Remembrance Day is about the past, not the present

Remembrance Days grow clearer in retrospect. They remember past wars after all, not wars happening now or about to happen. Those are contentious; they involve arguments and disagreements about whether they should proceed. Past wars are simply past. The remembrance focuses on those who suffered or died in them and didn't deserve to, which is the vast majority in all wars.

More harm than good from celebrity humanitarianism

Recently I declined to sign an ad on behalf of a clearly worthy cause, as I generally do. The organizers were lining up people they consider "prominent" or with a "profile." There are A-lists and much lower ones (where I reside) both for signers and causes but if you believe in it, why not do what you can?

The reason I give for declining is that I dislike the implication that some voices count more than others on these matters. I know that sounds churlish and self-indulgent, especially if the issues are urgent. U.S. comic Janeane Garofalo once went on CNN to criticize the Iraq War. She was asked what gave her the nerve, since she's no expert and was only there because she's famous. She said she'd rather see Noam Chomsky on but CNN won't have him because he isn't famous enough so there she was. Then they attack her for it. She sounded smart and ambivalent.

The trouble with algorithms

There’s a special Canadian wrinkle to the general argument used to rebuff critics of massive government spying on private communications: your phone calls, emails, etc. The argument goes: if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. The Canadian wrinkle has to do with the environment.

The National Post’s Jen Gerson interviewed a U.S. privacy expert. She asked about the PRISM program, by which U.S. agencies spy on Internet activity based outside the U.S., but which routinely rebounds back into the U.S. He said, “ . . . if we have intel that a reporter in Vancouver is a terrorist or whatever we’re going to ask for communications from the U.S. to Vancouver over this time period. They can get that, run an algorithm to see who’s been talking to X, Y, Z, maybe see your email address and your email to me . . .”

Death of the salesmen

I’ve been trying to watch Mr. Selfridge, a British TV series about the American who created a legendary department store in London during the Downton Abbey era. Mr. S is played by Jeremy Piven who, believe me, was more riveting as Ari the obnoxious agent in Entourage.

I persevere since I’ve got a stake in salesfolk. My dad and his two brothers sold dresses at the corner of Spadina and Adelaide for 46 years — wholesale not retail, as the sign in the window said. They were agents for Montreal factories. My brother and I viewed them as the Marx brothers of the dress business. Now the Darling Building is a heritage site with new media startups and galleries. Darling Lunch downstairs, where the shmata guys conspired, is a Dollarama.

Cyprus, dedicated transit funding and guerrilla warfare

It’s hard not to watch Cyprus the way you watch one of those plucky little countries that appear in the World Cup and people root for. This week they rejected the European hierarchy’s latest attack on its citizens. The plan involved swiping a portion of all savings accounts there in return for another bailout that won’t work. It was so blatantly unfair to ordinary folks who, as usual, weren’t to blame for the mess, that even Cypriot legislators voted it down.

Greeks, who’ve gone into the streets in awesome numbers with similar gripes, were green with envy, someone said. They never got their own reps to back them. “Apparently,” wrote Yves Smith on her Naked Capitalism website, “a fast seizure of funds is harder for the public to accept than a sustained grind-down into penury.”

Outsiders form the majority in politics of inclusion

Former senator Jerry Grafstein, a mainstay of the Trudeau era, was hanging around the Ontario Liberal leadership convention last Saturday. "Where's the big ideas, where's the issues?" he muttered. Where, in a word, was the vision? Guys like him, in the age of Keith Davey, the legendary Liberal Rainmaker of Canadian politics, were big on The Vision Thing -- a bitter term used by former U.S. president George H.W. Bush, who despaired of ever having one of his own, like Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the U.S. or Pierre Trudeau's Just Society here. They held Thinkers' Conferences where guys (always) with Big Ideas shared them with party hacks. That's how the Liberals recruited Trudeau and much later, Michael Ignatieff, with opposite effects.

Democracy, leadership conventions and the voting fallacy

Ontario Liberals hold their leadership convention this weekend at Maple Leaf Gardens -- a great choice of venue. The event belongs to a dying breed: brokered conventions. That means the wheeling, dealing and decision-making happen right there on the floor among delegates in real time. It runs counter to the trend toward more self-evidently democratic conventions, in which party members everywhere get to vote by mail or online -- the way the NDP chose Tom Mulcair last spring and federal Liberals will do so in April.

