40 ideas we need now
On the occasion of our 40th birthday, This Magazine asked 40 past and present contributors—and some distinguished guests—for a big idea whose time has come. Some particularly inspired folks contributed more than one idea; sadly we couldn’t include “helmets for drivers” (J.B. MacKinnon) or “deep-fried butter sticks” (Ivan E. Coyote), but what is here represents an incredible array, with ideas as diverse and individual as the people who contributed them. (With illustrations by Graham Roumieu)
Looking for more inspiring ideas? Read the collection of ideas not available in print, from such thinkers as Olivia Chow, Elizabeth May and Aiden Enns.
The opposite of a big idea
JUDY REBICK
My big idea is the opposite of the next big idea. In my generation, the practice of the left was differentiation. Each of us believed that our position was “correct.” We fought against the other currents who we believed were fundamentally wrong, counter-revolutionary, reformist, sell outs, Stalinists, liberal or whatever other epithet we could think up.
I think now we need to look at integration. We should be looking at all the ideas and practices that are moving us forward in the political, social, environmental, cultural and even the spiritual worlds. What I mean by moving us forward are ideas and practices that are working for change on a series of levels, dealing not only with economic and political issues directly, but also with social, cultural, individual and institutional change, and, most importantly, linking them. I am not suggesting we give up our ideas, but rather that we open our minds and hearts to knowledge and wisdom from outside of the traditional left, even broadly defined.
In a recent visit to Bolivia, I was struck with the approach of the MAS (Movement Towards Socialism). Rooted in centuries-old traditions of communitarian socialism, reciprocity and a oneness with the Earth, combined with decades of radical and militant trade-union and indigenous struggles, the MAS took power under the leadership of Evo Morales late last year. When I asked Morales to explain their philosophy, he responded:
“The indigenous communities have historically lived in community, in collectivity, in harmony not only with each other as human beings but with Mother Earth and nature, and we have to recover that. If we think about life as equality and justice, if we think of humanity, the model of the West, industrialization and neo-liberalism, is destroying the planet Earth, which for me is the great Pachamama [the supreme goddess of Aymara/Quechua who are the largest groups of indigenous peoples in Bolivia]. The model that concentrates capital in the hands of the few, this neo-liberal model, this capitalist model is destroying the planet Earth. And it’s heading towards destroying humanity. It really can do that. And from Bolivia we can make a modest contribution to defend life, to save humanity. That’s our responsibility.”
What’s important to note is the way in which Morales roots their struggle in the ancient tradition of indigenous peoples, but also combines the struggle to protect the environment with the struggle for social justice and for the defence of humanity itself. It is the way in which the Bolivians bring together movements and ideas that have not been integrated before that I believe gives them their power, and to a degree, their popularity.
At the 2002 World Social Forum, a young friend dragged me to a session on spirituality. It was the most interesting session I attended that year. A former Marxist, now a Buddhist who calls himself Siddhartha, said, “The situation in the world is too grave to allow differences of ideology or ego to divide us. We must focus on what unites us.”
In their far-seeing book, Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri say that we will find the new strategies of transformation for this new stage of capitalism we call neo-liberalism or corporate globalization by looking for the “common,” the elements that are shared by the diverse peoples and movements struggling for change around the world.
The next big ideas will come from the spaces of convergence among different movements for change globally and across a much broader spectrum than we have been willing to look at in the past.
Universal daycare
NICOLE COHEN
Ask a working mom what big idea she thinks will change the world and she’ll likely say universal daycare. Chaviva Hosek, then president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, put it pretty plainly back in 1984: Canada’s patchwork daycare system made it “almost impossible for women to be in the labour force.” Feminists were lobbying for a publicly funded, universally accessible national daycare program, which they believed was key to women’s liberation.
Though the language around daycare has shifted—it’s no longer spoken of as a women’s issue, but rather, euphemistically, as a “family” issue—the lack of a national daycare program in Canada remains one of the biggest barriers to women’s economic and political equality, especially in light of the Conservative government’s $1,200 per year for kids under six, which amounts to little more than state-funded incentive to keep moms at home. Such a program would free women from the burden of childcare, which overwhelmingly falls on our shoulders, and would take pressure off families who rely on neighbours and relatives to watch the kids. Women wouldn’t have to drop out of the labour market to care for kids, preventing them from being “mommy-tracked” to precarious, low-wage and part-time employment. This would close the gendered pay gap, as Canadian women still earn 63 percent of what men earn. Hosek said it back in 1984, and working moms are saying it today: It’s time to put daycare on the table.
A rational public sphere
MARK KINGWELL
Imagine: the unforced force of the better argument as the sole yardstick of political authority. Previous generations of democrats did, and then found rationality something to be suspicious of—only to wake up and find that the ground of argument was no longer beneath their feet. Secular humanism was a heresy, civil liberties a nuisance, due process and privacy mere cavils to be got around by executive fiat. Worst of all, political leaders were communing directly with supernatural entities via interior monologue. As the critic Sam Harris notes, if the same claim for dialogue with God were made via a hairdryer instead of communion, there would be a national emergency. “I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes the claim more ludicrous or more offensive,” Harris says.
The problem is, he’s more right than he knows. True, the hair dryer is no more or less ludicrous to the rational mind than inaccessible private dialogue, because both are equally offensive; but it is likewise no more or less ludicrous to the credulous mind, because both are equally invisible. That is, it makes literally no difference at all to a somnambulant citizenry which model of opaque logic governs political decisions because it is opacity, not the alleged source or medium of dialogue, that makes for the offence. Absent a context of public reason, in which claims of legitimacy are made and criticized openly, there is no such thing as a national emergency, hair dryer or no hair dryer.
Which is probably another way of saying that the idea whose time has come is philosophy, understanding by that much-abused word what Jonathan Lear calls “conceptual therapy”: not making ourselves feel better by means of concepts, but subjecting our concepts to therapeutic investigation. That’s an idea whose time has always already come, has come again and again, forever and ever, world without end. So no talking to hair dryers, okay?
Unlearning the tyranny of facts
DAVID NAYLOR
Not long ago my daughter took a half-course designed to promote critical thinking. She learned how to pinpoint flaws in logic, dissect rhetorical flourishes away from the core of an argument, examine issues from different perspectives and differentiate science from pseudo-science. My batting average in our debates, already mediocre, sunk to new lows. It remains possible, unfortunately, for students to move through secondary and post-secondary educational institutions without acquiring strong reasoning skills. We are still very focused on facts—arrayed in patterns, conveyed passively, or uncovered more or less predictably through cookbook experimentation and unchallenging exploration. That emphasis seems incongruous. With computers able to store and search vast amounts of information, facts are cheap. And with the pace of scientific advance and the range of legitimate perspectives on most issues, facts are also evanescent and surprisingly mutable.What might the next generation of learners do instead of memorizing facts, you ask? Among other things, they could read and play music. Play more sports. Write prose and poetry. Acquire a skeptic’s toolkit of sound reasoning skills. Debate highly-charged issues and learn the lost art of rational and respectful discourse. Study inspirational biographies, not to memorize facts, but to promote understanding of how one might lead a more meaningful life. I can’t prove that these measures would equip tomorrow’s students to make the world a better place. But given the work to date of “well-educated” baby boomers, it might just be time to try something a little different inside—and outside—the classroom.
