déjà vu...

Oh dear god...

worth a listen...

If you have an hour to spare, and the speakers turned on, click here. Not entirely unrelated to my last post...

(Taken from the excellent collection of mp3s on the CBC Radio Ideas website.)

why, oh why, do we pay taxes...?

This piece on arts funding got me all riled up... it's a long article by Andrew Coyne, originally published in Next City magazine, and very much worth a read. It basically counters the prevailing view among most media and elites that what Canada needs is more public funding of the arts if its culture is to survive the American behemoth in our back yard (or are we in their attic?), and continue to celebrate national identity and creative excellence.

I will admit up front, that while Coyne makes a compelling case for his point of view, I think he oversimplifies what public arts funding actually amounts to, and reveals a pronounced blue streak in his "individual-knows-best" approach to taxes.

Coyne argues that individuals should only pay for culture they directly consume, and therefore arts funding is unfair to people who couldn't care less what's happening beyond their local Blockbuster. This kind of argument, favouring individual "market-driven" choice, cites historical examples of excellence in artistic creation that made no use of the public purse, as though the only thing public subsidy of the arts was trying to do was discover another Shakespeare or Michaelangelo, by spraying a buckshot of cash at anyone with even the slightest inclination towards making something "great".

Public funding of the arts is a good deal more complex than the model Mr. Coyne presents, so his piece is more correctly viewed as a direct attack on the Canada Council (lord knows it's not the first one, and won't be the last).

Public arts funding in Canada is responsible for an impressive array of cultural public works projects over the last sixty years, including all of the major regional theatre centres, galleries and museums (both small and large), the maintenance and presentation of national collections, encouragement of cutting edge artistic and curatorial practice (recognized and celebrated internationally), the establishment of viable cultural industries, and the list goes on...

And despite all of this, many artists do still make a good living outside of the realms of public subsidy, in the (gasp!) commercial art world, that exists alongside and in fact benefits greatly from the creativity fueled (and funded!) by what Coyne sees as an onerous tax burden on average boors.

An example. Toronto theatre-goers need look no further than the Mirvish Theatre season: originally staged at the (publicly funded) Toronto Fringe Festival in 2001, Trey Anthony's da kink in my hair opened at Theatre Passe-Muraille, a mid-sized not-for-profit (also publicly funded) Toronto theatre, in a remount production in 2003 and did extremely well, boasting sold out performances, a rare achievement in the mid-range theatre scene. Two years later the play went on to a large-scale commercial remount at the Princess of Wales Theatre as part of the 2005 Mirvish theatre season. The production was a massive success, with sold out performances (again) and subsequent television and movie development deals. Was this a bad investment by the public purse?

On the flip side: Atwood on the underfunding of the arts in Canada (sadly, this is only available to Globe online subscribers). This one is a bite-sized opinion piece, a five minute read, and an interesting take on the state of the arts in Canada from one of our most recognized literary figures. To be sure, Atwood's been on the scene long enough to have something to say worth listening to.

heh, heh...

Just click here, and look for "Ken Dryden is not a goalie" posted on February 6. Full credit to my friend MA for this one...

zero means impossible...

Okay, it's a bit (or a lot) pedantic, but the Ottawa city budget, currently in the agonizing throes of council approval, is driving me crazy.

Our recently elected mayor, Larry O'Brien (or Mayor Larry, as he's sometimes called) promised if elected to balance the city books with absolutely no tax increases while guaranteeing no reduction in services. Umm, I'm no economist, but...

His budget proposal seems improbable if not impossible in reality, and the idea that an already cash-strapped set of services could continue to be offered without even a meager a cash infusion in line with inflation is ridiculous. It's citizens who will pay the difference through semi-hidden service fees and stealth taxes, like a proposed increase in transit fares to the tune of 9.5% (just over five times the rate of inflation), and the gutting of parks and rec maintenance budgets along with a reduction in law enforcement capacity. All this because an unelected candidate made a badly researched and irresponsible promise in order to win an election.

