Response to the Public Order Emergency Commission request for comment

 Sent: Sunday, October 2, 2022 12:34 AM

To: Perspectives (POEC/CEDU) <Perspectives@poec-cedu.gc.ca>
Subject: Emergencies Act

 

I live on Vancouver Island but can report that the longer the occupation of Ottawa lasted last February, the greater the schism opening up here, to the point that a fringe minority, driving pickups festooned with upside-down Canadian flags and obscene posters, organized their own mini-Convoy to Victoria to scream about oppression. Not once, but twice.

There were many instances and an increasing frequency of public figures being harassed by obviously-uncontrolled men shouting about "freedom", mask and vaccination mandates, and hatred of our government.

We wanted it shut down before it turned into something more serious.

Consequently, the vast majority of us here supported the invoking of the Emergencies Act.

We applauded Parliament's action to cut off a more widespread insurrection when it finally did.

(The last remnants are with us still.)

And the response from the Commission, received today:

Good day Mr. Havelaar,

 We have received your submission and we thank you for taking the time to provide us with your comments and observations. Public input is an important part of the Public Order Emergency Commission’s investigation.

 If more details are needed from you, the Commission will contact you directly.

 Again, thank you,

Letting her run

The case of “Appadurai vs BCNDP” has revealed some very interesting misconceptions, the most galvanizing of which –– to me, at any rate –– is that many commenters apparently believe that the leader sets party policies. (Because if it’s recognized he/she doesn’t set policy, what’s the point of her campaign? Destruction of the BCNDP? Catharsis?)

I don’t know much about the inner workings of other parties, but that notion is demonstrably not true of the BCNDP. 

Actually, I suspect it isn’t true of most parties, ie UK Conservatives, who have recently turfed two leaders elected by the party membership over policy differences with their own Caucus, whose members could smell personal political defeat in the air. It’s also not true of the CPC, whose Parliamentary Caucus removed Erin O’Toole for less-obvious but similar reasons. As for Danielle Smith of the UCP, whose members appear to have temporarily fallen into line with her craziness, that jury is still out, but stay tuned: they haven’t yet faced the Alberta Legislature with her at the helm, and there’s a May election coming right up.

That’s why the leadership ambitions of an obviously talented and charismatic would-be leader of the BCNDP were always doomed to failure, even if she and her Dogwood friends had signed up enough “members” to win the contest. 

The BCNDP is built on its constituency associations. Besides electing candidates for Provincial election, those associations elect representatives to attend regular Provincial Conventions, where BCNDP Executive members are elected and provincial political policies are debated and created. The mechanics aren’t important here, but the fact that the Constituencies control the membership and consequently most BCNDP financing is crucial, given that in BC political parties are exclusively dependent on personal donations. 

As far as I know, Ms Appadurai has no local Constituency behind her; her members identify as former Greens, Dogwood members and followers, and disaffected, former NDPers. Would they have stayed around long enough to complete the process? We’ll never know, but we do know, from previous elections, that Green Party members don’t fund the “backrooms” and candidates of their party the way the BCNDP does. They don’t organize campaigns the same way either: they simply don’t have the resources or manpower.

So let’s engage in a bit of fantasy, and imagine that in spite of the odds the Appadurai campaign, were successful and she were elected Leader. She has no seat in the Legislature, so she’d have to try to direct things from afar until she had achieved one. Not very effective, and, because she ran a campaign literally against the Caucus (from her publicity: “Views + positions may not represent those of the BC NDP, Caucus and Government.”) she and her team would find some steep hills to climb, not the least of which would be, who would represent her in the Legislature in the interim, almost the entire Caucus having declared for Eby? Then she’d have to find a seat to contest. Would she run in any vacant seat? Would a sitting member offer up his/hers? Would their Constituency Association concur without a local nominating convention? Would the Provincial Executive parachute her into a constituency without constituency consent? Could she possibly be successful, assuming everything else (funding and manpower, principally) was in place? (The BCNDP isn’t the BCLiberal Party, where Christy Clark, already Premier at the time, having been defeated by David Eby in Point Grey was able to bribe her way into a seat in the Okanagan. ) 

To dive even further into fantasy: assume she has won a seat and therefore a place in the Legislature. Does the Caucus follow her in implementing her promises: stop Site C, stop fracking in the North-east, stop LNG Canada and the pipeline that supplies it, stop all old-growth logging, including Fairy Creek, etc.? No, the Caucus does not, because that’s not NDP policy, and in any case the Premier doesn’t set policy. Her platform was the Green Party’s platform, and they have a caucus of two.

So, never going to happen. The Appadurai campaign was a clear attempt to skip around conventional parliamentary democracy and get the government of the day to bend to a very small minority of BC electors.