Microbicides
ANURITA BAINS
A microbicide is a substance, a product that is in development, that will reduce the transmission of HIV during sexual intercourse. Microbicides could be topically applied by a woman as a gel or a cream, or they could take the form of an intra-vaginal ring that releases an active ingredient gradually. The form is not important; what is important is that it will prevent HIV infection, put protection from the virus into the hands of women and potentially save millions of lives. In Africa, 59 percent of those infected with HIV are women; in the 15-24 age group, a staggering 76 percent of those living with HIV/AIDS are women and girls. Gcebile Ndlovu, a friend and a women’s rights activist in Swaziland, says, “If we let things go the way they are, there won’t be any women tomorrow.” It’s not an unreasonable statement. Women are biologically more susceptible to HIV, but it’s not only their physiological makeup that puts them at risk; pervasive disempowerment fuels the spread of the virus.
African women lack legal protection against abuse, violence and harmful cultural practices. They have no sexual autonomy and negotiating condom use is extremely difficult. A microbicide—a product that puts protection from HIV in the hands of women—would be a sexual, political and cultural revolution for women in Africa. A product that is effective only 60 percent of the time could prevent 2.5 million new HIV infections over a three-year span. And that’s a conservative estimate. Researchers say that an effective microbicide is five to seven years away. It couldn’t be a moment too soon.
Small ideas
ANDREW POTTER
Leftism is closely allied with utopianism, and utopianism is nothing if not dedicated to the pursuit of the Big Idea. From Smash the State and Destroy Capitalism to Make Poverty History and Impeach Bush, no one can accuse progressives of thinking small.
And why not? There are plenty of things to like about big ideas. A big idea is sexy and exciting, promising to remake and renew a world that is tired, stagnant and corrupt. There is no question that the great appeal of the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s was that it led its participants to believe that they were on the cusp of a revolution, their demonstrations a series of rogue waves in the flood tide of history. At the same time, big ideas have always seemed perfectly calibrated to the scale of the challenges. Fascism, Poverty, Empire—these are big, powerful opponents that have always been fought with big, powerful ideas.
Since the final collapse of its biggest economic idea, socialism, the North American left has dedicated the bulk of its energies to the pursuit of moral utopianism. This is the conviction that a society of any reasonable size could do away with both market incentives and the coercive power of the state, relying only on moral suasion to achieve large-scale political and economic goals. But the popular version of this idea, the “think globally/act locally” ethic, has had little positive effect. If anything, it has only made most of our problems worse, by exacerbating individualist consumerism and status competition.
Still, defenders of this big idea point to its role as a “regulative ideal.” Even if the revolution is not right around the corner, they ask, isn’t it worthwhile to always remember that a more equitable, just, and ecologically sound society is possible? Isn’t moral utopianism just another way of shooting for the best, even if we will inevitably fall short?
Well, no. One problem is that it leads leftists to reject perfectly good policy initiatives, ones that would lead to tangible improvements in people’s lives, because they are not radical enough or because they “buy into the logic of the system.” As Theodore Roszak put it in his famous book The Making of a Counter Culture, the problem with reform (that is, with small ideas) is that it amounts to nothing more than redesigning the towers of the technocratic citadel, leaving the fundamentally oppressive structures intact.
More importantly, the sort of moral homogeneity that this sort of utopianism requires would be entirely unwelcome. Human values are irreducibly diverse, and our societies will always be beset by groups with deeply conflicting conceptions of the good. This is something we should not lament, but embrace. Our role as progressives is to work for economic and political arrangements that facilitate cooperation among these groups, without choosing between them.
Which is just to say that the future of the left lies with liberalism and the market economy. If this sounds like an acknowledgement of the End of History, that is because it is. History ended while the left wasn’t paying attention, leaving it with no more big ideas, just the sagging corpse of an exhausted ideology propped up by invidious moralizing. The search for the big idea is the Achilles heel of the left. If it is to have any future as a serious political stance and as a viable electoral alternative, the left needs to ratchet down the rhetoric and the ambition, and learn to love the considerable virtues of the small idea.
Individual action
GEOFF HEINRICKS
While E.F. Schumacher’s 1973 book Small is Beautiful has never gone out of print, it has never taken hold. Where the concept struggles on in spirit, it’s sorely pressed upon by the globalist corsairs and their sutlers. The subversive subtitle, Economics as if People Mattered, trumpets that we continually do all sorts of things that don’t make economic sense. And that’s precisely what makes us human. For brevity, I’d plump down chapter two of part two of Schumacher’s book—“The Proper Use of Land.” We’re in for a real world of pain in the next few years, for reasons he recognized so many decades ago. As did writers like Kentucky poet and farmer Wendell Berry. Although it may be too difficult to change the death of rural North America by policy, I do agree with Schumacher’s goal that we should “orient all our actions on the land towards the threefold ideal of health, beauty and permanence.... And this cannot be achieved by tourism, sightseeing or other leisure-time activities, but only by changing the structure of agriculture.” It’s time for individual action. Some of us need to get our hands dirty. Actually, a lot of us do. The sooner the better.
Sharing the road
LISA RUNDLE
Some ideas for social improvement seem so logical it’s hard to understand why they haven’t already crossed over the great divide that separates ideas from reality. You comfort yourself that there must be some good reason it can’t happen or it would already be. “It’s complicated,” you imagine a straight-spined bureaucrat reassuring. But then that childlike clarity surfaces once more, say, as you choke through smoggy traffic by bike or swerve to avoid yet another life-threatening car door, and it feels imperative to know: If global warming is threatening the very existence of life on Earth, if our car-based culture needs to change as quickly as possible to have any hope of turning things around, if rapidly dropping air quality in our increasingly urban lives is sending more and more people to hospitals—why do we still give so much space to motor vehicles?
I was in a provincial park recently in which the looping park road was split down the middle—one side for cars, the other, bikes. What brilliant proportion. Imagining it applied to a downtown core blew my mind. Limit vehicles to those situations in which it truly makes sense to burn a fossil fuel to do whatever you’re doing. And, while we’re at it, let’s insist all our public vehicles—every bus, every police car, every work truck—be converted to lowest-possible emissions. Hybrids? Biodiesel, anyone? And can we stop wiping ourselves with ancient forests, please! Ah well, all just ideas.
