Friday, December 19, 2014

Willem Justus Havelaar 9/11/1915 to 12/13/2014



First, a brief story:
In the summer of 1965, by one of those flukes that has pursued me from time to time, I found myself in Rotterdam, playing officer cadet on a Canadian naval frigate. We were in Rotterdam for an official visit, tied to a wharf across the harbour from where, in 1951, the Havelaar family had departed for Canada aboard the M.V. Zuider Kruis.
Shortly after arrival, I was granted some leave to visit my great-aunt Emilie Mees, known in the family as “Old Tante Miek”, who lived  on an estate in the middle of Rotterdam.
We eventually got around to what we'd been doing in Rotterdam, and I explained that I'd been part of a select group of appropriately turned-out cadets and officers who had been received at City Hall.
“And did anyone make a fuss over you?” she asked.
“No, except I was interviewed by a newspaper reporter.”
“Well, it's too bad it wasn't the old mayor who greeted you. He would have recognized the significance of meeting a Havelaar.”

I think that was probably my first real insight into my dad's culture.

Those of you who have read his blog (justhavelaar.wordpress.com) will know the particulars of my parents' voyage to and settlement in Canada, and will appreciate the vistas of opportunity that move provided. You probably won't, however (because he glosses over the facts) fully grasp the hardships of the first ten years or so, which went hand-in-hand with the adventure.
It can't have been easy, for example, to survive that first Canadian winter with 4 young children in an uninsulated house built largely of wet shiplap. In fact, I now think I probably very nearly didn't survive it.
It can't have been easy for an ex-publisher to survive and then become accustomed to working in the woods as a chokerman, or in a sawmill, hauling lumber from the greenchain and loading it into boxcars, either of which would have been hard for anyone.
It can't have been easy the first time he was “laid off” during one of those cyclical logging-industry downturns, and anyone can imagine what he experienced, wondering how the family would cope, and where the next job was. I know that fear penetrated even my seven-year-old brain.
It can't have been easy working in English, a language of which he really had only academic knowledge. (Especially in Terrace, BC, where the rules of grammar didn't really apply!)
I know it was a real leap of faith and desperation to pack up in Terrace so that he and my mom could go to Normal School in Victoria.
And the whole time, I now realize, a man who had grown up in a family of considerable privilege, with maids to look after the household, had to deal with the fact that we were constantly desperately poor in a way we had never been in Holland, and could only escape that poverty through his labours and intellect.

If you asked him about this, he'd tell you they were successful because he and my mom were a formidable team, with complementary skills. He'd tell you he owed everything to her strength and sense of purpose, and the fact that he couldn't fail her. He'd refer to her ability to manage and stretch the little money they had. And he wouldn't be wrong: they did complement each other, and she was a rock.

But I think there's more to it than that. I think my father, in a way that eluded even my mother, had an adamantine sense of self. He never doubted that it was important to be a Havelaar, not in the standard social or class sense, but rather in the sense that he was part of a long line of people who knew how life worked.
He had been brought up imbued with the social and cultural capital of his extended family, and he just knew the rest would come.

And then, of course, it did.

Thursday, November 27, 2014

How about that Brenda?! (and associated matters)

1    There must be something in the water in Area D of the Strathcona Regional District, and it can't all be runoff from the numerous and increasingly-problematic septic fields.
Whatever it is, it continues to work for Brenda Leigh, now about to enter her (can it be?) 8th term as the Director.
Although I don't live in area D, I drive through it on the highway several times a week on my way to and from Courtenay. This year I thought, once again, she might be in some trouble.
Particularly as, although she got out in front of the fight against amalgamation of part of Area D with Campbell River early, she was clearly not in control of the overwhelming rejection that the referendum produced.
Brenda's opposition this year was obviously well-organized and well-funded. They started with a sign campaign in September featuring large, well-designed, high-visibility signs in prominent locations, mixed with a saturation of smaller versions of that sign; by the end of the campaign they were also running large 4-colour ads featuring their attractive candidate in the local papers.
Maybe a month before the election date, Brenda's crew started putting our her now-familiar small black-and-white signs along the highway. A few weeks later these were joined by a number of larger signs stressing her experience. There may have been newspaper ads, but if there were they didn't strike me, hence I'd say not very effective.
Brenda won with 56% of the vote.
That's some machine!

