Author: Justin Podur

It’s too bad that liberals don’t look to leftists for advice. Every once in a while in this blog I come up with brilliant ideas for what Canada’s Liberal party should do. The following is another instalment in that long and futile tradition.

Continue reading “If only the Liberals listened to me…”

I have written a bit about Canadian foreign policy over the past few years. The big piece I wrote and built on since, I called “Canada for anti-imperialists”. That was about four years ago now. Since then, I learned two things.

1) Films can reach audiences that written articles can’t, and
2) I have absolutely no skill, ability, aptitude, or enjoyment in filmmaking

Luckily for me, others do!

Continue reading “Myths for Profit”

The 2008 Canadian election has some of the features of the past few elections. The majority of the population faces the quandary of how to defeat a reactionary party that just might have the largest plurality of support. Will they get a majority or just a minority? The second place party has slight differences with the ruling party but has a record of lies, destructive neoliberal economics, and destructive foreign policy. Should they be taught a lesson or have they learned it? Can they be punished without the electorate punishing itself? The electoral system is increasingly out of step with the diversity of popular opinion. And some very important questions about immigrant rights, indigenous rights, indigenous territory, corporations, and the country’s relationship to the rest of the world, are off the table. But for all that, it is still an interesting situation. In last week’s leaders’ debates, three of the five parties, who got equal time, had left-of-center views. Of course, in North America the center moves steadily to the right and is defined by it, but the debate was still refreshing. Environmentalism is popular, and the presence of the Green Party forces the NDP to run more openly to the left, since the centrist environmentalist niche is already filled by the Greens. Fighting with the Greens for this niche has also had a civilizing influence on the Liberals, who are talking about climate change seriously.

There are still too many taboo topics. Taxation, for example, was denounced by all parties in the debate, who fall over themselves and each other to insist their plans won’t increase anyone’s taxes. This is public miseducation. Like budget deficits, taxes have their role, and for politicians to eschew them is to tie the society’s hands before situations that require flexible economic responses. Making people pay more to ride public transit, or adding user fees for health care services or pharmaceuticals, or cutting funding for the arts, causes suffering just as surely as raising taxes does – it just causes suffering for different people. Letting the transportation, energy, and water infrastructure rot doesn’t make a budget deficit, but it does make an infrastructure deficit, and society ultimately will pay for either kind. This is especially true in a time when the Harper/Bush/McCain people’s economic policies have proven so spectacularly and widely disastrous and ideas of public economic management need to be quickly and sensibly resurrected and implemented.

But these simple points cannot be made in any political campaign because for a party to say they would use deficit spending or increase taxes (as opposed to “shifting” taxes) would be harmful to them politically. But allowing the society’s economic discourse to be dominated by ideological distortion also does political harm, especially to progressive forces (and parties that would use those forces to come to power).

Another example is ‘terrorism’. You would never know from politicians or the media that everything that is a crime under new ‘anti-terror’ legislation (killing people with bombs or guns, kidnapping people, destroying infrastructure) was a crime before the ‘anti-terror’ legislation. The legislation is a political tool for increasing state and police powers, and is being used in ugly ways against a group of young people in Toronto as these elections are unfolding. In his recent sentence against one of the Toronto 18, the judge argued that it did not matter that the 20-year old had committed no crime, and it didn’t matter that he may not have known. The NYT correspondent (and yes, for sensible coverage of this Canadian topic the NYT was better than the mainstream Canadian press) Ian Austen described the trial this way:

“Evidence presented in court made it clear that, at best, the man was a minor character in the group… There was no evidence offered directly linking the defendant to the bomb plot or plans to storm Parliament. Instead, most of the case focused on his attendance at two camps that the police described as terrorist training sessions but that prosecution witnesses characterized as recreational or religious retreats. Both were videotaped by a paid police informant who was part of the group and who testified that he choreographed some of the scenes.” (NYT Sept 25/08)

The informant, in question, said this about the young man found guilty: ‘“I don’t believe he was a terrorist,”… Mr. Shaikh said he did not believe that the defendant was aware of the group’s violent plans.’ (NYT Sept 26/08)

As for Judge Sproat, who rendered the verdict, he argued that “planning and working toward ultimate goals that appear unattainable or even unrealistic does not militate against a finding that this was a terrorist group… engaging in activities such as paint-balling, physical exercise and rafting is by no means inconsistent with the existence of a terrorist group” (NYT Sept 26/08)

Sproat’s verdict fits with well the Rumsfeld doctrine on the same topic: “The absence of evidence does not indicate the evidence of absence.” And it has the same shocking implications for Canada’s legal system. Or would, if anyone were paying the slightest attention. But here, too, it seems politicians have nothing to gain by suggesting that we ought not allow the state to use entrapped suburban youths to terrify us into surrendering rights to due process.