A safe place to pee
IVAN E. COYOTE
A place for everyone, and everyone with a place. I’m talking about clean, single-stall, gender-free public washrooms. For some of us, urinating in public is at best stressful, and on a bad day can be a life-threatening ordeal. Ask any old-school butch with a brush cut, and I will bet you one bladder infection she hasn’t peed at a movie theatre since padded shoulder pads were popular. Imagine weaving home in your stilettos after three martinis and a triumphant drag performance. You can’t risk the fluorescent lights in the 7-Eleven, not to mention asking the clerk for the key to the men’s room while wearing a strapless sequined number, so you are forced to hike up your skirt in an alley somewhere and just pray you aren’t spotted by six frat boys who decide they have to kill you because at first sight one of them thought you had nice legs. Or maybe you are a single father looking for a place to change your baby’s diaper. It could work for all of us, if you think about it: one wheelchair-accessible room with a sturdy lock on the door, available to all, no matter what you have under your skirt. The sign on the door would just say “washroom.”
Copyright reform
SUSAN CREAN
For those still wondering what became of the left, I can tell you that it never actually went away; it went virtual. I realized this listening to Eben Moglen, the American copyleft guru, speak at an Open Source conference in Toronto in 2004. I’d not heard such a rousing defence of public enterprise since Kent Rowley died, and it was all about copyright and the public interest in free access to knowledge.
Used to be you could put an audience to sleep by even mentioning the word copyright. That changed, in part because of Napster and the internet, in part because intellectual property became a core element of the global economy, and a source of spectacular individual wealth and huge political meaning. Think Bill Gates, think AIDS in Africa, think Monsanto.
So here’s the situation. The evolution of mass media, and now digitization, has meant that for the first time in history individuals who aren’t landed, titled or particularly wealthy can create wealth by making art out of next-to-nothing and selling it as “cultural content.” (Few actually do strike it rich, but enough to prove the point.) At the same time, large corporations have acquired control over massive parts of the shared cultural heritage of entire societies and generations, doing so by virtue of their role in the production and distribution of cultural works. They can regulate access to this heritage, even when it is in the public domain, and they can charge for it.
You might draw a parallel between Pepsi bottling water, a free public resource, for profit, and Google’s project to digitize all the books in the public domain. No one can quibble with the desire to create access to the world’s library, but the process of privatization that accompanies this is worth arguing about. Basic access to the storehouse of knowledge is turning into a commodity.
This is a serious development with huge implications for human rights and human culture. Which is why the quintessential question of our age is about to become “who owns culture?” The Sack of Baghdad illustrated the point in extremis—as in “Who has the right to destroy the treasures of the past?” But the wars over piracy and downloading music, over the appropriation of indigenous cultures and the cost of drugs, open up the debate to ultimate questions of ownership and the public good. There is now some recognition that copyright reform is a profound and far-reaching matter, involving ethics as well as economics. Way too important to leave to the pols and the pundits. Kent would have loved it.
Beyond the economy
ANDREW COYNE
A common complaint about Canadian politics has it that “everyone is on the right.” The NDP likes to say this about the Conservatives and the Liberals; some on the left say the same of the NDP.
On one level, this is nonsensical. When we say “the right,” we presumably mean right of something, i.e. the centre. Granted, the centre has itself shifted right of late, but it is logically impossible for everyone to be to the right of it.
Nonetheless, it is true that Canadian politics has undergone a great convergence in recent years. It is one, however, in which right and left can take equal satisfaction. If the left has belatedly come to accept the market economy, the right had earlier to come to terms with the state’s social responsibilities. Nobody, left or right, wants to nationalize major industries any more, and nobody, right or left, would deprive the poor of schooling, or health care, or any of the major undertakings of the modern welfare state.
Many people find this suggestion—that we’ve reached a consensus on such matters—deeply upsetting, as an underhanded attempt to marginalize dissent. Is it? Isn’t it conceivable that, as a society, we’ve simply come to … agree? The consensus is not general, after all. It is confined to the economy. It only looks general because, for the past 100 years or so, politics has been almost exclusively about economics.
To anyone born in the 20th century, this seemed like the natural and inevitable state of affairs. Politics took the form of broad clashes of ideology over the organization of economic life—between communism and capitalism, between state and market, between Keynesianism and monetarism. But it was not always so. Politics in previous centuries was largely concerned with other things: with the rights of religious dissenters, say, or how far to extend the franchise. But in time a consensus formed on these issues, and society moved on.
So while there remains debate about the fine points of democracy—for example, on the merits of proportional representation versus first-past-the-post—on the broad strokes there is general agreement: nobody objects that this is “marginalizing” anti-democratic beliefs. Perhaps we have come to the same consensus on the basic social and economic model. We allocate productive resources using markets; we redistribute incomes using the state. We’ll still argue about the particulars. But the stirring ideological battles most of us grew up with may be obsolete.
This isn’t only a matter of convergence: The economy itself seems to give us less to argue about these days. Recessions, and how to remedy them, were once the staples of political debate—but changes in the structure of the economy mean recessions are likely to be both less frequent and less severe than in the past. Inflation, the deficit, even unemployment: none provide quite the fodder they once did.
Nowhere is it written that there must be disagreement about the fundamentals of economic policy. Politics was not always about the economy in the past. Perhaps it will not be in the future.
What might replace it? Climate change seems an obvious candidate, or terrorism: issues on which there is broad disagreement, and which will probably still confront us decades from now. Both, moreover, may require us to rethink conventional ideas about national sovereignty, inasmuch as neither can be addressed except by concerted international action.
But who knows? My only point is to suggest that the economy need not be one of them, and probably won’t be. If not quite the End of History, it may be the end of economics.
TERRY MOSHER
The Hipster PDA
CLIVE THOMPSON
A few years ago, Merlin Mann hit the wall.
The San Francisco web developer was completely disorganized. He was juggling five projects at work, and to try and keep the chaos in check, he produced endless to-do lists, rolodexes full of phone numbers, and calendar reminder-notes. As things spiralled more and more out of control, he desperately tried ever more organizational technology: A Palm Pilot, Microsoft Outlook, anything else his high-tech friends recommended. “But nothing really worked,” he admits, because as most of today’s office drones know, those personal data organizers—or PDAs—are usually more hassle than they’re worth. With all the typing in of notes, synching to your laptop, and sitting there while it harangues you with reminders, you become a slave to the machine.
So Mann threw the technology out the window, and started with a fresh idea: Pen and paper. He bought a stack of 3’’ by 5’’ index cards, and fastened a few dozen together with a big alligator clip. Now whenever he needs to remember something or make a to-do list, he just pulls out a Sharpie marker and writes it down. There’s nothing to synch, no batteries to recharge—just an incredibly elegant “device for capturing and sharing information.”