Had they been successful, they would have destroyed the infrastructure of the BCNDP and made it unelectable in BC. 

        And they wouldn’t have done the Green cause or Ms Appadurai any good at all.

 

Defeating the Trojan horse

    This morning all NDP members received an email from David Eby, the new leader of the BCNDP. I thought it excellent: just the right tone and content; absolutely without any sign of triumphalism; no condemnation of either Anjali Appadurai or the people who supported her bid; apparently sincere hopes that the new members would go on to become dedicated NDPers.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that this attempt to take over the BCNDP to make it, in effect, a clone of the Green Party was driven by a coterie of very dedicated fanatics, who will undoubtedly ensure that the smell of their attempted coup and its abrupt conclusion will linger for some time.

(Aside: for those of you still unfamiliar with the details, I recommend a Twitter feed by Rob Shaw: https://twitter.com/RobShaw_BC/status/1582548584808882176 

And for commentary, Vaughan Palmer’s column on the subject: https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/vaughn-palmer-report-stuffed-with-evidence-against-anjali-appadurai-campaign)

This encounter with the Trojan Horse of radical environmentalism is not, I think, as problematic as it might be at first glance. I think I detect the problem. It’s inherent in the BCNDP’s processes and procedures. 

I make that analysis because we experienced, in North Island, something similar, so as a former activist I’m well-placed to present this illustration: 

When Colin Gabelmann retired and Glen Robertson became the MLA, the North Island locus moved up-island and became much more directly union-influenced. So some of us, me included, took the opportunity to follow Colin’s example and step back as well. That lasted also during the term of Glen’s BCLiberal successor, Rod Visser. We got seriously active again before the next election, during the drive to name a new NDP candidate to take Rod on. Brian Giles, who had been Colin’s constituency assistant, dropped out well before the vote, which left Brenda Leigh, Area D director of the Strathcona Regional District, and our candidate, Claire Trevena, a former Green who lived on Quadra Island and was new to NDP politics. 

By the time of the nominating convention, by all accounts and evidence, Brenda’s crew thought they had the nomination in the proverbial bag: they had solid union support and organization, North Island Constituency did not have a large membership, and they knew they had signed up literally hundreds of new members. 

Mostly $10 memberships, the minimum permitted by NDP rules. This fact turned out to be important in a convention nomination; they were both incredulous and indignant when Claire was declared winner. 

After Claire’s committee took over the constituency reins we discovered that North Island had acquired one of the largest memberships in BC, at around 1300. We also discovered that many were located in Area D, where Brenda was (and continued to be, until the recent election) a popular representative. When renewal time came round, almost all this new “membership” vanished; in fact, some people we knew in other contexts who had been signed up had no idea they had become NDP members: they thought they were just giving Brenda a few dollars to run her campaign.

And of course Claire beat Mr Visser, and won the next few elections until she retired in 2020.

I don’t think the Appadurai campaign would have had exactly the same problem that the Leigh campaign had; I think their new “members” were probably very motivated, and would have voted, given the chance. And they would certainly have been reminded. But they wouldn’t have been very representative of the rest of the NDP membership, and they would almost certainly have faded away shortly after, even if their candidate were successful.

So how do we prevent a future takeover event, now that Avi Lewis and his fellow-travellers have set the template?

Happily, a fix is not very difficult.

I think the world has changed, and with it the incentive to join political parties. Consequently, we need to dump the $10 minimum, which has evolved from being a socially-responsible policy to being an incentive for larceny. It doesn’t even cover the cost of administration for these new memberships! 

These days, $10 is a couple of cups of fancy coffee, and most of us think nothing of spending that much if we feel it’s worth it. So I suggest $50 be the new $10. That’s enough to make people think, not enough to dissuade the dedicated, and if anyone genuinely needs to pay the lower sum, that need is easily accommodated, just as we have always accommodated people who couldn’t pay $10.

We really admire John Horgan and the present government and, although we’re both past active participation in the Party, we have high hopes for Premier David Eby’s leadership. He has been an excellent Minister on a number of difficult files.

        Would be nice if he occasionally showed that sense of humour that he’s hidden so thoroughly, though! 

Letter to my MP: housing mailer

 

Dear Rachel,

I don't know who prepares your mailers, but he/she let you down.
You know Prime Minister Trudeau isn't responsible for housing or rental costs.
Yes, those are appalling costs for many people, but certainly not most. And if any government is at fault, that would be the various provincial governments, in whose bailiwick housing falls.
Of course you already know that too.
And you also know that our provincial government is very committed to dealing with this issue. It is not responsible for the problems either, and regularly confers with the federal government, seeking assistance for provincial initiatives dealing with housing costs and availability.
The mailer issued under your name isn't helping.
At the moment, the only thing that endears me to our federal party (which appears so desperate to distance itself from the government that it distorts important issues) is that it's helping what is essentially the second-best federal government I've seen in my lifetime pass some very socially-responsible legislation.
Of course I have no problem with you; you've been a good MP. Except that your caucus keeps dropping these clunkers on us: it's become a regular topic of conversation when we older NDPers get together.