Other non-debated examples that politicians stay away from? The continuing occupation of recently hurricane-devastated Haiti, Canadian support for all of Israel’s moves against Palestinians, the neoliberal “Free Trade Agreements” with the US and other Latin American countries like Colombia, the use of force and prison terms against indigenous communities defending land and life, and so on.

And yet there is the occasional glimmer of a genuine discussion. When an Afghan-Canadian argued that Canada should remain with NATO in occupying that country, Jack Layton argued that Canada should not have been there in the first place and should withdraw as soon as possible. When Harper tried to offer the usual deceptions about reducing ‘emissions intensity’ as opposed to carbon emissions, Giles Duceppe used his time to explain exactly why this was a deception: the example he gave was – you would reduce emissions by 10% per barrel, but then you would produce 5,000 barrels instead of 1,000. These are glimpses of what one could actually hope for from a political debate: people not letting sham arguments pass unexposed.

The most intriguing possibility has more to do with the voting pattern than with the outcome. As much as I like what they are doing at voteforenvironment.ca in spite of critiques like this one, I don’t like the final outcome sought by voteforenvironment.ca (75 Con, 123 Lib, 52 NDP, 1 Green, 55 Bloc, 2 IND). I would prefer it to be even closer between the Liberals and the Conservatives. The latest national poll has Con 33%, Lib 26%, NDP 19%, Green 12%, and Bloc 10%. It is certainly true that it is worth putting thought and effort into averting a conservative majority. But a split of 35-25-20-20 in Anglo-Canada and the Bloc taking most of Quebec, for example, that resulted in a Conservative minority (or even a majority) would create strong pressure for change in the electoral system: in such a system the Liberals would have much more to gain from insisting on such a change than trying to keep a two-party system and hope they can win in it. Proportional representation would create other possibilities for progressive forces during elections, and reasons for politicians to have to pay attention.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer.

Last night I saw Naomi Klein speak to a packed house at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto. She captured a lot of what I’ve been feeling these days and managed to explain to me why I have been unable to write anything for the past two weeks. I’ve felt there was so much going on that all I could do was some kind of roundup of all the things that would treat them all superficially, or delve into one or two and not mention some huge things that were going on, neither of which appealed to me. Not that silence in these times is better. But Naomi helped me solve my problem with a strategy of her own: try to explain the situation and get help with what to do from people you respect.

It was strange, she said, to be on a platform speaking to a room full of people trying to analyze events that seem to be going too quickly to make sense of. But she proceeded to do as good a job, it seems to me, as anyone could, of offering something that could help people make sense of things.

I would summarize her talk as follows. She started from the basic premise of her book, the Shock Doctrine: that elites use the shock of natural disasters or military violence to impose economic policies that redistribute wealth from the people to the wealthy. She also used a quote from Friedman from the book, that the key was what ideas were “lying around” when a crisis hits. Friedman and the Chicago School and their counterparts around the world ensured that their privization/deregulation/monetarism were lying everywhere, and also helped to motivate and justify the violence that imposed the ideas.

What did that have to do with this moment? Several things. First, the financial collapse of the US banks and mortgage institutions were a direct outcome of these ideas. Second, that the solution to such a crash, the last time there was one of such magnitude (and with similar causes, in the 1920s), was the entry of the government into the economy in a massive way – the regulation, nationalization, taxation, and public investment of the New Deal in the US. At that time, though, there was more grassroots organizing locally (though, like the organizations that exist today, those were demonized and made invisible as much as possible at the time and in historical accounts) and there was more international rivalry (from the Soviet Union and 3rd world nationalism). Today US elites see themselves as victors enjoying the spoils of the world and, like a neglectful partner in a romantic relationship, see no ideological or institutional competition to give them an incentive to behave better.

And yet, Naomi said, this was ours (progressives’) moment to lose. We ought not to defeat ourselves by believing their propaganda about us, that our project failed because our ideas failed. That is not true. And they are proving it for us – by socializing the debt that the banks incurred, they are showing what progressives know and always have said – that government always plays the major role, the only question is whether that role will be on behalf of the wealthy or whether there will be some component of looking after the public. We should not be deceived by their arguments of inevitability, especially now that they have demonstrated their incompetence and their inability to handle the situation. Nor should we be deceived by their declarations of our weakness. We, she concluded, are much stronger than we think.