He even gave it a name: The “Hipster PDA.”
Within days, Mann had started a minor revolution. Thousands of people began clipping index cards together, and throwing their high-tech organizers in the trash can, too. (NDP press secretary Ian Capstick is probably the most famous devotee.) It’s not hard to see why: The low-fi genius of the PDA is a gorgeous corrective to the hysterical complexity of today’s working world. All throughout the ’90s, we were told that software tools and Palm Pilots would allow us to explode in productivity: We’d get more done, have more time for friends, finally change the world. But the opposite happened. A recent Microsoft study discovered that people spent 25 percent of their days organizing how they’ll get stuff done in the other 75 percent.
Why in god’s name should one out of every four minutes be spent organizing yourself? Largely because our organizers are way too complex. By eliminating a layer of technology, the Hipster PDA frees this enormous chunk of your day for leisure, play or that old-fashioned information-crunching regimen known as “thinking.” “We’ve been sold this idea that high tech can solve everything,” says Mann. “It’s not true.”
Best of all, the Hipster PDA is a visual pun—a slap in the face to the Palm Pilot, that gormless icon of 1990s go-go corporate zeal. The Hipster PDA isn’t just a simpler way to organize your life. It’s a reminder that frantic multi-tasking and endless networking are rather idiotic goals in the first place. Sure, a Palm Pilot can hold 2,000 contacts—“but if you’re the kind of person who actually needs to keep track of 2,000 people,” as a friend of mine once joked, “you’re probably an asshole.” High-stress times call for low-fi solutions.
Sustainability
DAVID SUZUKI
Our planet’s six billion inhabitants today consume more than 40,000 litres of oil every second. On the supply side alone, that’s an astounding and unsustainable number. But nothing we use just disappears. Everything goes somewhere and has consequences. For oil, it ends up in our atmosphere, causing air pollution and global warming.
Right now our economy is designed to meet our needs through constant growth—ignoring the facts that resources are not limitless, and that endless pollution will have dire consequences. But our economy doesn’t need to be organized that way. Instead, we need to ensure that the value of the essential services provided by nature is included in our economic bottom line. Clean air and water, fertile soils and a stable climate may be given to us free-of-charge by Mother Nature, but that doesn’t make them worthless. It makes them invaluable.
Surviving the carbon chain
GORDON LAIRD
Dow Chemical Canada announced in August that it was closing two petrochemical plants in Ontario and Alberta, adding to an estimated 50 manufacturing facilities that Dow has shuttered worldwide in the last three years. Some 550 jobs were lost. And there was no national outcry.
But as it often goes, a glimpse of the future resides in a nondescript news item. Dow closed these plants, and others like them, not for lack of demand for valuable petrochemicals. Rather, Dow’s facilities were closed due to a chronic shortage of ethane, a natural gas derivative that serves as an essential ingredient in the global petrochemical business.
A shortage of ethane is an unexpected salvo against our industrial hydrocarbon chain, which features the most diverse set of substances ever manufactured by humans. Petrochemicals bless Wal-Mart with plastic, make fertilizer for food production and fill hospitals with Aspirin. The fruits of our carbon chain—polymers, styrene, methane, nitrogen, paraffins—are the lifeblood of the 21st-century economy. There’s actually a strong historic correlation between the world GDP and ethylene demand—prosperity is plastic, and vice versa.
Chemicals and plastic require significant energy resources (sometimes comprising more than 75 percent of the cost of production) to transform raw hydrocarbons into appliances, plastic packaging and syringes. By its own estimates, Dow Chemical’s global operations consume the equivalent of a Middle East country’s daily gas production. In other words, our hydrocarbon chain is systematically cannibalizing itself.
Add climate change and energy-driven political instability, both of which are in no small way essential fossil fuel by-products, and the modern carbon economy poses the great paradox of the new millennium: the plentiful will become scarce, cheap stuff will prove expensive.
Our hydrocarbon world is a monoculture. And monocultures never last. The “solution” is not merely energy efficiency rebates and hybrid SUVs, but a resolve to reinvent our economy and society for the inevitable crash that a polymerized society will face. Cancelling public subsidies for non-renewable resources and carbon-intensive manufacturing is one of many obvious measures that would help de-intensify the spiral. An immediate, incremental carbon tax, adjusted for income, should be national policy, something that could save our economy as well as help salvage Canada’s foundering international commitments on pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not a matter of choice but of timing.
Water
MAUDE BARLOW
The world is running out of fresh water. Two billion people do not have access to clean water and by the year 2025, says the United Nations, two-thirds of the world will be living with inadequate access. Simply, the massive destruction of both surface and ground-water systems poses the greatest environmental and human rights threat of our time.
This has given rise to a mighty contest. On one side: the global water industry, composed of for-profit water-service companies and bottled water giants; international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and many first world governments, including Canada’s. This side claims that water is a commodity, not a human right.
On the other side: a powerful new international grassroots movement made up of small farmers, indigenous peoples, human rights activists, environmentalists, women’s groups and the inhabitants of thousands of communities around the world fighting for the right to control their local water sources. These groups and many, many others, have formed a global resistance to the corporate theft of their water and are leading the way to a water-secure world based on the belief that water belongs to the earth and all species, and is a universal common trust.
The omission of water from both the original United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has hampered the fight for water justice and has allowed private interests to determine the fate of the world’s water. The process within the UN toward a more binding legal framework has already begun with the adoption of General Comment No. 15—emphasizing the right to water as a cornerstone for all other human rights. The eventual goal is a full UN treaty guaranteeing clean water to every citizen on Earth as a fundamental right and a public service.
Canadians are surprised to learn that successive Canadian governments have openly opposed such a convention at the UN. The official reason given is that such a treaty might require Canada to share its water with the US. In fact, nothing in such a convention would require Canada to lose its water heritage; Canada did that when it signed NAFTA, which treats water as a tradable commodity.
The real reason Canada’s political and business elite refuse to support the right to water is that one day, they want the right to sell Canada’s water to the highest bidder and this would be more difficult if water was universally understood to be a human right, not a commercial good.
Canadians think that because we live in a water-rich country, we can take our water for granted. It is time for Canada and Canadians to become part the global fight for water justice and water stewardship. If we don’t protect and sustain our precious water heritage, someone else is soon going to claim it.
Buycotting
WAYNE ROBERTS
In a knowledge economy, few people know how to make things that can actually be used. That’s why shopping has a bright future, especially among the intelligentsia and other specialists in learned helplessness who denounce consumerism.
Since radicals and environmentalists are articulate shoppers, they will exercise more influence by promoting a particular style of shopping than they do now by pretending they don’t believe in it. Instead of buying a brown bag to wear over our heads when we go shopping on Buy Nothing Day, we can promote Comparative Shopping, an idea whose time to be shopped around has come.