On reflection, maybe it wasn't the smartest thing in the world to put those prominent “Honig” signs on some of Area D's most-obviously expensive properties at Bennett's Point!
Just sayin'.

2    For the past three years Campbell River has had a mayor in open warfare with most of his council much of the time. Consequently, he was on the losing side of most of the significant issues that council dealt with.
So this election he offered us a choice: elect me, elect my slate, and we'll rein in the bureaucracy and cut taxes dramatically. They advertised together, and spent a significant amount of money
Among the people I know at all well, the mayor was a pretty constant source of embarrassment for three years. Comparisons were made to Rob Ford. (minus the drugs, of course) Nobody I talked to believed much in the platform. He did not have the local papers on side.
He lost to a popular councillor, but only by 121 votes.


None of the slate was elected.
I'm hereby formally registering a sigh of relief.
The new council has two returning councillors, Larry Samson and Ron Kerr. The former tended to side with the majority; the latter with the mayor.
It also has Charlie Cornfield, a former mayor who sat out the last term for personal reasons, started to run for mayor, then spotted (or was persuaded) that this would result in the return of the incumbent and consequently ran for council instead. He topped the polls.
It also has Michelle Babchuk, a former School Board Chair (I'd be surprised if she doesn't have her sights set on eventually succeeding Claire as our MLA; if that's the case a session or two on council will surely help hone her skills!)
The last two places go to Marlene Wright and Colleen Evans. I clearly don't move in the right circles to know why they were elected, but suspect ties to the business community.
I voted for the new mayor and the top 3 vote-getters, so I'm optimistic, at least for the moment.

The one real surprise for me was that Claire Moglove, a lawyer who was clearly the most effective voice on the past Council and often appeared to be effectively the mayor, lost by 410 votes. Payback? I don't know.



3    The School Board returned essentially the same crew as before, although adding Richard Franklin, a well-respected former Elementary principal.
But really, what's the point? All BC school boards can do is try to mitigate the damage Victoria does, and deflect the anger of parents, teachers, and support staff. There must be better ways to spend the money they cost.


4    Rachel Blaney was elected the NDP candidate for North Island-Comox-Powell River last weekend. Congratulations to her and her team! They worked hard and won handily.
So why am I grumpy about it?
--not because the election had already been decided by mailed ballot before we got to the convention.
--not because the speeches were tedious and irrelevant.
--not because the average age in the room must have been well over 60, and all those under 40 appeared to be children or relatives of the candidates.
--not even because I voted for the wrong person, which I didn't.
I'm grumpy because neither candidate offered anything more than talking points. Furthermore, one is apparently confused about which are federal and which are provincial issues. The other started well but doesn't know when to stop talking. By the time we left to count votes, all the energy had been sucked from the room. I left realizing that neither had presented any coherent vision of what an NDP member of Parliament might actually do for the constituency.
I'm grumpy because I didn't hear anything that would suggest we've learned from previous elections, which, if I may remind my readers, the Conservatives won, on both sides of the new riding. The fact that John Duncan (John Duncan!) isn't running here doesn't mean that we're going to win. There are any number of scenarios available in which the Conservatives or the Liberals win, especially if the Liberals run a credible candidate. Which is exactly what Peter Schwarzhoff is...
I'm grumpy because I don't know how I'd deal with my despair after another majority Conservative government. And especially if we let them have this constituency.
Again.
On the optimistic side, we've got a year to get it right, and no, the usual people (myself included) are now too long in the tooth and can no longer be relied on to get results.
Recruiting a team that can must be job one.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Promised billions?

Your editorial about BC liquified natural gas,  A Taxing Negotiation (Sept. 29) says the BC Premier, Minister of Finance and Minister of Energy "may have good explanations for what looks like double taxation on a particular industry."
They do - it's political! - but we'll never hear it from them.
Natural gas royalties have plummeted under their watch, while production levels have increased dramatically. [In 2012 Marc Lee, in an analysis for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, noted that: "As a share of provincial GDP, royalties were 1.13% in 2005/06, but have fallen to just 0.07% of GDP in 2012/13. On a per capita basis, royalties fell from $458 per British Columbian to just $34 over the same time period."]
If LNG plants are permitted to recover their billions in costs before paying even the "extra tax" you wonder about, it seems unlikely that the exporters will ever have to pay it, and even more unlikely that the Premier's promise of "billions" to the provincial treasury will ever be realized.


