Letter to Honourable John Duncan

Dear Mr Duncan,

As a long-time BC Coast MP, and as a member of the Cabinet charged with deciding whether to permit Enbridge's plans to ship dilbit from Kitimat by enormous tanker to proceed, you are uniquely qualified to educate your fellow MPs on the subject.
I therefore ask you, on behalf of your electors, to speak up for us, our interests, and the coast where we are privileged to live.
As you well know, this issue crosses party lines for those of us living on the BC coast: we know that oil tankers in the unusually-hazardous waters of Hecate Strait and the Douglas Channel are potentially a recipe for the destruction of our way of life and economy, not to even mention the semi-pristine environment we currently enjoy.
You have undoubtedly seen the Jack Knox column in today's Times-Colonist. I draw your attention particularly to a portion of it where he nails the issue:

Here in B.C. — at least on the coast — the tale is told differently, and it has little to do with wanting more money or being anti-industry or anti-oil; most of us drive cars and know we need to get the fuel from somewhere. Nor is the story about global warming, or whether or not the oilsands are dirty, or even about the pipelines themselves. It’s about what happens to the oil after it hits salt water.
Simply put, people fear that adding 220 supertankers a year to the snotty waters of B.C.’s inner coast would be rolling the dice on another Exxon Valdez.   

I urge you, as a person of influence in your government and as our MP,  to make representations on this issue to the MPs from other parts of Canada who may not understand the depth of our opposition to Enbridge's plans, and to truly represent us, as you have promised to do so often in the past.
Yours very sincerely,

Dealing with: an embarrassment of mayors

Municipal voting results too frequently reward people who do not represent the majority of electors. The consequence can be a mayor frequently at loggerheads with his council, sometimes fatally. Some examples:
     Item: In Montreal just under 40% of registered electors vote. Denis Coderre becomes mayor of Montreal with 32% of the votes. There are 11 candidates; the top 4 get nearly 97% of them.
(Coderre, in spite of his narrow win, may yet prove to be a superb mayor. If that turns out to be the case, lucky Montreal! But the new mayor’s "Equipe Coderre" controls only a minority of seats, and it would be at least useful if he had a more solid claim on legitimacy.)
     Item: In Toronto Rob Ford won 47.11%. Since his win two years ago he’s done everything required to trash his reputation, yet could win the next mayoralty assuming his ‘base’ holds and enough people run against him to split the opposition vote.
     Item: In Campbell River’s last municipal election 30% of potential electors cast a ballot. Walter Jakeway, who then had no record in municipal politics, won with 37.79% over two former councillors, who got 37.25% and 16.93% respectively. Jakeway’s term has been less-than-impressive, but he has his fans and could win again if enough people run against him.

In each of these — and, frankly, the majority of mayoral elections in Canada — when there are a number of strong candidates and the vote is consequently split, the results frequently frustrate the actual wishes of the electorate.
Of course this also happens in provincial and federal elections (i.e. Team Harper winning only 39.6% of the vote, but achieving a majority government, largely because of three strong parties). That one, however appears impossible to resolve at present. Municipal politics, less influenced by party politics, should be easier to fix.

And I think there is a fix. It’s called the “Preferential Ballot”, and it’s used in elections in many (usually English-speaking) countries. 
To see how it works in a Canadian context, we could look at recent nominating conventions of the NDP and the Liberals, which both used a hybrid version suitable for voting by mail and in convention. Or we could look at BC in1952, when a more cumbersome version elected the WAC Bennett Social Credit government that lasted some 30 years. (That government wouldn’t have lasted nearly that long if the Socreds hadn’t dumped the preferential ballot as soon as they could!)
Here’s how it works for NDP Leadership conventions: Those attending Convention vote in the usual way. The home-based elector fills in a ballot, indicating at least a first choice and a second and even a third if desired. If a candidate scores over 50% on the first count, it’s all over. If no one does, the lowest-polling candidate(s) fall out. The Convention delegates vote again and the mailed/internet ballots showing them as first choice are recounted for second choice. And so on, until one of the candidates achieves 50% plus 1.
In municipal elections we already vote on a scanned ballot so, in these days of the computer, the count would be almost as instantaneous as at present.
I think there’s a good chance many of our municipalities would run better. At the very least, mayors would be able to claim they legitimately represent the majority.
It might even dull some voter cynicism, and encourage some of the currently-uninterested to exercise their franchise.
Which is democracy as it should be.