Premier Dalton McGuinty disappears into mystery

An aura of mystery hovers around Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty. There’s two words I doubt you ever expected to hear together (the ones starting with M). Is it possible he needs an intervention? Not a high-rent one like the invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan: a trashy intervention like you see on reality TV. He did say he needs a hug. Is that a cry for help or what?

Paul Ryan and the collectivism vs. individualism debate

A toast to Paul Ryan -- or to Mitt Romney who made him his teammate in the U.S. presidential race -- for putting a grand old argument back on the front burner. "The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it," Ryan has said with spunk, "is a fight of individualism versus collectivism." That was once a great debate but it's drifted almost out of view. First the Berlin Wall came down 23 years ago, then the Soviet Union imploded, the "individualism" side declared total victory and if that wasn't enough, the End of History too. The collectivism side, which had been largely hiding behind communist and socialist parties, grew mousy, except for relics like the socialist "caucus" in the NDP.

Cases of misplaced shock: Drone killings and bad soccer calls

I don't think there's anything shocking or implausible about Canadian Olympic athletes Christine Sinclair and Melissa Tancredi suggesting the ref in their soccer semifinal was in the tank for the U.S. and would wear an American jersey to bed that night. She called what amounted to a non-existent foul at a crucial point. You have to go back to 2002 to find another instance. There's no good explanation for it, which amounts to a licence to speculate on why she really made the call.

I don't think the Canadians were saying the Norwegian ref is infatuated with Americans; but rather that there's a bias at upper levels in FIFA, the Olympics and the major broadcasters for having a U.S. team in the final -- much as the NHL would doubtless prefer Stanley Cup finalists from major U.S. cities for similar commercial reasons. Officials know that and if they get a chance to bolster that bias, they may, consciously or by a more tortuous route. It's the way of the world; matters like money and audiences enter in. If you ignore those interests, you mightn't get as many choice games to officiate.

Democracy as an end in itself

What do people mean when they talk about democracy? I'm not thinking of historians, politicians or philosophers; just people.

When I arrived in Tunis, where the Arab Spring began, which spread to Cairo and then was the model for Real Democracy Now in Madrid, which in turn inspired the Occupy movements everywhere, I was hustled by a driver into his taxi. I sat beside him. Neither of us had our seatbelts buckled.

Democracy is in the eye of the beholder

What do people mean when they talk about democracy? I’m not thinking of historians, politicians or philosophers; just people.

When I arrived in Tunis, where the Arab Spring began, which spread to Cairo and then was the model for Real Democracy Now in Madrid, which in turn inspired the Occupy movements everywhere, I was hustled by a driver into his taxi. I sat beside him. Neither of us had our seatbelts buckled.

Spain's 15M movement links assemblies to politics

I went to Spain last fall hoping to find vigorous remnants of its bold anarchist tradition, homages to the spirit Orwell depicted during the anti-fascist civil war there in the 1930s, though this time the cause worth giving everything for would be democracy, rather than socialism.

I was attracted by the lingo: Real Democracy Now -- it didn't mince words, it combined disgust for the fake thing claiming the name with a sense of urgency to give it reality. Protesters were called Indignados, their bald passion a key to creating a democratic rebirth.

Democracy: Thinking outside the box

I’ve been vexed by elections going back to high-school student council. The wrong candidate usually won: the quarterback beat the class intellectual, convincing me that “the people” are stupid and democracy doesn’t work.

Voters whose candidates lose often react that way. But what if the problem is elections, not democracy — because elections aren’t all there is to democracy. That may be hard to absorb, since we tend to equate them. But perhaps democracy isn’t just a political system; it’s a core part of being human.