The section in italics was excised in the version printed in the Globe and Mail on October 1, 2014

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

We own a Westy

If you drive a VW camper van, from time to time you will break down.
It’s axiomatic, almost a universal law.
This June I was with Mike and Larry, on the third Three Amigos tour. We’d camped at the Provincial Campground near Kinuseo Falls, which is over 40 km past Tumbler Ridge on a bad gravel road. We were getting gas at one of the few places in Chetwynd where you can do that, on our way to Pine Pass and Crooked River Provincial Park an hour out of Prince George.
Parked on the other side of the pumps when we drove up was an absolutely pristine red VW Eurovan Westphalia. When it’s owner emerged, I asked the year: a 2002. (I believe that’s either the last or the penultimate year they were imported.)
However, when I admired his vehicle, the owner, a gentleman about my own age with an accent more obviously European than my own, pronounced himself more than a little annoyed.  It was parked there because he couldn’t get it started. He was pretty sure it was something electrical, but couldn’t get anyone who knew anything to look at it.
I couldn’t do anything but commiserate, because I know the nearest VW garage to Chetwynd is in High Prairie, Alberta...
And I was very pleased it wasn’t my van, because that would have been more than a little awkward.
It’s also one of the things you accept as a VW camper van owner, until you don't. We got rid of our much-loved Vanagon Westy after it had broken down for the third time in one trip, just outside of Vancouver, Washington.
Of course, before that we’d been as far afield as Yellowknife, NWT and Austin, Texas without incident...
Which is why, after we limped the Vanagon back to Victoria, we promptly bought our present Eurovan, which is a gem, and has given us and the people we have lent it to almost no trouble.
But this weekend it added Idaho to Washington and Oregon, the states in which we’ve broken down:
This saga started in Washington State, just outside of Clarkson. Sandy had mistakenly navigated us down the Washington side of the Snake River, and had just noticed our destination, the Hell's Gate State Park on the other side, when the alternator light came on. Or maybe I just hadn't noticed it before.
Anyway, suffering from considerable psychological tension, as we were retracing our route to get to Lewiston, on the Idaho side (get it? Lewis & Clark?) I remembered that the last time the van had done this, now several years ago, I'd freaked out, only to find out, once the van was safely in the care of Sunwest VW, that the light was on due to a loose connection.
Anyway, we got to the campsite without incident, met Enid and Isaac there, and had a fine time  camping by the lovely Snake River and drinking Washington wine and Oregon beer.


Next morning we set off. The alternator light came on, then went off (thus cementing my belief in the loose connection) and didn't come on again until we had nearly achieved the summit overlooking the confluence of the Snake and the Clearwater, including the two communities.
I took the necessary photos, and we proceeded on to Moscow, then past it. No issues.


Enid and Isaac had just passed us for the second time when the engine started to sputter, and within a quarter mile it had just stopped entirely.
Fortunately, I'd had the foresight to pull off, and also fortunately, San's phone could get service. (Enid's, which was charging in our care, couldn't) So she phoned the AAA.


They were extremely helpful, and two hours later we were in a large truck, the van secured to the deck on the back, on our way to Coeur d'Alene.

By that time we were back in contact with Isaac, and they picked us up at the garage. Mechanics in Idaho don't work on Saturday so Enid found a room for 4 at Bennett Bay Inn on beautiful Lake Coeur d'Alene. Where we ended the day drinking Washington wine and Idaho beer around the firepit, of course.

Because Enid and Isaac have a car, we spent Sunday on Mount Spokane with its 360 degree views (all the way to Canada!) so our weekend tourist needs were well satisfied.


On Monday the technician diagnosed the problem: a dead battery, alternator kaput, and possibly a frayed timing belt as well. The parts were available in Spokane.
They would arrive next day.
So we found ourselves enjoying the “corporate rate” at the Best Western, which is hardly traumatic, although living there does expose one to the less-touristy (hence considerably less lovely) scenery of Coeur d’Alene’s outskirts.
And very pleased to have  both a BCAA membership and a cell phone that works in the US!


PostScript:
You know the very best thing about our experience this time? It's the fact that not one person has expressed dismay at being asked to work on a VW van, never mind the, "Sorry; we don't work on those" we heard several times when our Vanagon broke!