Political letters: May and Duncan

MP Elizabeth May wrote today, as she does from time-to-time.
Usually I'm not moved to action by such letters,  recognizing  them for the fundraising efforts they regularly are.
However, this one raised a very important point, pointing to continuing manipulation of the rules of the House of Commons by the Conservative Government, which make it difficult for her to do her job. She identified this rule change as "a motion to require that members, who are either independent or are members of recognized parties with fewer than 12 MPs, submit amendments to committee 48 hours prior to the start of clause by clause consideration of any bill" and demonstrated this was clearly aimed at her interventions in the past.
She further noted that the "Conservative approach, of rejecting any and all amendments while simultaneously abbreviating debate opportunities, is a perversion of the parliamentary process. It is a new and hyper-partisan approach to the legislative process."
And then, as expected, came the request to add my name and email address to a petition...appeals to fill Green Party coffers guaranteed to follow.
That said, I think she's right to be both offended and worried. And she's right that her privilege in the House is ultimately our privilege.
So I wrote a reply:

Ms May:
I am persuaded by your explanation of how the rights of individual MPs are being abridged by the governing Conservatives.
However, I will not put my name on a petition on the letterhead of the Green Party of Canada, as I do not support that party, either federally or provincially.
I will, however, write to John Duncan, my MP, and will add a copy to the Prime Minister and the Minister of State for Democratic Reform.
Sincerely,

And followed that with a letter to my MP:

Dear Minister Duncan,
I have just received a letter from Elizabeth May, MP, detailing the latest roadblock your party has put in her way, making it difficult for her to be an effective Member of Parliament.
She writes, "The Conservative approach, of rejecting any and all amendments while simultaneously abbreviating debate opportunities, is a perversion of the parliamentary process. It is a new and hyper-partisan approach to the legislative process."
Although I am not a supporter of her party, her arguments and examples make sense to me, as I would hope they make sense to you. As you served many years as an Opposition MP, I would hope that you would abhor anything that frustrates the job of such MPs, on the grounds that her Vancouver Island constituents deserve an effective voice just as much as your Vancouver Island constituents.
And I would hope you speak up accordingly.
Yours very sincerely,

Just the latest anti-democratic initiative from a government that claims the following:

Canada's commitment to open government is part of the federal government's efforts to foster greater openness and accountability, to provide Canadians with more opportunities to learn about and participate in government, to drive innovation and economic opportunities for all Canadians and, at the same time, create a more cost effective, efficient and responsive government.

The Ryder

The news has hardly broken, and already I'm fed up with the hand-wringing reporting.
Apparently Ryder Hesjedal was introduced to EPO doping by Danish cyclist and team-mate Michael Rasmussen.  In 2003.
This is news? Maybe in 2003 it would have been, but in 2013?
Does the fact that he may have doped in 2003, when he was an unknown mountain-biker trying to make the Canadian team, automatically mean we must assume he doped for the Giro d'Italia in 2012?
I'd be astonished if Hesjedal had been able to resist in 2003, when the testing was either non-existent or lax, and literally all competitive cyclists were either doping or not winning, and equally astonished if he hadn't been able to resist in 2012, when everybody suspected the top riders.
In fact, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be talking about this at all today if he hadn't doped in 2003, because almost none of us would know his name now!

(Reminds me of that scene in "The Greatest Story Ever Told", where the louche guy pretending to be the Devil is talking to Max von Sydow, who is pretending to be Jesus of Nazareth. The Devil, from his cave high up the mountain points out all the lands below, and tells Jesus all will be his, if only he changes Teams.
Jesus refuses.
But we all know how that turned out.)

Oct 31: I admire the way Hesjedal got out in front of this story.  The flak-catchers for the Unsavoury Mayor et al could benefit from taking note.
Not that the two cases are in any way comperable.