Forgive us our debts, dammit

If you’d like a titillating read this summer, let me propose Debt: The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber. It’s a book that dares to question “the very assumption that debts have to be repaid.” In all honesty, did you not just feel a shudder of moral revulsion at the thought along perhaps with the thrill of the forbidden? That’s what’s titillating. Graeber, an economist/anthropologist, asks how debt managed to become “the most profound moral obligation in our reality.” People are readier to condone and forgive — or at least consider doing so — murder, theft, betrayal; how on earth did that happen? To find an answer he goes back five millennia and advances stealthily toward the bizarre present.

Correcting Canada’s democratic deficit

The PR people come straight for you at public events. They aren’t easily deterred. They have an evangelical quality. I don’t mean Public Relations people; they’re shy and retiring by comparison. I mean the Proportional Representation people. They know the answer to our democratic deficit. They’re true believers.

I confess I was once among them. After all, it’s been the only serious form of democratic reform on offer here. (OK, Senate reform, too; I’ll get to that.) PR would make a real difference in how we vote and how governments are created. At the least, if Canadians got a chance to vote on PR, I felt, they’d embrace it. It was a no-brainer.

Canada's ongoing project of Confederation

History is incorrigible. That's because we're forced to read it in reverse, from the now to the then, instead of the order in which it happened. That's why it often seems to make sense. Take the War of 1812. Looking back (as if we're on a ship or train), it seems to have worked out. Canada avoided absorption by what became a colossal, violent, rapacious U.S.; it became an independent, fairly harmonious place. But at the time? The U.S. was youthful, idealistic and egalitarian. It had a democratic constitution and a bill of rights! Britain -- our side -- was a class-ridden old empire, leading efforts in Europe to beat back the liberatory impulses still alive in Napoleonic France. We may have wound up on the "right" side but who could have known? History makes fools of us all and goes its own way.

Canadians owe a debt to Quebec’s student strikers

Speaking of debts, as most governments now do in order to explain why they can’t create anything and need to cut back on whatever is already there, here’s what I think we owe to those striking Quebec students.

We owe them for taking a shot at saving our national honour in the eyes of the world. We’ve lost brownie points on the environment, our even-handedness in areas like the Mideast, our commitment to peacekeeping — but their campaign for equal, publicly funded access to higher education hits a note closer to that other, previous Canada. I should add I don’t begrudge the Harper government its shifts; it’s what they said they’d do. But they don’t reflect the attitudes still held by more than 60 per cent of the population — at least according to how they vote.

Rick Salutin: Is dissent alive and well in Canada?

Rick Salutin used to be a respectable columnist at The Globe & Mail. Then he got fired, and happily (as he tells it), became “unrespectable” again.

But the fact that the left-wing dissident ever had a weekly column in a national mainstream publication speaks to the evolution of dissent in Canada, he argues.

“Think about the media for a minute in the 1960s,” Salutin told a crowd of over 100 people who gathered at the Ottawa Public Library for a lecture on the health of dissent, hosted by Prism Magazine on April 21.

“Jeez, think about TV or any newsroom... there were no women; there were only white men, they all wore white shirts and ties, and the range of opinions was quite narrow. There was nothing like the range of opinions that you can hear in public discourse in the media now. You heard almost nothing about race, nothing about gender; it wasn’t until very late when you heard about women’s rights. You might have heard a little about poverty but not a lot. You heard nothing about the environment,” he explained.

Rick Salutin's Last Words

Whenever a columnist is suddenly fired from a well-established gig, and explanations why aren't particularly forthcoming or convincing from the people in charge, the curious mind naturally turns to what the columnist has recently written, and whether it might have set in motion the axe.

There's rarely any way to prove cause and effect, of course. In the case of the canning of Rick Salutin, long-time, left-leaning, award-winning columnist for The Globe and Mail, we're told officially that he didn't fit in with the paper's redesign plans.

The firing has sparked an organized protest led in part by regular Tyee columnist Murray Dobbin. And it leaves confused not only Salutin's loyal readers but anyone in journalism who has been encouraged to believe that attracting readers is a good thing.

Salutin's Sept. 17 column drew 587 comments. By comparison, stalwart Jeffrey Simpson's latest effort pulled in 143. No word yet that Simpson has been redesigned out of Canada's paper of record.

And yet, according to what Dobbin says Salutin told him, The Globe gave its popular columnist no reason for his dismissal.