The downtown wards, those that stand to lose most in all of this, virtually shut out Mayor Larry, while the affluent suburbs who could quite easily afford the needed increase, enthusiastically voted for O'Brien, public good be damned.

No matter what happens, Ottawa is going to suffer for the sake of one's man's political pride/hubris, and pay a high price when the city starts to fall to pieces because of a new culture of chronic underfunding being led from the top down.

The man has never held any public office, had never attended a council meeting before running for mayor, and rode into power on the strength of his experience implementing "21st Century management practices" (whatever that means). Oh, and the mayor can't stop wearing his ceremonial chains absolutely everywhere he goes. Dark times...

this is so fun...

I told you, in a huff of resignation (with much pouting and sulking), that for the time being I'm ignoring politics, but Scott Feschuk's blog makes it fun again!

it's official...

The science is REAL. Oh, and it's totally our fault.

sticks and stones will break my bones...

Today the federal Conservatives released three attack ads aimed at discrediting Stephane Dion by questioning his leadership abilities, and his credentials as champion of the environment, among other things. It would seem that in the absence of well crafted and comprehensive public policy, Harper's Conservatives feel that name calling is a more appropriate tool in fulfilling their role as stewards of the public trust.

Will this accomplish anything positive for the environment, clarify the role of Canada in Afghanistan, meaningfully address the crumbling public healthcare infrastructure, or deal with any other issue of importance to Canadians? Nope. At best the only things gained are gained by the Conservatives and amount to a few percentage points in the ephemeral public opinion polls and a modest but temporary bump in majority status probability. And after this immature publicity stunt we're supposed to look to Harper and company for increased integrity and accountability in public office? That's the sound of me laughing all the way to indifference.

I'm just going to tune out for the time being and hope against hope that our government decides to actually govern instead of playing opposition politics with the power they were given by the Canadian public in the last election (by a minority of Canadians, it is worth remembering).

the price of secrets...

This past week Maher Arar finally received two things long overdue him: over $10 million in financial compensation from the federal government for their complicity in giving him up to the US anti-terrorism machinery and ultimately to a nightmare of unjust detention in subhuman conditions for nearly a year; and more importantly, a formal apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

It is worth quoting that apology here:
"On behalf of the government of Canada, I wish to apologize to you…and your family for any role Canadian officials may have played in the terrible ordeal that all of you experienced in 2002 and 2003."

All of this was a result of misused (and likely non-existent) "classified information," a growing body of invisible truth being used by political leaders in supposedly democratic nations to demonstrate to citizens that they are making gains in the all-too-abstract "War on Terror." The public exoneration and compensation of Maher Arar makes clear that there is a concrete financial cost to such secrecy, in addition to a political one.

And yet the continued presence of Mr. Arar's name on the US "no fly list" is a sad example of the failure of our public institutions to right the inevitable wrongs that the culture of over-classification commits. It would seem that even the rational light of public justice is not enough to put to rest some of the worst kinds of secrets, namely the kind that justify unfounded hearsay, and unjust detention.

With this in mind, I find the op-ed contribution in today's New York Times particularly relevant.

'da behrrs...

Wow, there are fans and then there are FANS. In the words of Mama Rose: "Some people got it and make it pay." I don't think the mother of all stage mothers had the Super Bowl in mind, however...

blue is the new green...

Poor Rona. I mean, where was this $1.5 billion in spending on the environment when she needed a career saving announceable? I guess no matter how it's come about, seeing the resurrection of Canada's "old government's" environmental programs is progress of a sort, right?

we interrupt your regularly scheduled life...

...to bring you a word from our sponsors.
This is completely crazy.

saturday afternoon quotable...

"The country of one's dreams must be a country one can imagine being constructed, over the course of time, by human hands."
-- Richard Rorty, philosopher

day one...

The Dems are in charge again...

First female speaker in the history of Congress and the first Muslim Congressman in US history are two major highlights of the newly opened 110th Congress. So far, so good. Fingers crossed...

the holidays are over...