Mike Duffy's corner

The Canadian Senate, that bastion of pork-barrel privilege, is threatening to suspend, without pay, or benefits, or recourse, Senators Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin, and Patrick Brazeau, all Stephen Harper appointees.
Or, constitutionally-more-correctly, they were recent appointments by the Queen of Canada in Council, which for practical purposes means much the same thing.
They are, to various degrees, contesting this, although all the available evidence so far is that they are guilty of fairly outrageous piggery, even by the slippery standards of the Canadian Senate.
Therefore it is somewhat to my surprise that I find myself in Mike Duffy's corner.
Also Pamela Wallin's. Maybe even Patrick Brazeau's, although that's going to require rather more effort.
That doesn't mean I'm making an argument in favour of keeping the Senate as it is; quite the contrary: I'm a committed abolitionist.
Anyway, a status-quo Senate is not what's on offer, and what the senators are proposing wouldn't improve the Senate. Rather, what they propose to do would render it even more useless than it already is.
Imagine a Senate with a majority of hyper-partisan appointees in the mould of Duffy and Wallin who had the power to silence those inconvenient senators who didn't agree with that majority. Could anything be more redundant? The whole point of senators being appointed is that they cannot be silenced, unless, in the words of the Wikipedia entry, "…he or she fails to attend the Senate for two consecutive parliamentary sessions. Furthermore, senators lose their seats if they are found guilty of treason, an indictable offence, or any "infamous crime"; are declared bankrupt or insolvent; or cease to be qualified." None of the three the Senate proposes to suspend fit those criteria at present, and even if they did, it shouldn't be up to their fellow-senators to discipline them. Once appointed, any senator who continues to clear that low threshold is in until he or she either quits or turns 75.
That's the law, in spite of the fact that Stephen Harper extracted promises of resignation after 8 years from some present members.
So the Senate has no right to render them ineffective in the senate context, no matter how many orders or entreaties they get from the Prime Minister's office. Only the Queen or Her representative in Canada can sign those papers.
What I particularly appreciate about all this is that Stephen Harper came into office on promises to "reform" the Senate, on promises to make it more relevant. So far he has delivered only a partisan atrocity, an embarrassment of flag-waving Conservative cheerleaders even less relevant than the mostly-irrelevant Liberal majorities that preceded them.
So I'm with Mike, Pam, and maybe even Patrick: long may they be burrs under the Conservative saddle, long may they remind Mr Harper of why his nasty brand of politics is often corrosive, and long may they remind us why we'd be better off without not just them, but the entire institution.

A BC education: the reality

Number 2 daughter is going to UBC in the fall, to do her professional year.
These days that's not something I'd normally recommend: it's an expensive program, and the chance of landing a job in a reasonable time at the end is remote.
Except that she's English-French bilingual, and consequently almost guaranteed a public-school job in French Immersion when she has completed.
If she still wants it by then, having experienced the reality.
It's ironic that as she's taking steps to enter the profession, her brother-in-law (we'll call him Eric), married to our eldest, a French Immersion specialist, is taking steps to leave it.
Eric is in his mid-30's with a degree in physics and math, subjects he taught in the International Baccalaureate program at two International Schools. He returned to Canada four years ago, armed with the reputation and paperwork of a highly-effective, motivating, and motivated teacher, who also coached.
Neither he nor our daughter could get an interview in Campbell River that summer.
So they settled in Victoria, on the grounds that there were three school districts in the region, so chances of a job appeared better there than elsewhere on the Island.
Our daughter was interviewed over the summer and was on the Victoria Teacher On Call list when school started. She was in a job by mid-November, replacing a colleague on maternity leave, and hasn't looked back since.
Eric, on the other hand, couldn't get even an interview in Victoria, although everyone acknowledged that the district was seriously short of math and physics specialists. Apparently Victoria already had more TOCs on the list than the union was comfortable with. Fortunately, he eventually fluked into an interview in one of the other districts, and slowly started to gain BC experience and seniority.
He's had at least a part-time job in that district ever since the first year, but has taught his own subjects only occasionally: most semesters he's ended up mostly dealing with students who haven't completed their science and math courses in previous semesters.
And, of course, he coaches.
This semester he finally got to teach physics, replacing a colleague who was trying something else.
Then a couple of weeks ago he was advised once again to apply for a very-part-time job that had been posted for next fall, and they'd try to fill it up over the summer. He knew that meant more course-completion.
But Eric's not a special education teacher. He doesn't feel qualified, and finds the job both frustrating and soul-destroying.
Happily for him, he has options outside the school system, and he's going back to college to explore them.
He's not the only one who is frustrated: his principal expressed dismay that he couldn't place Eric more appropriately, and that he's about to lose a real asset to the school, a teacher who has qualifications and skills the school really needs. But the financial situation is such that the district cannot plan appropriately for next academic year, and seniority governs whom he can place where. His hands are tied.
And that's why I wouldn't recommend a professional year for most people.
Not in BC, anyway.

Signs from an election

When the campaign started in North Island I mentioned to my son that, judging from the signs, it looked to be all Claire Trevena in Campbell River, except for some empty lots.  He said, "That's not surprising. It's embarrassing to be a BCLiberal these days."
That didn't change for about two weeks, but shortly after the "debate" we started to see the occasional Facey lawn sign, and by the end of the campaign there were quite a few. Even so, the Trevena signs, all on private property, still outnumbered them about 5 to 1.
But it was an indication that things were going to be tighter than we could have predicted earlier in the campaign, and in the end the signs didn't even tell an accurate story:
Claire's margin of victory was down somewhat from last time,  50.7% for Claire (BCNDP), versus 42.16% for Facey (BCLiberal), and 7.14% for Bray (Conservative).
Once again, Campbell River went BCLiberal by a small margin.
Tellingly, Claire won big in the communities of the north and on the islands.

