour of protecting its doctrine and structure.[2] The upper hierarchy would like to eliminate "cafeteria Catholicism". Of course, the closer to the ground you get the priests and bishops also want to retain the resources which come from larger congregations, so there has been a lot of a sort of DADT attitude at the ground level towards dissenting views on women's orders, female participation in the liturgy as lay ministers, divorce, contraception, abortion, and homosexuality (all areas where the divergence between Catholic doctrine and popular practice is particularly marked[3]) as long as they are kept relatively private. (This has been accompanied by a considerable relaxation in the principle that anyone receiving communion should go to confession immediately before the eucharist, and a tendency not to ask about certain areas of opinion which a penitent might not mention in the confessional.) There has been increasing pressure, however, to enforce greater conformity in all of these matters, as well as liturgical distinctiveness[4]. Ecumenical dialogue has also become less fluid and more take-it-or-leave-it. You might expect this to lead to large-scale defections. From where I stand, it looks very much as though the fact that there hasn't been a mass schism in western Europe and North America as a sort of delayed Modernist controversy is due to the increase in a personal, almost fetishistic, devotion to the papacy over the last thirty years or so. Most of the people I know who have left the RCs formally (as opposed to lapsing) have done so either as a reaction to the administrative -- not doctrinal -- catastrophic mishandling of abuse issues by the hierarchy, which is a very different issue (there are complicated connections involving the RC desire to be autonomous, but this is shared by many other ecclesial and non-ecclesial bodies (e.g. Boy Scouts and many school boards) which all seem to share the knee-jerk reaction of trying to manage abuse issues internally to avoid scandal), or because they are GL (usually not BTQ), feel personally excluded by the RCs, and now find other groups (Anglicans, notably) to be gay-friendly in a way which they were not a generation ago. There has been no large-scale breakaway along the lines of the Old Catholics in 1870. The shift in the direction of sect is a long way from complete, though. The hierarchy (and many of the laity) still want / assume the benefits of churchiness while pushing in the direction of sectiness. The consistent thing for Cardinal Archbishop Collins to push for would be the severing of ties between the province and the Catholic board system. If you want to erect limina between the inside and the outside then it's a good idea to render yourselves as independent of the outside as possible. But just as the low-level handling of cafeteria Catholicism has been grudging and slow, nobody in the hierarchy wants to jeopardize the substantial flow of funds which supports the Catholic Board system. It's a complicated dance (after all, there's also a significant component of Catholic school supporters who support the GSA legislation, including the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association) which becomes less tenable the more firmly delimited the gap between society as a whole and the Church of Rome becomes. [1]It's actually rather hard to pin down, because the only reference point is the Eastern church (the Oriental Orthodox, Monophysite, and Nestorian churches, largely Syriac-speaking, were effectively invisible to the West (except for the Armenians) during much of the period, and certainly didn't bulk large in ecumenical discussions), and even at the beginning of the Great Schism it's not really clear how the two sides viewed each other. I think it's fair to say that by the thirteenth century or so Roman ecclesiology simply assumed that it was the church as such (conveniently ignoring the East whenever possible), and that prior to about the eighth century formulating the idea of the Latin-speaking church as "the church" would have been ludicrous to just about anyone -- plus there's the fact that as long as East and West were in communion the issues just didn't arise. The fully developed set of distinctions don't appear until Trent, but they were implicit a long time before. [2] The giveaway is where it is structure and not doctrine which is involved, principally on matters of order. There is nothing doctrinal preventing the Western Rite church from allowing married priests or from having women as lay eucharistic ministers, but the hierarchy has set its face firmly against both (well, except for married ex-Anglicans, which are a narrow special case, and which much of the ordinary hierarchy dislikes in any case). [3] The convergence of all of these issues together is a mark of conservative protestantism as well, but evangelical and antinomian protestantism has always had a more sect-like set of traits. The convergence -- tending towards treating these disparate[5] issues as one big issue -- becomes especially disconcerting when publications which are supposedly single-issue (on abortion, usually) also are vocal about contraception and gay rights. (After all, in principle it would make sense for anti-abortion activists to be wildly in favour of contraception, as effective contraception ought to render abortion much rarer.) [4]The introduction of the new translation of the missal is interesting here: it really adds nothing new and (from where I stand) it's a better representation of what was there in the normative rite. But it was hotly resisted and even more firmly imposed in part because it sets the space of worship more firmly apart from the secular, by retaining a different level of formality of language. It's not Latin or Old Church Slavonic, or even Cranmer, but it marks off the RC rite as different and distinct. (The ICET language was not only less formal, it had also been adopted by everyone and his/her sibling.) [5] Theologically, there's a tight connection between the opposition to contraception and the opposition to homosexuality, but issues with women's orders (for conservative protestants, the presence of women in positions of authority in ministry), divorce (the RC position is quite different from that of the Eastern Orthodox here, for example), and abortion are all distinct issues. Socially, they have become the bundle of values that is, de facto, the defining set of shibboleths for social conservatives. | ||||||||||