The tinsel has only just been swept off the floor, the decorations put away and the tree put out, and already we're back to the kind of petty politics that made 2006 such a parade of ignorant rhetoric all across North America. Sadly, it's happening in Massachusetts once again...time warp, anyone?

the year ahead...

I've been hesitant to indulge in some sort of New Year's retrospective, "the year as I saw it" kind of thing, mainly because so much has happened to me personally, and to all of us collectively, that I may yet need the better part of 2007 to process all of 2006. I'm also just as reluctant to make any sweeping predictions about the year ahead since pretty much right across the boards we're living under the most uninspired leadership in a generation as the world continues to stumble ever deeper into the uncharted terrain of the 21st century. The travesty of justice in Iraq this past weekend is a prime example of international leadership taking the low road, and showing off the worst aspects of human kind.

Maybe my somewhat dark view of the year ahead is just a side effect of the strange pseudo-tropical winter weather we're having in pleasant valley, or some low-level post-holiday depression, but I must admit that I'm feeling just a touch cynical about 2007. Which is why I had best bite my tongue.

I did, however, come across this quotation last night which, though harsh, does kind of sum it up for me:

"We are waiting with the cruel, experienced eye of a citizenry that has lost respect for its leadership in general, yet hasn't quite worked out what to do about it and so waits for them to self-destruct."
-- John Ralston Saul, from The Collapse of Globalism

"moral anarchy" and other holiday parables...

Bill Moyers' excellent piece about "moral anarchy" in the US is a worthwhile way to pass fifteen or twenty minutes over the holiday season. It's a bit dense in places, but then again critiquing the social order of the United States isn't light stuff.

bam-bam is coming home...

Last week, while in Toronto for some work and a fair shake of holiday season merry-making, a friend mentioned an odd little story to a group of us gathered for a Christmas party. The players in this tale were a family living in a rural patch outside of Ottawa, a wayward deer they had taken in after its mother had abandoned it by the roadside, and finally the 'by the book' provincial bureaucracy that was forced to separate deer from family because they didn't have the proper permit to keep such a creature, no matter that it owed its life to their care. The whole thing looked like it was going to end badly, leaving the poor deer (domesticated to the extreme) to flounder in a zoo setting (where it wasn't really wanted), with the poor farm family left to pine for their darling deer and shake their heads sadly at Queens Park and its "urbanites-know-best" condescension toward the whole affair. A holiday season buzzkill if ever there was one.

Yesterday the PREMIER of Ontario, yes that's right, Dalton McGuinty himself, made a personal visit to the family's rural environs to announce to much media fanfare that Bam-Bam is coming home. Though it won't happen by the time the turkey is served, the homecoming should take place just shy of 2007, meaning a small glass of bubbly might be in order for this most unusual of family reunions to ring in the New Year.

A true Christmas miracle...and great (though admittedly unusual) political photo-op.

quotation for a saturday afternoon...

"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand."

- Baruch Spinoza, philosopher (1632-1677)

if you can't shout anything nice...

best reality tv ever...

CBC got a lot of slack for its first experiment in reality tv, a failed show called The One, but yesterday it got top marks for the best thing since Survivor: The Liberal Leadership Convention.

After a nail-biting day on my couch, glued to the tv, I was handsomely rewarded with what was dubbed by many pundits as a quintessentially Canadian outcome: the "darkhorse" in the running (or underdog, to mix my mammalian metaphors) Stephane Dion, took the leadership of the Liberal party after a series of reversals, upheavals, defections and despite beginning the whole thing squarely in fourth place.

For a second there it looked as though Michael Ignatieff would up the dramatic ante by shedding a tear or two in the agonizing lead-up to the final ballot announcement. Viewers were treated to live televised close-ups of the two finalists side-by-side, a beaming Dion seemed to know it was in the bag, whereas Ignatieff did all he could to turn a wince into a passable tv smile. The whole time a video-montage of ex-Prime Ministers was being screened in the convention hall to push the announcement time to the 6pm time-slot, a prime time media trick to maximize the national viewership.