Going electric: the arrival of the Bolt

  Last July the Bayerische Motoren Werke car company (BMW) made an announcement that set the business pages of the English-speaking Press alight: it announced that in Britain BMW owners, for only £10 per month, could purchase a heated seat subscription. 

Of course every BMW sold already has heating coils in the front seats; the subscription would merely activate them for customers who hadn’t initially bought the option.

(https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription/index.html)

Almost every article I read on the subject at the time pointed out the slippery slope, the likely popularity, and the potential cash cow this ‘option’ represents. So yesterday I wasn’t surprised when I read an article on a possible culmination of the trend, featuring a brand new entrant in the electric car market, VinFast from Viet Nam, described as a “Tesla Challenger”. It promises to have a battery subscription as one option: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/vinfast-vf8-vf9-battery-subscription-vehicle-pricing-explained/

A trend coming to an automobile showroom near you? Count on it!

I believe we’ve just had a small exposure to the phenomenon ourselves.

When we bought our Golf Wagon TDI in 2011 we were presented with only two options: the “customline” or the “highline”. We chose the less expensive version; our 11 years and 200,000 km of trouble-free experience make a convincing case that for our purposes we had made the right choice. I believe all we had to add were snow tires and a roof rack. VW never once tried to pressure us into adding to the initial package.

And of course, VW’s financial apology for failing to acknowledge that it had cheated on emission tests ultimately made it a very good deal financially as well.

Last November, when we started to see proof that our “solar roof” really was going to reduce our electricity bill to almost nothing we started to get serious about an electric car. After considerable online research, we decided that the Chevrolet Bolt, some writers’ “Electric Car of the Year” in 2017, would probably suit us very well, even though critics were not particularly enamoured of the build and trim. The clincher for me was that the dealer is in downtown Campbell River: I relished the thought of no more time in the waiting room of the dealer in Courtenay which is where I, an owner of two VW vehicles, spent too many hours after my dad, who had lived in Courtenay, died. 

So I sent an email, got an immediate response including a spec sheet, went to see the salesman, and put a hold on the first Bolt through the dealer’s doors.

It had a fairly-extensive option list, so not the basic model we had imagined, but it was available when most relatively-affordable electrics weren’t.

We took delivery on August 31, 2022.

Of course after only 2 weeks we already love our Bolt, though there are some significant things to master: 314 pages of “Owner’s Manual” and the steep learning curve dealing with innumerable –– and to us foreign –– systems. But then we remember that we managed to come to terms with our first and subsequent computers, making them do what we wanted, so this does not seem an insurmountable challenge. Already we’ve established that mostly it drives just like a car with an automatic transmission, and we’ve owned a couple of those. And “one pedal” driving is pretty intuitive. So far the hardest lesson has been that you must keep off the accelerator pedal or you’ll be well over the speed limit before you realize there’s a problem.

But this piece really wasn’t supposed to be about the delights of driving Bolts. I started it because I was annoyed by the daily emails from OnStar, GM’s subscription service for most advertised add-ons. 

So far we’ve managed to ignore them, and as they will apparently end in a month, they are not a serious impediment to our enjoyment of the car. 

Nonetheless.

We signed on to the OnStar system because getting us on was one of our salesman’s jobs, and we liked him. On reading the details, however, we realized we are definitely not interested in being monitored by our car, and all the useful attributes of the OnStar system are adequately covered by a smartphone with the BC Hydro EV app and a BCAA membership. 

And no, we cannot do without our BCAA membership. We own a 1992 Volkswagen camper van. It would be madness to have that vehicle and no BCAA membership, as we have discovered on more than one occasion! 

(You know what cynics say about VW camper vans: comfortable place to await the arrival of the tow truck. They’re not entirely wrong.)

We don’t either need or want the monitoring either, as today’s example of redundant OnStar monitoring demonstrates: this morning after I got back from ‘Thursday morning coffee with Geoff’ I got two emails, both pointing out that the tire pressures in the car needed attention. Of course they did: the car had been in the OK Tire shop, having the issued summer tires swapped for 4-season radials. 

(In fairness, the email did point out that we should ignore the message if the problem was being attended to.)

Some people would be happy to get that message; I find myself decidedly not among them.

