The deficit fetish

Letter to the Toronto Star, unpublished.

Re Trudeau touts red ink as road to prosperity, Aug. 28 (2015):

In reaction to Justin Trudeau's plan to revive the economy, Thomas Mulcair asked, "Why do you feel the need to be an even greater deficit hawk than the prime minister?"  Mr. Mulcair has forgotten his mentor, Tommy Douglas.

When asked how he would finance his war on social wrongs, such as poverty, Douglas referred to 1939. In the  Great Depression, Canada got into the Second World War. There were means to fight a war then and there are means to fight a war now, Douglas contended.

With deficit financing and borrowing from Canadians themselves through war bonds, Canada fought the war and emerged a world power To replace our decaying infrastructure, deficit financing is a proper decision.

As for Stephen Harper, he has left the stage on this issue, last seen wandering tearfully around an oil patch.

The stock market and the Daily Bread Food Bank

"Feed their hopes, but give them only just enough to keep them from despair," Maxims and Reflections of Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540).

Wal-Mart stock dropped 3 percent after the company announced wage increases for their U.S. employees. An hourly salary of  $8.78 will increase to $10 sometime next year. No word if this largesse will be shared with Canadians.  Even if it does, it will not keep Wal-Mart employees from visiting the Daily Bread Food Bank.

It's ironic that certain Wal-Mart outlets contain drop boxes for the Food Bank. Ironic because it is Wal-Mart employees who are forced to use that service. Customers who  donate to those boxes are in effect subsidizing Wal-Mart starvation wages, and if the donated food was purchased at Wal-Mart, to  improving the company's profit margin.

All this inspired the revival a blog post of June 9, 2008: "Stock market promotes class warfare." Here it is:

Several years ago, the error-prone Canadian Imperial Bank of Canada (CIBC) negotiated a financial arrangement with the ill-fated Enron Corporation. "In order to extract itself from an Enron-related class-action suit, CIBC would concede a US$2.4-million settlement, the largest one-time charge ever taken by a Canadian bank, " according to The Financial Post of June 2006. CIBC maintained this in no way admitted any wrong-doing. (Do they enjoy giving away their money?)

This news was delivered to CIBC shareholders by Gerald McCaughey to whom had just been passed the CEO's mantle "from the singed fingertips of John Hunkin" who signed the Enron deal while enjoying a salary of $29.5-million (Report on Business, October 2006). To help re-coup some of this loss, McCaughey "took the axe to 950 managers, including 50 executives." This contribution to the unemployed garnered shareholder praise.

McCaughey's action threw 950 breadwinners on the job market, while Hunkin retired "with approximately $52 million in stock and securities" (The Globe and Mail, August 5, 2005).

On one side of the financial divide, we have the bank shareholders demanding even more bloodletting in order to enhance share value. On the other side, we have almost a thousand newly unemployed, one of whom may be you or your neighbour. In one house, we see a shareholder cheering while next door the family of a former banker worries about the mortgage and the cost of the children's education.

On the national scene, we see share value increasing as unemployment increases. It signals to employers greater competition among the unemployed for the jobs they offer. The temptation to take advantage of the situation is too great in the face of shareholder demands for greater profits. It means lower wages, fewer benefits, and worse working conditions for employees.

Internationally, we see large corporations moving offshore in order to realize lower costs and lower taxes. Again shareholders cheer as their own domestic economic base disintegrates.

Hedge fund investors speculate on the price of oil in the hope that tropical storms will strike the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico thus reducing oil availability. They cheer unrest in the Middle East. That too increases oil prices. [2015 note: Current low oil prices are due to Saudi Arabia politics, not economics.]

Much of the stock market is based on harm to a large segment of society for the benefit of the minority of investors who profit from injury to their fellow citizens.

As these scenarios multiply across our economy, we have the seeds of class warfare. The very nature of the stock market pits one element of society against the other.

"Modern societies are conflictual: class against class, interest against interest, men against women, workers against employers. In this, Marx was deeply right."  -- Michael Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution.

Canada first. No one in second place.

My parents came to Canada during the 1920s.  They were poor, no formal education, spoke no English, were Catholic and settled in rabidly Protestant Toronto. They became Canadian citizens as soon as law allowed. In their long lives, they never spoke of the glories of their Austrian homeland nor of how things were done differently and better over there. They did not bring European politics to Canada.

Little wonder I have no patience for partisan and nationalist arguments among later immigrants. Disputes in foreign lands must be left there.

Little wonder my patience ran out in 2010. The then Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty met with the Indian transport minister to discuss trade. Because of a grievance back in India, a group of Sikhs protested. "Unless they make amends quickly, the Liberals will definitely lose this community's votes," said Harbans Jandali, president of the Ontario Sikh  and Gurdwara Council.

