Author: Milan
Bugs headed for orbit
Door collage
Shed
Why aren’t the NDP climate and environmental champions?
It is generally held that the existence of this socialist tradition allows governments in Canada to play a larger role than in the United States. As noted above, however, pollution regulation in this country has imposed costs on industry that are only one-third of those imposed by American governments. Despite their much more vocal commitment to the virtues of free enterprise, Americans have been much more willing to see governments intervene to protect the environment than have Canadians.
Perhaps of more significance is the fact that this socialist tradition led to creation of the CCF in 1932 and the New Democratic Party in 1961. Environmentalism has always been seen as part of the progressive agenda and therefore it might be assumed that environmentalists form a natural constituency for the NDP.
In fact, however, the NDP has been no more successful than either of the other two parties in articulating environmental policy and NDP governments have not been particularly noted for action on the issue. It would be difficult to argue that British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, in which NDP governments have held power, have introduced more stringent pollution control measures than Ontario, where, until 1990, the NDP had not formed a government. A 1985 review of the record of NDP governments in Manitoba since it assumed power in 1982 reached this conclusion: “Changes in [environmental] legal arrangements and institutions have also been minimal; not one change seems to strike environmentalists as having great significance.”
The question is not whether the socialist foundations of the NDP will lead that party automatically to environmentalism, since they will not, but whether environmentalists can draw on that party’s concern for fairness and social justice as they work to put in place policies based on fairness and justice for the natural world.
Macdonald, Doug. The Politics of Pollution. McClelland & Steward; Toronto. 1991. p. 50–1
Related:
-
NDP opportunism and Conservative concealment
Talkin’ ’bout a coalition
The coalition and Canadian democracy
New Democrats disappointing on climate change
Liberal-NDP cooperation
Canada’s Liberals and NDP should merge
Thoughts on the Trinity-Spadina by-election
OMG NDP!
Climate change, Alberta politics, and hydrocarbon producers unwilling to act
NDP rally photos
Canada’s election 2021 climate change platforms
Open thread: 2022 Liberal-NDP consent and supply agreement
173 days after my thesis defence
Emotionally, this feels like one of the darkest times I can remember.
I feel like finishing the PhD has done me no good and left me at a blank place with no routes out.
I am overwhelmed by anger, grief, and fear to be moving from one precarious housing situation to another, with no prospect of getting to somewhere I will feel safe.
At the same time, it feels like the political problems in our societies and globally have become irresolvable pathologies, wherein all our responses become selfish, anger-driven, and self-defeating.
Rounding it out, I feel like my entire extended network of friends and family are also in crisis and in need of help themselves.
I feel like growing up in a prosperous suburb in the optimistic 1990s left me with a bunch of expectations and that the experience of life now is a clanging repudiation of the idea that if you educate and apply yourself you will have a desirable or at least a decent future.
Likewise, I feel like the idea that honesty and integrity are desirable traits was a misunderstanding of how humans relate to each other. They don’t want honesty and impartial standards that also apply to them — they want comforting and appealing lies, and then lies about those lies being lies. Institutions don’t want employees or members who apply high standards to them impartially — they want people who interpret loyalty as openly pretending to have high standards, while actually not applying them to the institutions which they are embedded in.
The last makes me feel like my whole identity is eroding. I have always been stubborn, forthright, and willing to assert my own views, sustained in part by the hope that broadly speaking and in the long term those would be good things for me. Now it is starting to feel like the only way to survive in the world is as a sycophant too captured and afraid to object to the failings and misconduct of the people and organizations that control us, that we endure only by their dispensation, and that — even though we all feel that the system has entered an accelerating phase of shaking itself apart into broken fragments — we will nonetheless continue to punish critics of the system rather than implement effective repairs.
Contrast with:
- I have to be somewhere (2010)
Eton’s Pop society
We knew that Gibson and Longden planned to put me up for Pop. The suspense grew heavy, our voices languished. Pop elections took hours, for the same boy could be put up and blackballed seven or eight times, a caucus of voters keeping out everybody till their favourite got in. Only the necessity of lunch ended these ordeals. Suddenly there was a noise of footsteps thudding up the wooden staircase of the tower. The door burst open, and about twenty Pops, many of whom had never spoken to me before, with bright coloured waistcoats, rolled umbrellas, buttonholes, braid, and “spongebag” trousers, came reeling in, like the college of cardinals arriving to congratulate some pious old freak whom fate had elevated to the throne of St. Peter. They made a great noise, shouting and slapping me on the back in the elation of their gesture, and Charles drifted away. I had got in on the first round, being put up by Knebworth, but after they had left only the small of Balkan Sobranie and Honey and Flowers remained to prove it was not a dream.
At that time Pop were the rulers of Eton, fawned on by masters, and the helpless Sixth Form. Such was their prestige that some boys who failed to get in never recovered; one was rumoured to have procured his sister for the influential members. Besides privilege—for they could beat anyone, fag any lower boy, walk arm-in-arm, wear pretty clothes, sit in their own club, and get away with minor breaches of discipline, they also possessed executive power, which their members tasted, often for the only time in their lives. To elect a boy without a colour, and a Colleger too, was a departure for them; it made them feel that they appreciated intellectual worth, and could not be accused of athleticism; they felt like the Viceroy after entertaining Gandhi. The rest of the school could not understand that a boy could be elected because he was amusing; if I got in without a colour it must be because I was a “bitch”; yet by Eton standards I was too unattractive to be a “bitch”—unless my very ugliness provided, for the jaded appetites of the Eton Society, the final attraction!
When I went to chapel I was conscious of eyes being upon me; some were masters, cold and censorious, they believed the worst; others were friendly and admiring. Those of the older boys were incredulous, but the younger ones stared hardest, for they could be beaten for not knowing all the Pops by sight, and mine was a mug they must learn by heart. Everybody congratulated me. The only person not to was Denis. He himself had been co-opted in as future Captain of the School, and could not believe that my election to such an anti-intellectual and reactionary body could give me pleasure. I thought that it was because he was envious, since he had been elected ex officio. My intravenous injection of success had begun to take.
Connolly, Cyril. Enemies of Promise. London; Routledge. 1938. p. 302–3
Back to the Claireville conservation area
We had to cancel a planned long weekend camping trip near Temagami because everyone is in crisis, but at least today I got a hike with three friends in the Claireville conservation area, a half hour bus ride west of Vaughan Metro Centre.
I appreciated the forested areas around shallow creeks, the frogs croaking in the marshes, and the bright weather which was neither unpleasantly hot nor oppressively humid. Strangely enough, the one unlocked bathroom we found was even air conditioned.