Anyway, in our situation that notification doesn’t make much of a case for the program: we can probably tell if a tire needs attention as we have, between us, some 120 years of experience of car operation! We are frankly more concerned by the lack of a spare, replaced by a can of goop to plug the hole and enough pressure to re-inflate the tire. Apparently it’s the contemporary way.

One of the carrots GM Canada advertises for buyers of their electric vehicles is up to $1000 to apply towards the installation of a “2^nd level” home charger. Given how slow the charge is on standard 110 house current, that charger, which is 4 or 5 times faster, is pretty-much essential equipment. We clearly needed a charger, so decided to pursue the offer.

But there’s a catch. Turns out that charger must be installed by a “Q merit Electrician” for GM Canada to honour its promise. So I asked Mike of Snowdon Electric, our electrician, who BC Hydro thinks is qualified to install chargers and who has installed at least one other for a Ford product, if he knew what that was. He had no idea. 

Mohammed, representing GM Canada, told me that GM has a deal with the “Q merit” organization and that the closest such electrician is in Nanaimo. Mike would only qualify if he became one. 

Mike is our son-in-law. He did the wiring for our two mini-split heat pumps several years ago, installed our solar roof and replaced our original electrical panel last fall, and is consequently entirely familiar with our electrical setup. We were determined that he would install the charger, even if that meant more cost to us. 

(Of course it wouldn’t actually cost more, because Mike lives in Willow Point so doesn’t have to charge travel time to and from Nanaimo.)

GM Canada eventually and reluctantly sort of conceded our point, and Mike was able to arrange a credit at Tyee Chevrolet for us.  A small consideration to make us feel better about being unwilling to access the advertised rebate. 

That should complete this phase of the adventure. Time to essay a small voyage at speed to Courtenay and back!

Further adventures with technology

 When our weeds/grass started to grow again after the winter, I dragged our lawn mower –– inert since October –– from the shed, shot some “starter fluid” on the filter, pulled the starter cord, and fired it up: first pull.

I was chuffed, especially when it kept going; when I put it away last year, it had started to become recalcitrant: sometimes difficult to start, sometimes running, but poorly.

So I wasn’t astonished when, after about 15 minutes, it just quit. 

I filtered and replaced the fuel, replaced the oil, and restarted it. This time it ran again, but raggedly. I didn’t run it long enough to discover if it would refuse again.

Already last summer I’d begun to think about replacing it, or at least adding another to our stable. We’re generally edging into all-electric, so off to C&L, where they sold me a very nice battery-operated mower for about three times what I had paid for the gas mower about ten years ago.

As expected, it works a treat, and although our yard has enough “mow-able” area that two batteries don’t quite do the trick, I’m old and retired, so I can wait for the recharge.

Anyway, yesterday I took the old mower into a repair shop for them to tell me whether it was fixable. 

The mechanic assured me it wasn’t, not for an acceptable price. So there’s that. 

Good thing we have a gas-powered van which can use the 10 litres of fresh gas!

Then there’s the chain saw.

I bought it years ago when I was still allowed to climb to the top of our hedge. At the time I needed to take the top two feet off. It’s a long hedge, and there are a lot of cedars that needed their heads lopped.

So the saw is small, and light, and altogether delightful. An Echo. I’ve used it a lot, considering most of our “forest” consists of rhododendrons, and most of them have turned into trees which need regular trimming. And we have a number of fruit trees which also need regular trimming.

(And haven’t the rhodos been absolutely gorgeous this year? The best ever!)

Last fall we had three apple trees and two pear trees. Two of the apples and one of the pears developed so many worms that the fruit was pretty-much unusable. 

I’m not really into spraying any longer, not even with lime sulphur, which rhodos don't like.

Also, they were starting to interfere with the rhodos.

In short, my saw got to talk to those trees this spring.

I was well into the largest of the apples, a full-sized golden reinett, when the saw quit. I started it, and it quit again. And then I couldn’t turn the engine over any longer.

So off to the shop where I’d originally bought the saw and where they couldn’t turn it over either. They took the plug out to have a look: “But it’s dry! You’ve been using the wrong gas!”

That initially seemed really unlikely, as I have a dedicated fuel tank for my saw and hedge trimmer, and I was entirely confident that was the fuel I’d used.

But then I realized: Oh no! serious seniors’ moment! When I’d filled up that gas tank in the fall I’d put in the fuel stabilizer to get the fuel through the winter, but had almost certainly forgotten to also add the oil.

Result one dead saw.

They were most sympathetic; told me they see this all the time...

Somehow that just didn’t take the sting out.

What did, finally, was when one of the service guys remembered that, although they no longer handle Echo saws, they still had some old inventory filed away. And one of the boxes contained a dead ringer for my saw.

I bought it for considerably less than a contemporary saw would have cost, went home, put oil in the gas tank, and finished the job.

The tree never knew the difference.