Everybody agrees that Dion has his work cut out for him. He seems to be a genuinely good man, and has a lot more on-the-ground experience than many of the other candidates, most notably in cabinet as both intergovernmental affairs minister and minister of the environment in previous Liberal governments. Above all this, he looks like everybody's favorite nephew or kind and brainy uncle (depending on which side of the generational divide you happen to find yourself on), so if not a second coming of Trudeau, at least he's not another "you-must-love-me" apologist like the well-meaning Paul Martin, and certainly not a cold intellectual in the mold of our current PM who, I gather, has no idea how to deal with the new head of the formerly headless Liberal party. Now it gets interesting...

they know who they are...

...if only they'd let us know too. Mr. Harper, you've done it again. What have you done? You'll know when it happens.

And here's Rex Murphy with a few thoughts of his own.

municipal politics in pleasant valley...

Pleasant Valley just elected a mayor who has never held any public office whatsoever, wants to crack down on the homeless and has promised not to raise taxes for the next four years while maintaining all services at current levels.

I should mention that he's from the private sector, and has pledged to run the city like a business using "21st century management practices." This isn't going to be pretty...

centrist soup?

In the wake of the Democratic sweep, Maisonneuve Magazine's 'Media Scout' weighs in today with some cautionary words to temper the mood of uncritical optimism that are worth sharing here:

Despite the general sense of optimism, there are some voices of concern and dissent. The Post and the Citizen both run articles about a new pack of “Blue Dog Democrats”: anti-abortion, anti-gun control Christian conservatives flying the Democratic flag and vowing to steer the party toward the centre of the American political spectrum. The Post also prints a Washington Post comment piece by Charles Krauthammer, who argues the shift in power is less significant than it may seem because of the specific people who won and lost. “The Republicans have shed the last vestiges of their centrist past,” he writes of the defeat of many Northeastern and Midwestern moderates. Add that to the new breed of right-leaning Democrats, and it seems the entire political field has shifted to the right. So perhaps that sea change is really more of a skimming off of moderate voices. And while the resulting concoction may inspire optimism because of the relative weight of its partisan divisions, deeper questions remain about the toxicity of the new political soup.

hello democrats and goodbye rummy...

It's official: the Democrats have won BOTH houses of Congress, answering a collective global prayer. The now infamous "checks and balances" once lauded as a model to be emulated by democracies the world over, may actually amount to something more than rhetoric. It's about time.

The Guardian/UK added its voice to this global glee at the new face of American politics in an editorial published in yesterday's edition. As they put it: "Thank you, America"!

Oh, and goodbye and good riddance to Donald Rumsfeld, who kept his job at least 3 years longer than he should have. May History judge him according to his worth.

the big 'Cs' out of step...

What a RELIEF to watch the blue trickle turn to tide last night; the election results were a test to the Republican lie that their status quo held the confidence of the nation. Mounting evidence of mismanagement across the US government, including most stunningly the War in Iraq as well as major domestic scandals, translated into a decisive loss of the House of Representatives and very likely the loss of the Senate for the "Grand Old Party." Maybe, just maybe, the system works.

Meanwhile back home our lesser 'blues' under Stephen Harper should watch their back if a newly released CBC/Environics poll is a portent of elections to come.

Pinch me.

promises made, blah blah blah...

See Rick Mercer's excellent blog for his take (with video evidence!) on income trusts. Priceless...

middling power corrupts middlingly...

Transparency International has just released its 2006 "Corruption Perception Index" and after a pretty rough ride (think Sponsorship Scandal and the subsequent Accountability Act as countermeasure) Canada manages to rank a reasonable 14th of a possible 163 (Haiti finished last, just below Iraq and Myanmar/Burma).

It's a pretty interesting little snapshot of the state of world governments, although the results are just the wrong side of objective according to certain "experts." Still, it puts things into perspective. No surprise that Northern Europe ranks decisively in the top 'least corrupt' spots, and as The Economist points out, Italy proves that corruption and poverty don't always correlate (the essential thrust of the analysis of this table) by ranking a dismal 45 (even the US manages a top 20 finish, in, well, 20th place).

dispatches from the southern front...