So what happened? I believe it's a different story in Campbell River than it is in the rest of the constituency.

Campbell River: I like the theory that what happend here is another manifestation of the "10-second Socred" phenomenon, a blast from the '50s and '60s, when we could never figure out why the between-elections-unpopular WAC Bennett was always re-elected with a majority, and why, once the election had passed, one could never find anyone who had voted for his party.
Apparently, in this election even the pipe dreams of the BCLiberal platform were more a more comfortable fit for many voters than the NDP promise of "Change for the better, one practical step at a time". This in spite of the still-unresolved BC Rail scandal, the HST debacle, the fantasy balanced budget, the culture of cronyism... and we could go on and on.
But there was more to it than that. The BCLiberal campaign slimed NDP leader Adrian Dix so vigorously that, by the end, BCLiberal partisans had no trouble publicly associating him with fraud. Some of that stuck.  In a similar vein, the Facey campaign distorted Claire's record and positions so thoroughly in its advertising that her advocacy for a Campbell River hospital morphed into a claim that the new hospital would be shelved if an NDP government was returned. Her work for the BBC turned into a "she's not from here" meme, and Catalyst closing the Elk Falls pulp mill magically became her fault. I don't think the print advertising to this effect made much of a difference, especially after the front-page story in the Courier-Islander that quoted Claire accusing Nick Facey of lying, but local radio ads on this theme, run just before the election, certainly changed some votes.
I wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Campbell River Mirror after the last Facey ad they published:  
As one of his former teachers, I'm pleased that Mr. Facey "thoroughly benefited" from the education he received in Campbell River.
However, it appears that he didn't always pay attention: I'll bet not one of his Social Studies teachers ever said to him, "It's fine to distort the record of a political opponent for political gain." He acquired that idea on his own.
In case he just missed the lesson, he should know that disagreement is is the lifeblood of democracy, but distortion is disrespectful of the system, and inevitably leads to cynicism and less participation.
Surely he isn't in favour of either!
It would have come out just after the election; unfortunately, they chose not to publish it.

Rest of the constituency: The story there is Claire's personal and ongoing relationships with the communities. Voters in the north know that Claire has really worked on their economic issues, like the Port Alice mill. The First Nations know from experience they have Claire's ear. And they really worry about the environment, about oil tankers, and climate change, and salmon, and the reckless attitude the BCLiberals have towards almost any development. 
That, and the voters there know Claire, who has represented them well for 8 years. By contrast, Facey was and is Campbell River, and so are almost all of his supporters.

And that's why Claire beat Facey by just over 2000 votes.

As for the provincial results... I predict it will be a long time before any party in BC will again treat BC voters like the rational adults we all claim we are.  Sad, really.

Elizabeth May, MP

The other day MP Elizabeth May published an article in the Huffington Post Canada. Nothing particularly unusual there: she publishes there regularly.

How many other federal politicians report to Canadians in such a useful way? I regret to say I don't know of any others. So kudos to Elizabeth May.

This time her article was of particular interest to me, as it included her analysis of bills C-38 and C-57, both presently before Parliament, and both having serious potential consequences for those of us living on the BC coast.

She'd actually read them, in toto.

This reading revealed that the Conservative ministers sponsoring those bills have seriously misrepresented them, promising “safeguards” not actually present in writing:

    In March of last year, Budget 2012 promised more pipeline inspections and new tanker regulations. Then ministers claimed the new measures were in the budget omnibus bill C-38. Since C-38 was over 400 pages long, perhaps they did not expect anyone to read it. Maybe they never read it themselves, as Minister Oliver trumpeted then, “Mr. Speaker, the bill will do a great deal to protect the environment... As I mentioned in my remarks, tankers will have to be double-hulled, there will be mandatory pilotage, there will be enhanced navigation, there will be aerial surveillance and additional measures will be taken in particular cases when necessary.
    None of this was in C-38. It is, in fact, what he announced in Vancouver on March 18, 2013. I imagine he wondered why he had such a strong sense of déjà-vu.

So much for C-38. What about C-57?:

    Yesterday Harper’s ministers announced we would find these new measures in Bill C-57, the just tabled for First Reading Safeguarding Canada’s Seas and Skies Act. I have read C-57. This now takes top honours in the on-going competition for most over-hyped legislative title. I have read it and it is essentially a housekeeping act. It deals with the skies, through changes to inspections of aviation accidents and aeronautic indemnities. There is no environmental aspect to the “skies” component. Then there are the amendments related to “seas.” The Marine Act is amended to change the date for the approval of a new director of a port authority. The only oil-spill related components are in the Marine Liability Act. The act is brought into compliance with the 2010 International Convention on Liability and Compensation for Damage in connection with the Carriage and Noxious Substances by Sea. So, nothing about double-hulled tankers...