I sent a letter to the Toronto Star arguing that foreign problems are better left off-shore and that Canadian politicians should not be held hostage to behaviour on the other side of the world. I sent a similar letter to Mr. Jandali. The newspaper did not publish, nor did Mr. Jandali reply.

This came to mind when I read a report in the Star of August 13, 2015 headlined, "Canadian Jews in Israel could help Harper."

My email to the Star, also unpublished:

It's disappointing if people holding Canadian citizenship but living permanently in foreign countries vote in Canadian elections in a way to further the interests of those countries in preference to those of Canada.

In the forthcoming election, some such Canadians living in Israel will vote for Stephen Harper because of his stand on Middle East affairs.

Disappointing because my vote on Canadian issues will be cancelled by a single-issue voter concerned more with off-shore matters than with our economy, health care, Aboriginal rights, research funding, the environment and so on.

Will the real Billy Bishop please stand up

Letter to the Toronto Star, August 1, 2015. Unpublished.

World War flying ace Billy Bishop may or may not be proud of the tunnel to the Toronto airport bearing his name (Billy would be proud, editorial, July 31).

More likely he would cringe at the thought there has long been an airport named after him in his home town of Owen Sound. Imagine a flight from Billy Bishop to Billy Bishop.

Yes, Bishop trained World War Two pilots at this site. But was there need to take the name of an existing facility? Toronto Island Airport makes more sense. The present name should be changed.

*   *   *

August 17, after-thought. The airport should have been named after Canada's most decorated soldier, Lt.-Col. William Barker. This Manitoba farm boy shot down 50 enemy aircraft during the First World War. He also received awards from France and Italy. There is always time to make a correction.

More censorship at the Toronto Star

The issue here is the Toronto Star's apparent double-speak. The photograph that appears in the Star shows Justin Trudeau in a Pride Parade alongside a young women with her breasts exposed. The Star blurred out her nipples. Thus my unpublished letter of August 8, 2015. 

Re Topless photos with Trudeau cause Internet commotion, Aug. 7:

The Toronto Star promotes the Pride parade as a "family event." In other words, you recommend we take our children to see topless women in the flesh. Yet, when it comes to publishing photographs of this "family event," you indulge in censorship, as in this case. Can you explain this double-dealing scented with a whiff of hypocrisy?

Canada Post, censorship or not?

In March 2014, Canada Post issued a public apology. It had delivered to residents of Happy Valley-Goose Bay flyers critical of the homosexual lifestyle. In a published letter to the Toronto Star, I asked if the corporation had become a censorship agency responsible for the content of what it delivers.

This month, the issue flared up again. The flyer in question was pro-life (anti-abortion to others) but found offensive by some. The postal union got into the act by claiming some letter carriers were upset about the flyers and have balked at delivering them. The union "supports our members who feel they have a legitimate concern that a corporation like Canada Post should work to preserve family values."  So now it's the the union that wants into the censorship business.

Common sense at last. A Canada Post spokesperson stated that the corporation is not responsible for the content of mail and is legally obligated to deliver all such material.

How not to win friends

To secure an advocate for one's cause, there are ways to go about it, and ways not to go about it.

At a trial in Toronto, the charge was living off the avails of prostitution, in street parlance, pimping. As the Crown Attorney's questions became more pointed, the accused thought he would win the jury's sympathy. He shouted at the prosecutor, "Admit it. You've been after me for years because I once shot a cop."  If any jury members were asleep, that woke them up. He was found guilty.

Land-locked Bolivia would like access to the nearby Pacific Ocean over the territory of its neighbour, Chile. During the return flight to Rome following his recent visit to South America, Pope Francis was asked by a Bolivian national if he would mediate this dispute. The pope said he could not comment as the issue was currently before the International Court of Justice. In any event, was the pope disposed to help?

A few days earlier, Bolivia's leftist president, Evo Morales, presented Francis with a gift. It was a cross in the shape of a hammer with a sickle mounted on it.  A "communist cross" is hardly the way to win a friend then ask him for help.

Greece, Toronto and Subsidiarity

Letter to the Toronto Star. Unpublished.

Richard Gwyn points out the flaw in bigness ("Taking on the bullies," July 7, 2015).  Much of the pain now endured by the people of Greece can be traced to the enormous bureaucracy of the European Union, Gwyn maintains. 

Elsewhere in the same issue of the Toronto Star we see the headline "Amalgamation a flop, Fraser study suggests."  The report questions the purported financial advantage of amalgamating Metropolitan Toronto into a mega-city. Purported cost savings were not realized. In fact, overall costs increased. This mistake was the work of the government of Mike Harris who believed bigger is better. 