Election time is upon us again, or at least our neighbours to the south. The US has had a pretty tough time getting this fundamental piece of democracy right in recent years, so people of all political stripes are feeling rather anxious about how the vote will go on November 7 when the country is poised to hand at least part of Congress back to the Democrats. In the most recent US elections hopes ran high that the Democrats would either retain or regain power, but a lot of "voting irregularities" and subsequent conspiracy theories of outright election-stealing by the Republicans kind of killed the mood of optimism in more moderate and progressive camps.

A good friend forwarded to me an excerpt from an essay in the NY Times Books section on this very topic by UK Guardian's American editor Michael Kinsley, in which he unpacks the thorny issue of the recent US Presidential election. I've posted the excerpt below (though the whole essay is well worth the read):

The great flaw in American democracy is not electoral irregularities, purposeful or accidental. It's not money (which, even under current law, cannot in the end actually buy votes). It's not even the inexplicable failure of all other Americans to vote my way or of politicians to enact my own agenda. It's not the broken promises and the outright lying, although we're getting close. The biggest flaw in our democracy is the enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty.

Politicians are held to account for outright lies, but there seems to be no sanction against saying things you obviously don't believe. There is no reward for logical consistency, and no punishment for changing your story depending on the circumstances. Yet one minor exercise in disingenuousness can easily have a greater impact on an election than any number of crooked voting machines. And it seems to me, though I can't prove it, that this problem is getting worse and worse.

income (dis) trust...

In a surprise move this week Canada’s “new” government managed to drain over $24 billion from the Toronto Stock Exchange all in the name of creating a more stable long-term economic sector in Canada. It also bears mentioning that they stand to recoup billions in lost tax revenue; over the next five years they can easily expect to pad the national treasury to the tune of at least $5 billion. Yes, the issue of income trusts.

I have to ask myself, why do they need bigger surpluses? So they can make other "surprise announcements" of further cuts to federal spending in order to further increase the sacred surplus? How much surplus is too much surplus? Under the Harper government we may never know the answer. Cut is the new spend.

My essential point is that Canadians aren't exactly getting more for their tax dollar these days, and a Conservative promise is clearly not something anybody can or should take to the bank, so I ask again: WHAT is the point?

I'm not an economist (clearly!), and it's hard to decipher the contradictory analysis coming from various quarters of the famously self-contradictory schools of Economics (some say it's good, some say it's bad, some say it's too soon to tell...), but I do know that this is another surprise decision taken by a MINORITY government that struts about like it is the first and last word on all that is good for Canadians. Any critics are just activists, socialists or, worse than all of this, LIBERALS (that would be Canada’s “old” government).

If angering investors is the point, then fine. Let's all throw good money after bad decisions. Bear in mind that investors aren’t just corporate fat cats, but Jane and Joe Canadian, who invested because they were told it was a responsible thing to do, you know that whole ‘security-that-comes-from-having-a-nest-egg’ thing. And of course that includes anyone with a pension plan or RRSPs. I know many people who took direct and significant hits because of this “surprise announcement”.

Memo to Stephen Harper: They all vote.

maybe this isn't the answer...

Scientists have discovered that a substance found in red wine, known as resveratrol significantly increases the lifespan of mice on a high-fat diet, and also staves off diabetes and liver disease. A miracle cure! All we have to do is drink a bit of red wine and then we can get away with all kinds of dietary faux-pas, right? Now I've advocated drinking at least 3 bottles per sitting for years, so I anxiously read on to see what kind of health-related lottery I'd stumbled into, a certain jackpot winner no doubt. My joy kept climbing as I continued down the page, until that is I came across the hard truth of the matter:

"The mice were fed a hefty dose of resveratrol, 24 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Red wine has about 1.5 to 3 milligrams of resveratrol per liter, so a 150-pound person would need to drink from 1,500 to 3,000 bottles of red wine a day to get such a dose. Whatever good the resveratrol might do would be negated by the sheer amount of alcohol."

Now I'm up for a glass or two, but I draw the line, ABSOLUTELY, at 4 bottles. 1500-3000 bottles, eek...