Make sure you contrast comparative shopping with comparison shopping. Comparison shopping is for narcissists. Once the mirror gets boring, they have nothing better to do with their days than shop for more things made solely for their pleasure. They compare to make sure they buy the best-looking thing they least need for the lowest price.
Wal-Mart targets these chumps. Mirror, mirror, on the Wal-Mart, who’s the most beautiful comparison shopper of all? Why, of course, me, me, me: the centre of the world who cares not a whit what child made the good, at what rate of pay, with what toxic chemicals, in what country, carted on what gas-burning vehicle, to be sold by what underpaid clerk, at a mall on what former farmland.
The comparative shopper, by contrast, doesn’t think inside the boxstore, and realizes that all the factors that go into keeping the sticker price low have a way of coming around very expensive when the bill on the hidden sticker price comes due for lives warped by exploitation and pollution. The comparative shopper looks for a package deal, always cheaper than buying one bit at a time, that includes community stability and environmental safety, and which even lowers taxes by creating more local manufacturing jobs while requiring less truck traffic on subsidized highways.
Instead of boycotting, comparative shoppers buycott, increasingly with the help of labels that ensure the product is a good deal all-round. Buycotting can be done individually or in groups, as when schools, hospitals, workplaces and community agencies get into the swing. It’s a strategy for optimizing what economists call “distributed benefits.” Its time has come.
Lowering the voting age
SCOTT PIATKOWSKI
As Canadians tackle escalating voter apathy, we may find part of the answer in the empowerment of teenagers—a group that is stereotypically the most apathetic of all. Giving 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote when they are still in high school will help to establish good citizenship skills that they can apply throughout their lives as voters. In that sense, it will put them a step ahead of the average voter. In my experience as a candidate, those who are too young to vote often do better research and ask better questions than their parents. The key arguments against lowering the voting age to 16 are reminiscent of those used against giving women (in 1917) and Aboriginal people (in 1960 … yes, 1960) the right to vote. Regardless of the voting age, those who want to inform themselves before they vote will do so, and those who don’t won’t.
Voting should be seen as a right, and good reasons must be given in order to deny that right. Sixteen-year-olds can drive. They can apply for subsidized housing. They can leave school. They can be tried as adults. Under certain circumstances, they can marry. They should be allowed to vote.
Reframing the issues
MURRAY DOBBIN
There are lots of big ideas out there for progressives to promote—the potential for re-building the nation is enormous. But before we can engage Canadians with big ideas we have to recognize that we have been trapped in defensive battles ever since the free trade fight. The left has honed its skill at telling people how bad things are; instead we need to give them hope.
Those who successfully frame the issues will almost always win the battle of ideas. But social movements in Canada have allowed the right to frame the issues without any systematic effort to reframe them from our values perspective. Stephen Harper is now making strategic use of the work of Frank Luntz, the communications genius who helped put US Republicans in power. And it’s working. Canadian reporters now routinely use the term “tax relief”—a classic Luntz term framing taxes as an affliction.
Progressive forces have to wean themselves from their relentlessly negative messages and give people hope. But they won’t be able to do that until they make a commitment to systematically reframe the key issues of the day—and putting the right on the defensive.
Squatter’s rights
MARIA AMUCHASTEGUI
Influential Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto argues that property rights are key to the functioning of capitalism. Because the poor in third world countries don’t have legal title to their homes, they can’t leverage their assets and take out loans to finance small businesses. He makes a case for squatter’s rights: By giving titles to squatters in shantytowns, slum dwellers can share in the magic of capital.
But De Soto’s logic does not extend to indigenous peoples. He credits the success of capitalism in America with clear property rights, without mentioning the original owners of the stolen land. His third world examples are limited to the urban poor, which in Latin America usually means Spanish-speaking Mestizos.
But what if De Soto’s argument were extended to those living atop the vast reserves of minerals, precious metals and oil, the reserves that fuel the growth of the West? In the third world, indigenous peoples rarely have legal title to land they live on and virtually never have “mineral rights”—ownership of the wealth beneath. Canadian mining companies, on the other hand, have staked a growing claim to third world mineral rights.
Let’s extend De Soto’s argument for squatter’s rights to indigenous peoples and let them benefit from what’s properly theirs.
Overcoming national amnesia
NUZHAT ABBAS
I come from places where most people refuse to believe in stories told by the state. Which is why it is astonishing to arrive here to discover that many intelligent, educated Canadians, even those on the left, actually believe in the story of a benevolent, democratic, “neutral” and “peace-keeping” Canada, innocent of global violence.
In 1981, I arrived in Canada from a Tanzania facing its worst economic crisis. Tanzania, then, was also one of CIDA’s biggest and most criticized recipients of foreign aid. Today, forced by the IMF to carry out liberalization policies, it is considered to be one of Africa’s success stories despite its worsening poverty. Canada’s history of generosity is now amply rewarded as lodes of gold in the north, initially mined by peasant miners, have been handed over by the state to Canadian gold-mining interests. Tanzanian lawyers and activists continue to demand justice for 65 miners killed and 400,000 miners displaced from their land in 1996 at Bulyanhulu.
All over Africa, Canadian development workers conveniently choose to believe in the myth of Canadian benevolence. They sun their bodies on beaches cleared for tourism, “explore” Africa, and grab at “experiences” that will reveal their “true vocations.” I am sceptical of their naïveté—surely they know that this story has been told before. Do they really not understand the racist violence that undergirds their missionary role as “saviours”?
One of my first jobs in Canada was to sell picture books about the Queen Mother door-to-door in Toronto offices around Yonge and Eglinton. Among the many buyers, mainly of English origin, were some older Jamaican and Trinidadian women. The sheer irony of my selling and their buying of this archaic colonial artifact in Canada was not lost on my 18-year-old self. It taught me much about the Canada I had entered, and the continuance of colonial histories that bound these women’s lives to mine.
If with Afghanistan, Canada’s complicity with imperial interests is finally visible, it has come as no surprise to some of us. But what is it that the rest of you see when you read the word “Canada”? How do you connect your country’s origin as a white settler colony to how it frames itself in the world today? What do you know about your country’s occluded histories—its modelling of “bantustans” for South Africa and its supplying of military technology to the US in Vietnam? Do you know about Canada’s pivotal role in starting the nuclear arms race in South Asia, its support of Suharto’s murderous regime in Indonesia, and its participation in the overthrow of Aristide in Haiti? Do you remember the murder of young Shidane Arone in Somalia? And of Dudley George, here?
When we talk of Canada, do we see the same country?