There were more details, including some very interesting ones, but that was the basic argument she presented. What followed was almost as good as the talk itself though, as Naomi switched from being a speaker to being a host for some of the best activist organizations in the city to talk about a huge number of things that are happening now. It is going to take a lot of people to try to make sense of these times, and the structure of the event was consistent with that message. The activists that spoke were also excellent and at their best. People always ask me what to do, Naomi said, so I am going to get some help answering that question.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty talked about an ongoing campaign for public housing in Toronto. Public housing used to be one way to house people affordably. The alternative, Naomi pointed out, was the open ended speculative mortgage bonanza that culminated in first the foreclosure crisis last year and the collapse of banks this year. Any US crisis will eventually be a Canadian crisis, since Canada’s elites have made the country so dependent on the US. And any US economic doctrines become Canadian doctrines – at least the elite ones. In Toronto the City’s strategy is to become the biggest slumlord in the city, refusing to do the necessary repairs and keeping the people in the public housing system in squalor, so that the argument can eventually be made that the buildings should be condemned and replaced with condos, privatized. OCAP is part of a campaign to fight this through witholding rent and pooling it for repairs themselves. It is a simple and brilliant strategy that will work if enough people take it up. Another fight is against the invisibilization of homeless people on the streets – once invisible, they lose any protection from the state’s depredations. There’s a street takeover on Saturday October 4th. If you’re in Toronto, be there. This was a moment of extraordinary opportunities and dangers, but the biggest mistake would be to accept the inevitability of capitalism.

More fighting words came from the Tyendinaga support committee, who gave us the latest on Shawn Brant’s case and on a successful fight against a $2 million police station in a community that doesn’t have drinkable water.

Two speakers from No One is Illegal talked the fight against deportations, the exploitation of insecure labor, and the ongoing theft of land and resources from indigenous people, the deeper elements of the whole system. They both talked about what solidarity means – fighting along with the oppressed.

Someone from the Stop the War Coalition pointed out that in all the talk of present and future fiscal crisis that is going to preclude needed investment in social and environmental areas, no one is questioning the need for trillions (in the US) and hundreds of billions (in Canada) of dollars to go to the military. Also, that if Canadian mobilization helped stop Canada’s elites from joining the war in Iraq, it could do the same to end Canada’s participation in the occupation of Afghanistan (and future wars).

The Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid talked about how the Palestinians are the experimental subjects for innovation of the Shock Doctrine – surveillance, control, torture, imprisonment, destruction of the basis of survival. CAIA argued for the campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli regime and Canada’s support for it, until Israel complies with international law.

Discussion then turned to the Canadian election that will take place on October 14. An activist from a very clever website, voteforenvironment.ca pointed out that on October 14, Canadians would have their choice of 4 parties with progressive environmental policies and one dinosaur (the Tories). The Tories do not have a majority of the public by any means but they could win a majority because of our electoral system. Unless voters subvert the electoral system by voting strategically (which is NOT the same as voting liberal!). The site gives riding-by-riding information on who the favourites are and who the best candidate to defeat the tories is in each riding. It is non-partisan, other than being anti-Tory, which agrees very well with my position on this election. Please take a look at their site and pass it along. Canadians are some of the most wired people in the world per capita, which means a campaign like this could work. (Another motivation to oust the Tories, related to the high per-capita internet use of Canadians, is the Tories’ appalling digital copyright bills, the subject of some very interesting campaigning: see Russell McCormand’s blog, for a place to start). Activists from a new group called the Department of Culture also announced their campaign and upcoming events (that will be appealing since they’re artists) to try to stop the Harper people.

The whole event was really special for two reasons. One, because it tried to respond to a great deal of what was going on very seriously and sincerely, and managed to present so many campaigns and ideas and still seem politically coherent (at least to me). Two, because the relationship between the activist groups and event organizers and the speaker was just the right one: one of dialogue and mutual support.

The best line of the night was when she was talking about the job of progressives being to move the center. Let the liberals in power make the compromises – movements should push them. And in times like these, the more pushing, the better the eventual compromise. If, for example, they said the green economy couldn’t be afforded after socializing the public debt, then the way forward is clearly to nationalize the oil companies as well as the banks, since oil companies were still very profitable. In short, Naomi advised, ‘get out there and say some crazy stuff’.

I agree.

PS: This is not an unbiased article, nearly all the groups and people I mentioned are friends, groups I belong to, people I admire, etc.

PPS: I am going to try to write something about the economic crisis in the coming days. People have been asking and I have been researching…