In Toronto, there is talk of de-amalgamation. Europeans should also be thinking in terms of de-centralization, of invoking subsidiarity, that is the placing of control of various matters with the smallest government level best able to handle it.

Equity Demands Equal Pain

In a recent decision, Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Peter Lauwers wrote, "The legislative scheme offers no way out for people who are impoverished, dealing with health issues, or other difficulties, and who bear the burdens of these enormous fines for many years... It is most unfortunate that there is no process in the system for commuting old and back-breaking fines for people who have little prospect of paying therm, and whose lives are being ruined."

 The Canadian Law Dictionary defines equity as "Justice according to natural reason and good conscience as distinct from that which is strictly according to law."

In the spirit of Justice Lauwers' enlightened approach to law enforcement and in a spirit of equity, I propose that motor vehicle fines be levied in such a way as to produce equal pain for all offenders, that they be levied according to the defendant's ability to pay.

A $50 parking fine is a serious burden for a low-wage earner but a mere nuisance to a rich person and unlikely to discourage further violations.  Therefore, fines for parking and traffic offences be rated according to the value of the car. Thus the $50 fine for the owner of a modest car would be $100 to $150 for the owner of an up-scale vehicle. The brand name of the car can be programmed into the hand-held devices of ticketing officers such that the ticket automatically indicates the amount of the fine.

Equity demands equal pain for equal violations of the law.

"To kill the Indian in the child" -- never uttered

I recently criticized the Toronto Star for its editorial use of the odious expression "to kill the Indian in the child."  The basis of my objection was the Star's placing these words in quotation marks and failing to attribute them to some actual person.

This occurred in the midst of the vacuous debate of whether the Indian residential schools constituted cultural genocide. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverley McLachlin, waded in thereby shedding her robes of judicial impartiality and exposing the legal activist.

Toronto Star apologist Cathy English replied with an excerpt from a speech by Stephen Harper where he used phrase again in quotation marks, again without attribution. On occasion the expression was attributed to the poet Duncan Campbell Scott, long-time Superintendent of Indian Affairs responsible for the residential schools.. Worse still, one correspondent claimed it appears in Canadian legislation.

Statements in quotation marks must be the exact words uttered by an attributable source. Neither the Star nor the Prime Minister followed this essential rule.

For the record, an excerpt from Conversations with a Dead Man; the legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott by Mark Abley:

"But the offending phrase is not Scott's. He never used those words. Neither did any other Canadian official. The quotation can be traced back to a somewhat different statement uttered by a high-ranking officer in the U.S. Army, Richard Henry Pratt, the nineteenth-century superintendent of a residential school in Pennsylvania: 'All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man'."

"Homophobic" rendered meaningless

The word "homophobic" has had a three-stage history.

Early in the twentieth century, "homo" was from the Greek meaning "the same." Homophobic meant fear of the same, that is, fear of boredom.  Apparently ennui was a major concern at that time.  Oscar Wilde described it (ennui) as "the one sin for which there is no forgiveness." According to engram, the word disappeared from common use.

In the mid-1930s, it reappeared, this time in its Latin derivation of "homo" meaning "man." For a short while, homophobic referred to a woman who feared men.

The use of the word since the 1970s should be rendered "homosexualphobia."

Beyond fear, the word is currently used as a pejorative to castigate any questioning or disagreement with homosexual behaviour in public such as walking naked on our main streets or simulating sexual acts many consider lewd.

The word has now used so broadly it has no definable meaning.

Erasing Toronto history

Letter to the Toronto Star, June 3, 2015. Unpublished.

The Star shows concern for the erasure of aboriginal street names (Ojibe street signs bold reminder of aboriginal heritage, June 3), yet none for the disappearance of other historic names. 

I refer to the changing of Cawthra Square in downtown Toronto to Barbara Hall Park. Surely there was some better way to honour the former Human Rights Commissioner than by blotting out the name of one of our early families? 

For more than a century, Cawthra Square was the name of a plot of land in the Isabella and Jarvis area near where William Cawthra's widow lived after her husband's death in 1880. William was a businessman and philanthropist.

"Who am I to judge?"

Letter to the Toronto Star published June 5, 2015

This report (Can Pope create a climate for change? May 30) describes Pope Francis as one who “opened the church’s doors to gays by simply saying, Who am I to judge?” 

In a press conference, he said, “A gay person who is seeking God, who is of good will – well, who am I to judge him?” 

In fairness, the entire sentence must always be cited.

The message and the messenger

Letter to the Editor, Toronto Star, May 27. Unpublished.