Thursday, August 14, 2014

letter to the Globe

The Editor,
Globe and Mail

Sir,
There's a mine at the head of Buttle Lake in Strathcona Park on Vancouver Island. For years it had permission to drop its tailings into the lake, which in addition to being part of a hydro reservoir is Campbell River's municipal watershed.
For years this seemed a relatively benign solution; promoters of the mine said there was and would be no effect on the water.
And then testing started to show an alarming increase in heavy metals in our water supply.
That was when the mine built a proper tailings pond and system. The problem began to diminish gradually until nowadays we don't think much about it any longer.
Want to bet that's what the people living downstream of the Mount Polley Mine tailing pond disaster are looking at in their future unless the tailings are recovered and cleaned up?
(That's most of British Columbia's population, by the way.)

Sincerely,

Thursday, July 10, 2014

To the Class of '84

Dear Class of '84:

You'll forgive me if I don't remember very many of you individually or those I do, very clearly. It's been a while!
That said, your class embodies one of the favourite memories of my teaching career.
Here's why:
I arrived at Robron, after 10 years at Carihi, when you were in Grade 11 and the school was still undergoing some construction. I applied to come, largely because of Kieran O'Neill and Jim Beck, the Principal and Vice-Principal, in spite of the prevailing teacher gossip that Robron was an under-resourced construction disaster.
I still consider them among the best I ever worked with in my 35-year career.
Anyway, back to why you became one of my favourite graduating classes ever:
Some of you may remember the spate of racist incidents in the Rockland area in the late '70s. Those attitudes were in evidence at Robron as well, and the staff decided to tackle any racism that existed head-on. Obviously, the success of the program depended on your class, the school leaders, taking on the message that racism was unacceptable and would not be tolerated at Robron.
Which is what you did; your class was the first in Campbell River to feature students of East-Indian descent among its leaders in both sports and academics.
The consequence of the direction set by your class was that by the time my own children graduated from Robron in the '90s, racism was no longer either socially acceptable at Robron or a significant issue.
Perhaps even more importantly, your teachers applied the lessons we learned from you at Robron in other schools and in other districts.
Which makes your class kind of famous, indirectly!

Have a great reunion!
Justus Havelaar

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Power for BC: Site C vs gas

It almost pains me to say it, but on May 12 Vaughn Palmer (the Vancouver Sun's compliant provincial politics columnist) wrote a useful column that probably deserves more attention than it got from the commentariat.

In it he talks about one of the several significant questions posed by the just-released report of the “Joint Review Panel” tasked with evaluating BC Hydro's proposed Site C hydro project on the Peace River. Essentially, that question is: Why are Hydro and the Province determined to go ahead with the (present estimate) $7.9 billion dam option in a province experiencing a glut of natural gas which could easily be used to generate an equivalent amount of electricity for much less cost?

Here's his lede:
Among the more provocative passages in the report from the joint review panel on Site C are those challenging the B.C. Liberal government’s weirdly hypocritical attitude toward the use of natural gas to generate electricity.

And later, getting to the heart of the matter:
“Why, for example, was it permissible to produce, compress, send by pipeline, liquefy, and ship B.C. natural gas as LNG to Asia, where it would be burned, thus adding to the global GHG burden, while burning it here would at least save the enormous costs of liquefaction and transportation?” was how the panel framed the key question in its report released last week.
“This artificial limit was seen as especially galling in face of the (2012 cabinet decision) allowing the LNG developers to use as much gas as they wanted.”
 

Unlike many the critics of the dam option, I'm not very opposed to a third dam on the Peace. We've driven that  valley many times, and have seen the signs pointing out the potential water levels of the reservoir. It's obvious there would be forest cover and agricultural land lost. But most of the land is already cleared, and most of the agriculture presently consists of hay fields. Besides, there's apparently so much potential agricultural land available in the area, outside the valley, that Bill 24, presently before the legislature, proposes to alienate large chunks of it as well in the service of industry, development, and natural gas extraction.

Besides, the Peace River itself is already far from natural.

But $7.9 billion is serious money. Given the overruns that inevitably happen to the large public projects in this province, it's almost certainly an impossibly-low estimate. Most of us would have to be convinced that there's a good case to be made before we collectively embark on it; the enormous economic activity that would result from building it only makes sense if the power can subsequently be sold at a price we and our economy can support.

That case hasn't been made by either the government or BC Hydro.

When the Campbell government started touting it, Hydro was going to sell the power from Site C  to Americans, who, the government claimed, were sufficiently desperate to pay high prices for it.