GARY CLEMENT
Play is the way
CARLY STASKO
With enough courage we can channel our anger, fear, and pain into something as brave as play. The main reason kids play all the time is their blind courage and survival instinct. I’ve always seen play as a form of creative meditation, but I didn’t realize how important it was until recently. After my first gruelling chemotherapy treatments I decided to challenge the medical authority’s definition of chemo as a “war in my body.” I studied the biology of cancer treatment and in a leap of courage I redefined cancer and redefined chemo. I invented my own new metaphors for the therapy, metaphors rooted in ecology rather than war. Suddenly I found myself responding better to these life-saving but difficult treatments. Next I started dressing up as different elements of my immune system: vigilant white blood cells, healthy hemoglobin.
This wasn’t a kindergarten pageant; this was me taking control of the meaning that surrounded cancer so that I could survive, thrive and not feel like a victim of my own cure. I overcame the judge in my thoughts and followed my intuition—and I’m happy to say it worked. The imagination is our greatest survival tool. Play is not only for playgrounds; it is there for us on that dark night of the soul, after the tears have run dry. Channel all the energy you don’t know what to do with, and be as silly and courageous as you need to be to heal. Your greatest power may well be to redefine your own relationship with meaning—and play is the way.
The art of the game
CARL WILSON
There are few things in life that are at once raucously fun and deeply civilizing. But a board game, or a word game, or a game of cards … those come close. Their pleasures begin from being securely enveloped in the rules, but are only fulfilled by finding enough wriggle room to invent your own way to play without breaking any laws. So I choose to feel optimistic about the fact that gaming aesthetics are taking over the culture. Video games are bigger than pop songs and movies. The internet is kind of a vast game of tag, though the rules are forever getting scrambled. Blogs and YouTube and MySpace are like Scrabble, with each member hooking his word or image or video up to the tail of the player before. Artists are seeing themselves as remixers rather than autonomous geniuses, and new art forms are springing into being where audience participation isn’t a gimmick but the entire work—in “deep play, dark play and collective play,” as “avant-game” theorist and creator Jane McGonigal describes it, the action is reclaimed from the board or the Xbox to be played out by human bodies in public space. The starting assumption, not only civilized but radically democratic, is that everyone is innately creative, but it takes ingenuity to draw it out. This art, at its best, is local and social rather than mediated and spectacular. As artists become game designers, game playing also redesigns artists, pushing them to develop as much intuition about human potential as they might have about story or form—the way a great conductor can transform an orchestra’s interpretation utterly just by the angle at which he shrugs his shoulders. But now the people playing aren’t just the musicians. They’re also the music.
Optimism
ANDREA CURTIS
Three generations of my extended family have sat at the editorial table of This Magazine. My father-in-law, John Saul, was one of the earliest members of the editorial collective; I was the editor for two years in the late 1990s and, well, my son actually sat on the table in his baby seat while I was on the editorial board. It’s not something everyone would be proud of: fighting an uphill fight with few clear victories over several generations. But I think of it as a kind of badge de courage, a show of optimism in its unalloyed, most active sense. And optimism is a radical act these days. For someone like me, weaned on the dying gasps of the Cold War, cowed by the necessary but difficult birth of identity politics, armoured with irony, sucker-punched by plague and war and fundamentalism, optimism has not exactly been easy to come by. But then ennui and cynicism hasn’t done much for us either. My generation has probably been party to fewer progressive successes than any other in contemporary history. We could use a dash of hope, a genuine, non-ironic dream of social justice, a why-the-hell-not belief that by working together we can create a better society. Hope isn’t an answer, of course, it’s a start. What do we have to lose?
Solidarity
JOHN SAUL
Just back from almost a decade in Africa, I spent every Friday afternoon for the next 10 years (including most of the 1970s) huddled around Rick Salutin’s kitchen table, hatching This magazines with my one-time prof Mel Watkins and John and Lorraine and Rosemary and the rest, advocating left nationalism and contributing occasional bits of whimsical writing. But basically I stuck to my last as a convinced supporter of liberation struggle in southern Africa and beyond, while also underscoring, pen in hand, the all too comfortable role that an only mildly beleaguered—by American imperialism—“official Canada” (and Canadian capital) played on the wrong side of the various fights for freedom that we at the magazine cared about. Myself deeply involved in the anti-apartheid movement at the time, I was pleased to see how genuinely the others, activists and writers on diverse fronts, cared about such issues and the response from readers was gratifying too. “One struggle, many fronts”—the very idea of “solidarity”—was as true then as it is now and I also learned to make the connection to real issues here and to real Canadians in the course of my time with the mag. No small flag for This to have kept flying, of course, and no less needed now, in these dark Harperesque times of brutal aggression and smug global self-righteousness.
Age of consent
GERALD HANNON
Our Tory government is intent on raising the age of consent for sexual activity from 14 to 16—with a close-in-age exemption (for those few teens not interested in doing it with older guys and gals), while still keeping anal sex illegal for anyone under 18. They’re on to something. But they’re not going far enough. Given the by now well-established dangers of religious fervour, an age of consent for church/mosque/synagogue/temple attendance seems merely sensible. I’d make it 18. Same as smoking.
Radical secularism
MOIRA FARR
Enough with the relentless focus on the beliefs and behaviours of religious fundamentalists—both Bush league and Bin Laden lunatics. Time for secular humanists to stop cowering under the covers with their dog-eared copies of The Handmaid’s Tale and get vocal about their own “beliefs.”
The Dutch are doing it: Don’t like our liberal values? Let us help you pack—and feel free to send us a postcard from the repressive dictatorship of your choice once you’re settled in. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is doing it in his new documentary The Root of All Evil?, skewering the mush-brained illogic of creationists with delicious British crispness. I myself contemplate strapping various volumes of Enlightenment philosophy to my body, planting myself in a crowded public place and lobbing said volumes at innocent passersby, demanding … that we discuss things, in reasonable tones, over a beer perhaps, at a nice pub. I also plan to infiltrate the mainstream broadcast media, absconding with footage of Muslim men praying in mosques, obligatory it seems on nightly newscasts, and replacing it with mind-blowing images of our most brilliant mathematicians and physicists, furthering our knowledge of the real nature of the cosmos with their latest theorems and research findings. Talk about shock and awe. Well, you may say I’m a dreamer, but apparently I’m not the only one. Our prime minister may be an evangelical Christian, but he is in a decided Canadian minority. What does Statscan identify as the fastest-growing religious affiliation in Canada? No religion. You heard it here first. And over to my favourite social soothsayer, the Google Search Indicator:
Christianity: 60 million “results”
Judaism: 22 million
Islam: 123 million
No Religion (Too): 194 million
Imagine … the triumph of reason in the 21st century … it’s easy if you try.