Re The folly of the 'density creep' crew, May 26:

This column by Heather Mallick is an object lesson on how not to debate an issue. 

Mallick disagrees with residents' objections to a real estate development on their street. "A surly bunch," she describes them.  "Stubby-legged and trousered, sturdy as the two-storey, single-family homes they're defending, they pose in a hostile clump as they alert all Toronto to a coming menace. If you want to catch them smiling, turn the photo upside down."  

Mallick does not like the message, so she attacks the messenger. 

One event, three observations

The event:
Adolescents in a Toronto are vehemently protesting their high school dress code, specifically the injunction against clothing which exposes girls' midriffs. The piece of clothing in  contention was once called a halter top. Young girls believe they have discovered something new because haberdashers now call them crop tops.

Observation One:
"Youth due to its limited experience, tends to gravitate to absolutes. If it rejects, with cause, the absolutes of U.S. policy, it moves easily to separate but equal absolutisms."
               --- Rick Salutin, Toronto Star, May 29, 2015.

Observation Two:
"The young, at an age when they have not yet any experience other than sexual, when they do not yet have years of personal suffering and personal understanding behind them, are jubilantly repeating our depraved Russian blunders of the Nineteenth Century under the impression they are discovering something new . . . But of those who have lived more and understand, those who could oppose these young, many do not dare oppose. They even such suck up, anything not to appear conservative. Another Russian phenomenon of the Nineteenth Century which Dostoevsky called "slavery to progressive quirks."
                --- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture in Literature 1970

Observation Three:
Recently, I saw a reference to "the ethical sensitivity of youth."

Omar Khayyam

OK's to-do list:

--  a loaf of bread from the baker
--  a jug of wine from the vintner
--  a book of verse from the library
--  two song sheets
--  pick up thou
--  head for the wilderness.

P.S. That's Paradise enow.

Muslim dress vs French hot pants

A 15-year old Muslim girl in France has been banned from school for wearing a long black skirt. That's anathema to the nation's cult of secularism. An official said it was not the skirt that was the issue. Rather, because she wore it as a sign of her faith. Are we at that point in Western history where one's motive for wearing a certain piece of clothing is of greater importance than the clothing itself?

She was ordered to wear "neutral clothing." Does that mean mini-skirts and hot pants? Would the government object if a Paris fashion house introduced The Muslim Look?

Much of the current situation stems from idolatry of the state. Its current manifestation, secularism, tends to eliminate personal freedom, as in the case of this young woman. France has a poor record in this regard. The search for a national persona continues. How about something yet untried -- a tolerant and accommodating secularism?

Canada should launch an immigration program in France designed for Muslims. Advertising would read: "Come to Canada. Come as you are. You will be welcomed (except in Quebec)."

In her book "Belonging," former Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson wrote, "True secularism means the acceptance of many beliefs, not the eradication of them all."  

We should all work towards a balance between extreme freedom of expression which sews the seeds of violence and extreme criticism of religion which demeans personal belief. Life entails a balancing of interests, a compromise.

The TTC has gone PC

The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is ending Sunday stops outside churches. I can understand the TTC ending Sunday stops for business reasons. 

The excuse offered was intellectually insulting. The spokesperson said, "It's just about ensuring there's some equity." In other words, because some receive an extra service, equity says none can have it. Does that mean consideration for the handicapped and seniors will be abolished?  

The TTC has expressed the race-to-the-bottom mentality of the politically correct. 

Sex education

Letter to Toronto Star, published May 9.

Re Dispel myths on sex ed, Editorial, May 2:

This editorial claims that 49 per cent of those polled support the Ontario government's proposed sex education curriculum, while 34 per cent oppose. In the same edition of the Toronto Star we read that 42 per cent support while 40 per cent oppose. Within the margin of error, this constitutes a tie. 

Whichever numbers one uses, each side is a minority. Neither can rightly be described as a "vocal minority" with its covert message of disapproval.

Ninety per cent of Ontarians may agree the curriculum needs updating. That does not confer blanket approval for whatever some in the government deem acceptable. With so many opposed to parts of the proposed curriculum, this has become a classic case calling for accommodation for both sides.

What standard to judge the past?

Letter to the Toronto Star, April 26.

Re War poet remembered, April 26:

In his review of of a new biography of Rupert Brooke, James Cullingham comes close to the error of presentism -- the judging of historical events in the light of today's purportedly superior standards. 

For example, in his travels across Canada, Brooke met Duncan Campbell Scott whom the reviewer describes as the "now notorious assimilationist Canadian poet and Department of Indian Affairs mandarin." Scott believed the best future for our first nations was assimilation into the European culture. 

That was a common feeling a century ago. Today, some consider it notorious. A century from now, who knows?