In other words, the Ministers' words are just smoke, widely covered in the media, but having no legal weight at all.

More kudos to Elizabeth May MP, for doing her job!

I thought the information was important and hadn't seen it reported anywhere else, so sent the URL along to a number of our friends and family, all of whom are, to the best of my knowledge, reliably NDP voters. Most of the time.

And got back several negative comments, in effect pointing out that that Elizabeth May is the leader of the Federal Green Party: the competition; the enemy; potentially the spoiler.

Which misses the point, as far as I'm concerned.

Understand, as a lifelong activist NDPer, I don't support the Green Party of Canada. Any party whose website claims they stand for the following...
   The Green Party respects the need for a balance between competition and co-operation in a healthy economy, and the gifts and flexibility that this dynamic tension offers to society. We believe in social justice while encouraging self-reliance and we respect the principle of reward for effort and risk. Green Party policies will make Parliament more democratic and diverse through democratic renewal. Government must be far more accountable and transparent. The Green Party knows that social justice at home and abroad is both an environmental and an ethical issue.
...is just spouting vacuous nonsense.

And we know now for a fact that, given any chance of electoral success, the Green Party's values and principles are fungible: how else to explain Green candidate Donald Galloway coming out against sewage treatment for Victoria in the recent federal bye-election there? How else to explain Elizabeth May's pandering, unscientific position on smart meters?

But just because Elizabeth May represents a party of -- in addition to a number of committed environmentalists -- a slew of new-agers, wingnuts, and flakes of the tinfoil-hat variety is no reason to disparage what she actually brings to the debate and to the House of Commons.

It's true that she is effectively her own party, and thus is pretty much free of the constraints placed on members of larger and more significant parties.  It's also true that she was named 2012 Parliamentarian of the Year for a reason, and that she does her constituency, province, and country proud most of the time.

Had I lived in Saanich-Gulf Islands during the last election, given the available options I would have voted for her. Having seen her in action, I'd probably do so again in the next.

Occasionally exceptional individuals are more important than party affiliation.

..........

Further link: for those of you still interested in the disconnect between the Conservative propaganda and the problems of shipping dilbit in BC waters, I strongly recommend an article by Dave Tyre printed in Laila Yuile's blog.

This...

...is how I get myself into trouble:
Bought my dad a router/wi-fi, his being second-hand, old, and broken. Plus I couldn't persuade Hubert's tablet to connect wirelessly to it.
So I ordered one on-line from Staples and next day, when it arrived and I had read the box, I started to have second thoughts: his computer is old, a discarded Macbook of Enid's which I've made useful again by replacing the MacOS with Ubuntu Linux; maybe it wouldn't connect?
No problem, however: I'd just put the new one on our system and give him our (not very) old one, which I know works.
So I plugged it in. All the computers promptly hooked up to it.
But there was no security.
So I changed the wi-fi settings to provide security: no computers would log on.
I messed about with this for a while, but nothing worked. I looked on line, but no "fixes" worked, which was not unreasonable as none were trying to fix problems and symptoms that were identical to mine. Some of the suggestions for what one should do to connect a router to our Telus modem were downright scary, so I knew they would inevitably result in long conversations with disapproving Telus techies.  I didn't go there.
I put the old one back on, which made all three Apples happy, but confused the hell out of the Dell. I thought maybe if I upgraded its Ubuntu 12.04 to 12.10 this problem would just go away.
No such luck; the upgrade just created other problems (why did Python need to reboot? why wouldn't it? why was there no /tmp file space?)
Anyway, that's when I packed it in.
This morning, after following the dog and thinking for an hour, I decided to go back to Plan A. So I replaced our old router with the new one, taking care to unplug both the modem and my computer before doing so. I entered new wi-fi security settings. When I had finished, the Apples were happy.
Then I did a clean install of 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 on the Dell, and now, after some tweaking, it's happy as well.
So is the Ubuntu partition on my iMac.
But the iPod Touch, which we use as our radio most of the time, wouldn't connect, not even when I entered the new security code. As a consequence it now logs, all by itself, into the Telus modem, and works again.
Good thing I'm retired.

This is slight revision of a letter I sent to Bruce, one of the few people I know who actually understands  this sort of thing... and possibly the only other person I know who is interested.