Byzantium
MYRNA KOSTASH
Seven years ago, when I started the research on my new project—the life and times of a Byzantine saint—I had no idea what I was getting myself into. How could I have? What do any of us really know about Byzantium? I’m ahead of most of you, because I was raised in an Eastern Orthodox Church, but I wasn’t really paying much attention at the time to the provenance of the saints, angels, seraphim, cherubim, prophets, patriarchs, tsars and tsarinas, adorning the interior of the church on all sides and ceiling too. They came from Byzantium, of course.
So what? Just this: I’ll bet you think the Irish saved civilization. That’s very Eurocentric of you, or, to be more precise, very occidento-euro-centric. The reason you think the Irish saved civilization is that you think Rome fell in 410 to the Visigoths, and so went the Empire. But did you know that in his magisterial tome, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon ends his story in 1453? Are you scratching your head? In the eastern Mediterranean world, that date is as familiar and portentous as 1066 is in ours, and for the same reason: it marked the end of one civilization and the implantation of another on the same territory. I am referring to the Fall (or Conquest, depending on your point of view) of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, and the razing of a civilization that had lasted 1,123 years. The Byzantines—as we call them—called themselves Romans, for they were the direct and seamless heirs of the Roman Empire from the day that Emperor Constantine transferred the imperial capital to Constantinople from Rome. While “Western” civilization retreated to dank and dark monastic cells in Ireland, the Byzantines, and soon enough the Arabs in their purpose-built capital, Baghdad (750 CE), glittered and gleamed as the most powerful and desirable—indeed exquisite—cultures for miles around.
Bring on the Byzantines! Who’s afraid of the East?
BERNICE EISENSTEIN
Under-brain
SHEILA HETI
I have been hearing a lot about this “subconscious brain,” by which it is meant: the brain below the brains we are aware of, and that it is this so-called “under-brain” that actually controls the most important things about our lives, like who we love, and how we love those we love, and just the general course of things. As horrifying and unlikely as this “under-brain” sounds, I’m intrigued by the notion. Certainly, looking around me, I can see that it seems to be capturing the entire nation! So I’m putting my money on the “subconscious” as an idea whose time has come.
Local eating
J.B. MACKINNON
Eating locally finally makes sense of what environmentalists have been trying to get across for years—that ecological sanity isn’t about hair-shirt self-denial, but rather is about a better quality of life. Reconnection to the landscapes and people that produce your food returns a sense of stewardship to one of life’s most fundamental acts. An immersion in the local raises challenging questions for globalization. Plus you get to eat eggs that actually taste like eggs and fill your face with handfuls of fresh berries. From there it’s just a series of small steps to a global economy free from the doomsday philosophy of endless growth.
An ad-free outdoors
DAVE MESLIN
No one likes being hailed by ads from all directions every time they leave the house. Here are five reasons to ban outdoor advertising:
1) Ads are designed to make us feel lousy about ourselves. Your teeth aren’t white enough. Your clothes aren’t cool. You smell bad. You’re a loser without a car. You’re looking old. This is the last industry that should be given the task of exterior decorating in our cities.
2) Billboards are blind to the diversity in our cities. English ads with predominantly white faces wallpaper the buildings, bus shelters and garbage cans of every single neighbourhood, excluding those who aren’t straight, white, able-bodied and English speaking.
3) Capitalism is supposed to be about consumer choice. But when I try to turn off the TVs in gas stations, elevators, washrooms, on the subway and on those massive videoboards hanging above our streets, my remote control won’t work.
4) The last thing we need is another generation growing up thinking consumerism is the dominant religion—public space has become a shrine to capitalism, with mandatory daily attendance.
5) Imagine the alternative: our neighbourhoods could be used as canvasses for local artists, small local business, community messages and political dialogue. Let’s reclaim our visual environment. It is time to bring our streets to life.
Love
ROBERT HOUGH
What the world needs now, is love sweet love, it’s the only thing that there’s just too little of, oh what the world needs now is love sweet love, is love sweet sweet sweet sweet city woman, I can see your face I can hear your voice I can almost touch you, oh swe-ee-eet, sweet city woman, my banjo and me we got a feel for singin’ in the rain, just singing in the rain, what a glorious feeling, I’m happy again, I’m laughing at clouds, so dark up above, ’cause I’d rather be in some dark hollow, where the sun don’t ever shine, than to be in some big city, in a small room with a girl on my mind yeah Girls Girls Girls! long legs and burgundy lips! Girls Girls Girls! dancing down on sunset strip! Girls Girls my Girl! Talkin’ bout my Girl! Talkin’ bout my-ay-ay-girl, I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day, when it’s cold outside I’ve got the month of May, ohhhhhhh I guess you’d say, what can make me feel so … crazy for trying, and crazy for crying, and I’m crazy for love sweet love, it’s the only thing that there’s just too little of, oh what the world needs now is love sweet love.
Free culture
JIM MUNROE
Paying for art should be like paying for sex—possible, but not encouraged. I’m not against creative people getting rewarded for their work or thinking about their craft as seriously as a job—it’s what I’ve been doing for the past decade or so—but treating artwork as a commodity has never really felt right. And after thinking about it for a while, I realize why.
Art isn’t created in a vacuum—everything owes a debt to work that’s come before. One of my favourite examples is OutKast’s André talking about where the hell “Hey Ya!” came from. He credits a mix tape that a friend gave him that included “The Ramones, Buzzcocks, The Smiths.” So while that song is testament to his individual vision and work (he played all the instruments on it except the bass), it’s also not entirely his to sell, either. Like all art, it’s a mix of individual effort and a collective culture and consciousness that’s all tangled together.
Perhaps impossibly tangled. If we are really looking to the market to ascribe value to a song, what percentage of the profits from “Hey Ya!” should go to the influences? The influences’ influences? If André wants to sell it as a car commercial jingle, should the Buzzcocks be consulted?
Music, movies, games, books, are all freely accessible now that they’ve been freed of tangible media—this is cause for celebration, not panic. This is an opportunity to brainstorm fairer models to support cultural production. And it’s a creative challenge that many artists are embracing—one fellow I know gives his web-comics away for free while earning a living on the t-shirts he sells to his audience.
I might be talking myself out of a job, but there are lots of things that aren’t for sale in our world—maybe art should be one of them.
A.I.
DREW HAYDEN TAYLOR
For me, the next big step in my unique world of the arts is to see the further development of Native literature above and beyond its current little comfortable niche. I want to see us expand the frontiers and genres of what’s being written out there, not just the historical stories of days gone by or the more contemporary adventures of reserve or urban life. I want to, for instance, some day read Native science fiction—to boldly go where no First Nations has gone before. I want to read about A.I.—Artificial Indians. Or perhaps do an indigenous take on Shakespeare, like Ot’ello the Haida or the Two Gentleman of Rama. I’d also like to see Aboriginal travel books—where’s the best place to get fried baloney in Nepal? For centuries non-Natives have been adapting and appropriating our stories and storytelling methods, my lawyer and agent says we can now do the same.