More recently, and particularly during the first year of Christy Clark's tenure, that plan morphed into Site C powering the LNG revolution that was about to overtake us and pay for everything.

Now those markets are off the table. Apparently we'll need the power, but for what is far from clear.

However, let's assume we will need it. According to sections of the Joint Review Panel's report quoted by Palmer, one or more natural gas-powered generating plants would be both much less expensive to build and would produce significantly cheaper power. I'm going to suggest we could even absorb the cost of CO2 capture and sequestration, and still beat the Site C price for power!

Thus the only advantage Site C appears to have is a much longer lifespan: 100 years compared to 30. But who knows what our power needs will be in 30 years, never mind 100?

So that seems a dubious benefit; let's not do it. Let's let BC Hydro build a few gas plants, as and where needed instead.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

What's in a name

Last Friday, April 25, a local paper, the Courier-Islander, gave us a glimpse of what we can expect from the new owners when it published an editorial I'm pretty sure wasn't written in-house.
As is my wont when I find I'm somewhat offended by something political, I wrote a letter to the editor:

Dear Sir,
As a subscriber to your newspaper since the 1970's, it is extremely disappointing to see a piece of rather obvious Conservative propaganda masquerading as Friday's editorial (The Fair Elections Act. Is it fair or unfair?)
Especially as the government that introduced the Act has now climbed down from most of the contentious provisions so energetically defended in that editorial.


Today that letter was published, along with two others in the same vein.

This afternoon J showed up. He wanted to talk about "your letter", and why, as a Campbell River lawyer who signs himself W.J. Havelaar he couldn't be associated with it.
Fair enough, although as I pointed out, the contents of the letter pretty clearly demonstrate that he couldn't have written it.
Anyway, I agreed to write another letter:

Dear Sir,
My son, W.J. (Jay) Havelaar, wants me to point out that there are four W.J. Havelaars presently extant, and that he's not the one who has subscribed to your paper since the 1970's, so he's not the one who wrote the letter complaining about the "editorial" that appeared in the April 25th edition of the Courier-Islander.
Yours very sincerely,
W.J. (Justus) Havelaar 


That should clear things up!
(Though I doubt they'll publish it.)

Friday, April 25, 2014

This lead from today's Globe illustrates...

...why it is apparently so difficult to have a rational discussion on the issue:

Ontario’s law society has refused to accredit a new law school at a faith-based university over a policy prohibiting same-sex intimacy that some say is discriminatory.

Not to mention that that a significant part of it is just plain wrong.
Maybe not as wrong as the headline, however: Law Society rejects school over gay policy
Happily, the rest of the story is more nuanced.

That said, cheers from this corner for the Ontario Benchers!

(I tried to link to the article, but it appears to have been changed. Maybe someone read it and drew the same conclusions I did!)

April 26:
Since I posted this, the Nova Scotia Bar has essentially agreed with the Ontario Bar. It's quite possible the BC Bar will reverse its decision as well, if the membership gets to vote.

Mike asked me to expand on my position. I replied:
I thought the Supremes were wrong in the BCTF vs TWU case, and I think the Ontario Benchers are right in this case.
My complaint with the Globe lead and headine is that it doesn't help to describe the case as pitting the interests of same-sex advocates against the interests of religious fundamentalists, no matter how passionate the argument on either side. They're both, in their own way, correct, and I have no problem with each making his case.
However, the TWU covenant is clearly discriminatory: that's its raison d'etre. It discriminates against all adults who are in relationships that are not traditional man-woman marriage.
Normally this kind of discrimination of no great import, but these activities and relationships are, in Canada, not only legal but have the implicit blessing of the state in that they're recognized in various laws.
When such discrimination is a condition of entering or remaining in a professional faculty, one (education and law being two examples) which has strict anti-discrimination bylaws written into its professional college rules, a line has been crossed.