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May 9th, 2012
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| One question which is hard to avoid when looking at current politics (at least in developed countries) is: why does one side (usually the "conservative" side) seem so crazy, as though they were dialling in from an alternative reality? It may be blatant, as with many high-profile American Republicans and Rob Ford, or it may be more subtle (why is the Canadian Conservative Party so fixated on extending sentences and increasing penalties when every serious study shows that that Just Doesn't Work?). If you look at the history of the conservative / progressive split over a reasonable period of time (say, three to five centuries) it's reasonably clear that it would be almost as accurate to label the first group "rural" and the second "urban". Issues may change, but the type of distribution of the heartland of these positions remains fixed: the Cavaliers were country squires (largely) and the Roundheads were largely backed by Cits. (These are broad generalizations: Cromwell was from the fens and there were urban sophisticated Filmerians; but as broad blocks, the rural/urban split applies.) You could say the same of the Tories and Reformers in the mid-19th century fights over the Corn Laws. It's certainly true of the American Red State / Blue State divide and of the relative bases of support for the major Canadian parties. (It can get complicated where there are areas which are "rural" but industrialized, such as some mining districts, where dominant opinion can be leftish -- as with some areas in northern England which support Labour). However, it's been generally true in the past that it was hard to paint one side as "crazy". There have always been kooks in all areas of the spectrum, but Peel and Disraeli led parties with policies no crazier than those of Palmerston, Gladstone and Salisbury. The "Big Tent" parties of the middle of the 20th century were dominated by leaders with differing opinions but a largely consistent view of the world (many of Nixon's policies with regard to, for example, public health and foreign affairs were more like those of Lyndon Johnson than like anything now supported by the Republican Party). So where does the current strain of frothing-at-the-mouth crazy come from? Or, in a milder form, bullheaded support for positions which have no substantive support from people who have any knowledge in the areas (climate change, penal reform, public health) and which tend to alienate the voters in the centre whom these people ought to be courting to establish/extend a majority? I have a thesis. I think these people are relying on "common sense", and we've reached a stage where "common sense" has failed badly, irrevocably, and permanently. A couple of centuries ago, everyone ran things based on "common sense". Oh, we all knew that our senses couldn't be trusted as regards the non-movingness of the earth, but that didn't affect everyday life much. ("Common sense" tends towards Aristotelian rather than Newtonian mechanics, but that didn't affect many people: only a few people did ballistics or calculated planetary orbits.) We've had a succession of well-established results since then that violate "common sense" but give us a much better picture of how the world works. Some of these are abstract and don't affect everyday life much (Relativity, Quantum Mechanics: you can use transistors and GPS without understanding the theory). Some of them are practical -- notably well-established results in macroeconomics (restraint in recessions and tariff barriers to protect jobs both sound so sensible), cognitive psychology (just what is the real relationship between consciousness and responsibility?), and climatology (anthropogenic global warming models which involve large cascade effects from small triggers). There are all sorts of studies which show that, in the aggregate, the "common sense" approach of increasing penalties does not reduce problems related to "antisocial behaviour", ranging from Prohibition to the War on Drugs to DUI. Strict child discipline produces worse results than a tolerant and flexible approach. Then there's a second set of well-established results, which don't violate baseline "common sense" but make things a lot more complex: evolution and modern genetics; reassessments of historical narratives; textual criticism of scriptures, the recognition of contextual and historical complexities in familiar texts. If you grew up accepting simpler versions of any of these (and who doesn't? Even I don't answer my 10-year old daughter's questions with "it's complicated" every time) learning about them can seem just as much violations of one's gut sense of how things are as learning about quantum causality. This second process dates back to the 17th Century: the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes is probably it's starting point. It accelerates in the 19th century when Schleiermacher and Lessing help the whole process along. For good or ill, there's now a consensus reality established by research which has many, many divergences from one grounded in "common sense". It's still a pretty broad reality: you can accept all of the firmly-grounded research findings and be, say, an orthodox Christian (though you have to have a nuanced view of, for example, inspiration and theodicy, and you're pretty much required to hold with a deus absconditus for the most part) or a conservative as regards school curriculum (there's space to argue for a canon reinforcing and reinforced by a common culture, but you have to be careful setting up your premises). There's a large chunk of the population which is firmly wedded to "common sense". In their day-to-day lives this may not have massive consequences (depending on what they do), but it produces support for political positions which are not merely reactionary (seeking to put genies back in bottles) but fantastic (ignoring that many of the bottles never really existed in the first place). These people are disproportionately rural (more urban occupations require confronting one aspect or another of the newer worldview) despite that fact that there's nothing essentially rural about the view (there are lots of Torontonians who still support Rob Ford) and disproportionately older. | ||||||||||
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April 24th, 2012
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| A number of profiles of the national Harper Conservatives have noted that it has an aim to "shift the country to the right" with a fundamental realignment. Two events yesterday highlighted how this is not happening -- and how it's as a result of self-inflicted wounds. The first was the unexpected defeat of the Wildrose Party in Alberta; much of this has been attributed to the negative feedback from a couple of social conservative candidates who were, um, too honest about their views on sexual orientation and ethnicity, combined with the fact that their libertarian leader wouldn't rein them in / disown them. (Harper undoubtedly has members of his caucus who agree with them, but he's got such a degree of control that it's worth their political life to speak out of turn, even on much less flammable issues. This doesn't bode well for the CPC once Harper departs and they have a less extreme control freak in power.) The second was the Liberal/NDP agreement which will put off an election in Ontario and shift the overall tone of the budget slightly (ever so slightly) to the left. Despite the fact that the budget was ideologically a fairly (small-c) conservative document, with dominant themes largely similar to the National CPC budget (restraint, cutbacks -- it took a lot of arm-twisting to get McGuinty to agree to a minor tax-the-rich provision, and even then it's a temporary surtax aimed at paying down the deficit), the PCs rendered themselves irrelevant almost instantly by simply refusing to have anything to do with it. Hudak's version of combining electoral opportunism (backing local control except when he doesn't over things like, oh, subways) and refusal to work in a compromise mode is pushing the provincial policies further away from the right (only minimally, though -- I'm sure the Tories will be happy to back the government in confrontation with the teachers' unions.[1]), or, at least, ensuring that the government is going to be defining itself as "centrist against the right" rather than "centrist against the left". Toronto has the most right-wing executive in decades, and they can't get their act together. (The first budget was the easy one: I predict that given the greater weakness of the Ford administration and now that the relatively low-hanging fruit has been taken, next budget will end up with far less in the way of belt-tightening.) Of course, much of that is Ford's peculiarly self-neutering approach to governance, but he's not helped by allies like Mammoliti and Holyday who manage to emit utterances which are guaranteed to alienate anyone not already in his base. There's an argument to be made that the gap between "mainstream" Canadian opinion (even in Alberta) and that of the core social conservative base (largely rural) on which the Conservatives depend has become wide enough that (as in the US) there are almost two different consensus realities in play. The national conservatives have managed to get into power by putting these differences on display only in ways which don't get a lot of play in the way that explicit statements do (see: long-form census, climate policies which don't actually involve outright denial but favour Big Oil, immigration reform which can be described as "adverse effect discrimination" without showing outright explicit bigotry, cutting support for "fringe" players in the NGO arena such as environmentalist groups or KAIROS, changing SSHRC and NSERC grant policies, etc.); but they're a constant limit on their appeal in the urban core of Canada where the majority of the population lives. It's a little bit like the problem that long-term governments have of being "in the bubble", except that Smith and Hudak aren't in government, and the reality they live in imposes critical levels of blindness through their own choices. [1] Who supports the government against the Doctors is another question. That might actually have a more NDP/left populist appeal. | ||||||||||
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Sunt Lacrimae Rerum
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