The death of news
HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Have you heard the news? News is dead. Newspapers are transforming themselves into an interchangeable array of blogs and celebrity gossip columns penned by self-promoting hacks. As a result, it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between a so-called objective report and the veritable flood of commentary emerging from an amateur army of podcasters, vid-cam freaks and compulsive reviewers.
Television news died a long time ago. Or, at least around the time Geraldo drew a map in the sand to graph out the arc of his diminishing career and Peter Mansbridge started to jet around the world in a flak jacket so he could be seen on TV near war zones.
Meanwhile, the 24-hour news cycle has doomed radio (and also cable television) to near endless repetition. The same news update heard every 10 minutes, every half hour, every hour, leaves desperate junkies praying for a sex scandal.
The fact that there are news junkies says it all, really: As more and more people take responsibility for reporting on the doings of their communities, mass media corporate-produced news has become just another addictive entertainment almost as good for you as racially segregated Survivor and the Ho-Ho. It is packaged in sound bites and counter sound bites (the comments we can now attach to every story online) and carefully marketed to us for maximum effect. As a result, it’s ever more difficult to tell the difference between a current event, a promotion for the primetime schedule, what’s being retold for the sake of expediency or ratings, and what’s being ignored (for the sake of expediency and ratings).
The death of news as we briefly knew it might not be a bad thing. It’s like the old saying goes: no news is good news.
Power from the peonies
CRAIG SAUNDERS
In life, the big challenges are daunting. Climate change, poverty, violence, all things that must be tackled. But all too often, the issues are incomprehensibly abstract, and the solutions are beyond the ability of one person. As a result, many of us become depressed and slip into a cycle of inaction.
Could there be a way to make a tangible, visible difference while reconnecting, even in a small way, with your community and the earth? The answer may lie in the growing trend of guerrilla gardening.
In cities around the world, small groups sneak out at night to clean up a public space, such as a vacant lot or concrete planter abandoned by overstretched public works departments. Having seen an ugly, untended patch of soil in their neighbourhood, they set out to make it beautiful with shrubs, flowers and vines. A night or two of hard work can transform almost any space, and frequently more locals will pitch in and help with maintenance once they see what is going on.
It’s not the solution to urban decay, but it’s one small step. Done properly, it can be hugely successful, give you a sense of satisfaction from seeing the fruits of your labour, and help to build momentum that will help with other causes. As well, the odds are good that you’ll meet some neighbours, make some friends—and perhaps begin a community-building trend along the way.
Using the Magic 8 Ball at press conferences
JASON SHERMAN
Requirements:
1 (one) politician
1 (one) roomful of journalists
1 (one) Magic 8 Ball
Example:
BUSH: Good evening. This has been tough weeks in Iraq. Coalition forces have encountered serious violence. As a proud, independent people, Iraqis do not support an indefinite occupation, and neither does America. We’re not an imperial power. Now I’ll be glad to take your questions.
QUESTION: Mr. President, polls show fewer than half of Americans now support your policy in Iraq. What does that say to you?
BUSH: Cannot predict now.
QUESTION: What’s your best prediction on how long US troops will have to be in Iraq?
BUSH: Ask again later.
QUESTION: Mr. President, how do you answer your opponents who say that you took this nation to war on the basis of what have turned out to be a series of false premises?
BUSH: Reply hazy. Try again.
QUESTION: Mr. President, do you feel any sense of personal responsibility for September 11?
BUSH: My reply is no. Dave?
QUESTION: Mr. President, one of the biggest criticisms of you is that you never admit a mistake. Is that a fair criticism?
BUSH: Very doubtful. John?
QUESTION: Do you believe the American people deserve an apology from you?
BUSH: Most likely.
QUESTION: Are you prepared to give them one?
BUSH: Better not tell you now. Judy?
QUESTION: After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?
BUSH: I wish you’d have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it. Ann?
QUESTION: You mentioned yesterday that you think perhaps the time has come for some real intelligence reforms. Will you make them?
BUSH: Yes.
QUESTION: How will you?
BUSH: Ask again later. Last question here. Don?
QUESTION: Thank you, sir. With public support for your policies in Iraq falling off the way they have, quite significantly over the past couple of months, I guess I’d like to know if you feel, in any way, that you have failed as a communicator on this topic.
BUSH: Gosh, I don’t know.
QUESTION: Well, you deliver a lot of speeches, and a lot of them contain similar phrases and may vary very little from one to the next.
BUSH: It is certain.
QUESTION: But I guess I just wonder if you feel that you have failed in any way to really make the case to the American public?
BUSH: My sources say no. One thing is for certain, though, about me, and the world has learned this: When I say something, I mean it. Thank you all very much.
Working-class consciousness
JIM STANFORD
I know it sounds old-fashioned, but there is hard economic evidence to suggest that “working-class consciousness” may just be the next big thing for the left—in Canada, and elsewhere.
For years, progressives have quite rightly worried about divisions and differences among working people. We needed to address the many forms inequality took within the work force (gender, race, sexuality, ability, and more), and build movements to challenge those inequalities.
Today, however, working people have a lot more in common with each other than they used to—and mostly because we’ve all been getting the short end of the economic stick.
The wage gap between the genders has shrunk (more due to falling wages for men than rising wages for women). White-collar workers are learning that the biggest “perk” of their once-coveted positions is the standard requirement to work swads of unpaid overtime. Thanks to the internet, high-skill techies (engineers, programmers, designers) can lose their jobs to cheaper foreign labour even faster than a factory worker. The ability to win relatively good wages and benefits for certain groups of workers (once derided as the “labour aristocracy”) shrinks every day in the face of competition and globalization. Even the army of self-employed Canadians is realizing that “being your own boss” is not all it’s cracked up to be. Most are still “workers” in the truest sense of the word (owning nothing other than their ability to work, and driven as mercilessly by their customers as any assembly line supervisor). Real wages for all but the luckiest of professionals have stagnated or declined, and labour’s overall share of the economic pie has never been lower.
In short, workers of all ages and genders and races and skills are being exploited more ruthlessly every year. And the commonalities of this experience, I suspect, will eventually produce a commonality in political and cultural outlook. It won’t burst forth as a full-fledged, politically correct, social analysis. But it might appear as a gut-level willingness to demand more from this system: better jobs, better pay, better hours, better pensions, more security. After all, these are concerns that fundamentally unite the 85 percent of Canadians who have to work for a living.
It doesn’t mean we stop campaigning on the other issues. Only that the idea that there is something deeper that links all those struggles is poised for a new relevance. If our unions and movements can learn to talk about working class issues, and mobilize around them, in more effective and genuine ways, we’ll find ourselves riding an incredible force.