I should have added that the practice of law is, like teaching, a social service, a part of what makes our society work. Any person who has been sheltered in a cocoon of like-minded individuals his or her entire academic life is not, in my opinion -- no matter how professionally competent -- well prepared to confront the realities of that society, and is thus not well-prepared to fully discharge his or her duties to that society.
I believe I could give examples observed during my teaching career.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

A cautionary iTunes tale (perhaps usefully illustrative)


About a year ago Bruce alerted me to the existence of the Audioengine W3 Wireless Audio Adaptor, conceptually the very thing I'd been looking for. The price was right, so I found a seller in Ontario and bought one.
The W3 consists of two parts: one you plug into a USB port on your computer, the other is connected to the amplifier of your stereo system. It turns your computer into an excellent, high-fidelity, wireless music server.
To get our extensive CD collection into the (160 gig) small iMac in a “lossless” format (ALAC, a proprietary Apple format) I bought a 1TB external drive, connected iTunes to it, and started processing CDs. I was at the time not very familiar with iTunes, but did know that it functioned with “playlists”, so reasoned that if I turned every CD into a playlist and identified each playlist with the number in the catalogue I've been keeping forever, I'd have the equivalent of our entire CD library literally at my fingertips.
And that's actually how it turned out.
Better yet, Sandy's iPad and iPhone could be made to control the entire system remotely, which is spectacular and even useful... but that's not what this post is about.
What it is about is how I managed to screw up a perfectly competent, functioning system, and what I discovered while restoring it. (Which, as you will see, I haven't completed yet, and won't, for weeks.)

The saga started when I was assembling some music files that I wanted to send. I'd noticed iTunes had an export function, so I thought: why not get iTunes to export those files?
Having done that, I discovered that I'd actually exported the playlists rather than the music, but before I'd properly processed this fact, I'd managed to corrupt the file. Still don't know how.
I cursed myself for not getting around to backing up the iMac's files, especially as Time Machine makes this dead simple, and all our other computers are backed up.
However, that meant re-doing the entire playlist file, a significant undertaking.
Next day I was already into the “B”s when I thought I should probably attach an external hard drive and fire up Time Machine.
Unfortunately, there are only 3 USB ports on the iMac, and all of them were in use.
Fortunately, we have a powered USB desktop hub, with 4 extra ports.
Unfortunately, it popped out of the computer's port while I was fiddling with the back of the computer, plugging and unplugging, while the iTunes external drive was attached.
That drive subsequently disappeared from its place on the desktop.
Disk Utility revealed that the drive was corrupted, and needed re-formatting.
You cannot reformat without erasing the contents, and for obvious reasons I did not want to process nearly 500 gigs worth of music files over again.
Annoying, but no particular problem, I thought: the music files were backed up on our system's Network Attached Storage, a small server available to all our computers.
I checked: while that NAS had many music files on it (and works quite well as a music server, but has limitations) in total it contained fewer than 300 gig, whereas the defective drive used 465 gig. 
Clearly, there was something wrong, and I wasn't prepared to risk losing even more files.
Time to try the Mac's Disk Utility's “recover” function: 5 hours later my latent suspicions were confirmed; all that was recovered was the defective disk, so no joy.
I decided I had to buy a recovery program for Mac.
Once installed, it ground away for over 12 hours -- happily mostly at night -- but did recover the music files.
So I reformatted the original music disk, got the computer to copy the recovered files onto it, and 5 hours later reconnected it to iTunes, then added the files to its library.
I started on re-creating the playlists, and instantly discovered that, according to the iTunes library, I now had two copies of every track, one functional and the other not. While that information didn't take up much room, it would make creating every playlist a nightmare.
So I trashed all the iTunes files (except for those recordings bought from the iTunes store, which appear automatically) and started over, connecting the disk to iTunes, then adding the files on it to the library.

And that's where I am at present. Time Machine is going to spend the next few hours backing everything up, and then I get to create some playlists...

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Senate of Canada: an incremental improvement

The Senate of Canada needs to be abolished. Of this I have no doubt.
Furthermore, that is the long-held position of the NDP, one of the principal reasons I support that party.
But the NDP has an Achilles' heel on this subject: no senators plus, to paraphrase Otto von Bismark's tested observation, “politics is the art of the possible.”
Those two facts should make party spokesmen and commentators pause before ripping the Liberals and Justin Trudeau for removing 32 Liberal-appointed  senators from the Liberal caucus.
Here's why:
NDPers spouting the party line that the Liberal initiative doesn't address the real issue are not incorrect, but do overlook the fact that, given the requirements of Canada's Constitution, we're unlikely to see the end of the Senate in our lifetime. Getting the agreement of seven provinces representing at least 50% of the population is simply too steep a mountain to climb, and short of revolution, there are no other options.
So abolition simply isn't going to happen, at least, not in any foreseeable future, not even with a majority NDP government. (I love Thomas Mulcair's assertion that, as prime Minister, he wouldn't appoint a single senator. But does anyone believe the NDP would be in power long enough to empty the Senate?)
This implies that, if we are to be relevant on this issue, we need to put some water in our wine and think reformation instead.
Of course Conservatives are also talking reformation, but their favourite reform involves an elected Senate, which would not only perpetuate an already dysfunctional institution, but also give it added legitimacy. It might even prove to be effective, thus giving the Reformers who morphed into the Conservatives two of their three “E”s.
But why would anyone support a Senate with real power and legitimacy in which the Atlantic provinces would have more seats than the entire western half of the country?
I trust the NDP to oppose an elected Senate even more vigorously than it opposes what we have.
(Odds are they won't have to: the Supreme Court is likely to point out that such a change would require a change in the Constitution, which makes an elected Senate just as unlikely as an abolished Senate.)
Which leaves what the Liberals have just done.
Their shot at reform is unlikely to make much immediate difference and is not without its problems. Removing Liberal senators from caucus doesn't stop them from being Liberals or voting as their Liberal brethern in the House do. Nor does it stop them from being unelected. It doesn't even stop them from forming their own Liberal caucus in the Senate. But it does cut the ties between the Liberal Party leader's office and the Senate, and I don't see how any New Democrat could argue that's a bad thing, especially given the relationship between our Prime Minister's office and the Senate.
Besides, if Trudeau really does get to institute his proposal of changing how Senators are chosen, over time the Senate's partisanship really will be diminished.
Again, I don't see why that's not an improvement over what we have presently.
Even if it's far from the ideal.
Frankly, I'd be more impressed with my party if its spokesmen weren't so blinded by Justin Trudeau's rise in the polls that they can't acknowledge an impressive, if incremental, first step.

Friday, January 24, 2014

Warning: potentially boring...

 ...at least, unless you're one of those fortunate people who have the time to spend hours (and sometimes days!) messing with computers.
As I am.
Anyway, on to the latest computer saga, revealed through (a somewhat modifed) email correspondence with a friend who is also my Linux guru:

I have a DVD that I wish to duplicate for several complex reasons involving the fact that we have too many computers featuring too many operating systems at our house. 
So I go looking for K9copy, which I've always used before, and find it unavailable in any of the Linux repositories. I subsequently find it online, but then discover I will have to "compile" the file, which is well beyond what I think I'm able to do. 
On reading the on-line forums, I discover that K3b will also serve, but there's a problem: the resulting .iso file is 7.7 gig, and my blank disks are 4.7, which is of course why K9copy (which shrinks as it extracts and then writes files)  has been so useful in the past.
I suppose I could shrink the file using DVD95, but that has created problems in the past and I'd still have to write the resulting file to a blank DVD.
Clearly, I'm meant to not copy DVDs.
On the other hand, today one can purchase two 16-gig flash drives for a mere $20, tax included.


I send, and carry on, expecting to just drop the .iso files onto the virtual flash drive now mounted on my desktop. And the saga continues in the next email, an hour or so later..:

I'd forgotten that FAT32 files (which is how most usb flash drives are initially formatted) max out at 4 gig. So I reformatted one drive to NTFS, which Linux will format and Mac will read. However, according to Dr. Google, Mac won't write to it.
So I thought I'd format the other on the Mac. Disk Utility offered several versions of "Mac OS extended (journalled)". I know from past experience that doesn't work in Linux. It also offered something called ex-FAT, which, again according to Dr. Google, does. Except that this requires installing a new repository in Linux, and when I tried to do that, my terminal assured me that such a repository could not be found.
Apparently it is possible to shut off journalling in Mac OS, but I don't know what the consequences would be so I'm not going there.
In any case, I do have the two .iso files installed on Sandy's iMac, and I do have them on a 16 Gig NTFS-formatted drive.
And I learned a bunch of stuff, some of it even useful.


That email had just been sent when I received:

Interesting. Back on 2013-04-27, in reply to my question about whether you could play (with VLC) .iso files made with K9Copy, you wrote:
K9copy seems to have disappeared from the repositories. So I used K3b
to create the iso, then DVD95 converter to create a burnable file,
then DiskCreator to burn the disk, which the VLC Media Player played
without issue. I'd prefer K9copy, but there you are.
To which I replied:

Damn. So I've been here before, and had forgotten the particulars.
Oh well, as I mentioned, USB flash drives have come down in price phenomenally, so I really no longer need to make DVDs for this purpose.