Category: Canada
Anything related to Canada or Canadians
Unions for fossil fuel divestment at U of T
I was surprised to get an email today saying that three unions (USW1998, CUPE3902 (my union), and CUPE1230) along with the Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students wrote to President Gertler to endorse fossil fuel divestment.
The letter highlights how receiving financial benefit from the fossil fuel industry compromises academic integrity and how the industry harms indigenous communities. Notably, it doesn’t mention divestment from any entities targeted by other divestment campaigns at U of T.
It’s encouraging that organizations are still pressing U of T to act, though it’s also a bit troubling that these unions apparently don’t know that the campaign is no longer active, and those of us who were involved didn’t hear about this union initiative until now. In a way that’s probably relevant to my divestment research, it shows how the actions of allies can be uncoordinated.
Toronto Women’s March
Today I skipped Judo for the Toronto Women’s March.
For the moment, I will choose to highlight the progressive notion that Trump is the dying last gasp of misogyny, racism, and intolerance within an American population which is ever-more diverse, progressive, and empowered.
Trump is the braggadocious con man trying to sell himself as a sophisticated businessman, which is laughable from top to bottom, and who is trying to turn irritated ignorance into a policy agenda.
The years ahead are going to be rough, and a lot of people who dislike politics will need to think about whether they dislike creeping fascism even more. In the end, this is a matter of the golden rule. Treat others as you would want them to treat you. That means avoiding planetary catastrophe by shutting down fossil fuel production everywhere. It means respecting personal autonomy by providing health care, birth control, and reproductive control based on the idea that every person can make the best choices for their body. It means fighting with the understanding that much of what has been achieved since governments started thinking that people have rights regardless of sex or class or property is at risk in struggles around the world.
The time for fighting has come, and the more you have to lose the more you need to throw yourself into demanding justice, equality, and a world which can sustain life for many thousands of years ahead.
Improving Canadian healthcare
The Current recently ran a segment with Dr. Danielle Martin, talking about ways to improve Canadian healthcare. In particular, she emphasizes the importance of family doctors with a broad overall knowledge of patients’ health histories, and the importance of avoiding costly and damaging unnecessary tests and procedures.
It sounds like her book, Better Now: Six Big Ideas to Improve Health Care for All Canadians, would be well worth reading.
Graeme Smith on NATO’s war in Afghanistan
For the Afghan government to gain the upper hand, however, the foreign money needs to continue flowing. If salaries aren’t paid, local police could turn into insurgents or bandits. Problems with the pay structure would also threaten the integrity of the Afghan military, possibly breaking a key national institution into feuding factions. Donors have promised to continue supporting the cost of Afghan security forces until 2017, but even the most optimistic projections show the donations shrinking in coming years. The Afghan forces will also require help with air support and logistics, making sure that enough diesel, bullets and other supplies reach the front lines. Just as importantly, they need to refrain from beating people, stealing money and fighting each other. They need to behave in a way that inspires trust.
These are tall orders, but not impossible. Afghan security forces with a healthy budget from foreign donors may succeed in keeping the Taliban at bay. There’s also a risk that parts of the country could fall into anarchy, or break into civil war. I keep thinking about the hairdresser in Kandahar city and the cracked ceiling of his shop, always threatening to collapse. I hope that the United States and its allies feel a sense of responsibility about leaving southern Afghanistan in that kind of peril. In his State of the Union address in early 2013, President Barack Obama predicted “by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over.” Perhaps the war will be finished for many US troops, but the fight is far from settled. Afghanistan was an unsuccessful laboratory for ideas about how to fix a ruined country. It’s morally unacceptable to claim success in a few limited areas—child mortality, access to education—and walk away. At best, we are leaving behind us an ongoing war. At worst, it’s a looming disaster. This is not an argument in favour of keeping battalions of foreign soldiers in the south, but a plea for continued engagement. Troop surges didn’t work; the mission was a debacle. That should not discourage us. Rather, it should spur our work to repair and mitigate the damage in southern Afghanistan, and inspire a more careful approach to the next international crisis. The soldier who told me that modern civilization cannot tolerate empty spots on the map was probably right: we cannot write “Here be dragons” in the blank spaces, cannot turn away and ignore countries that become dangerous. That kind of neglect always bites us in the ass.
Smith, Graeme. The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan. Knopf Canada, Toronto. 2013. p. 282-3
Fight them over there, not over here
Karzai suffered criticism for his statement [that security in Afghanistan was better between 2002 and 2006 than in 2012], but he was correct. The NATO surges into the south will almost certainly be remembered as a spectacular mistake. Many of the aims were noble: peace, democracy, rule of law. We thought that a sweeping program of armed nation-building might improve the lives of people in southern Afghanistan and simultaneously remove a haven for terrorism. Both of these guesses proved incorrect. Flooding the south with troops did not have a pacifying effect. The villagers were not, despite the assurances from experts, clamouring for the arrival of international forces. Many of them now hate the outside world more than ever. As the troops withdraw, they leave behind pockets of territory not controlled by the government of Afghanistan, and few guarantees that these will never again serve as incubators for international jihadists.
But how much guarantee did we need, that southern Afghanistan will not rever to a hideout for terrorists? I was never convinced that any military, no matter how large or capable, could roll into a swath of terrain and make sure that conspirators could never again use that location as a base for nefarious plots.
Smith, Graeme. The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan. Knopf Canada, Toronto. 2013. p. 278-9
Exploiting global misunderstanding for local purposes
I told the UN chief about my recent conversations with disgruntled tribesmen, and their complaints about the Afghan police behaving like robbers.
“Yes, this is a case of bad governance,” Mr. Masadykov replied. “I can say now, when we’re talking about Taliban, maybe half of these so-called anti-government elements acting here in this area of the south, they had to join the Taliban movement or anti-government movement because of the misbehaviour of these bad guys.” He paused for effect, looking intently at me, and then looking at my digital recorder on the table between us. He probably understood that it wasn’t good for his career, describing NATO’s triumph as the killing of farmers with legitimate grievances. But he continued anyway: “I recently saw the report where they listed the names of the so-called Taliban commanders. Among them, knowing this area more or less — not all of them, of course, but some of them — I saw they are not Taliban. They were listed by internationals because internationals were informed by the local [Afghan] administration. And we still have people who are trying to play games, using the Canadians and Brits against their own personal tribal enemies. I saw people who were never Taliban, they’re now fighting against some certain tribal elders or certain groups.”
Not long after my story was published, under the headline “Inspiring tale of triumph over Taliban not all it seems,” the UN chief was transferred away from Kandahar. Mr. Masadykov’s boss downplayed his comments, saying they did not reflect the official view of the United Nations.
Smith, Graeme. The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan. Knopf Canada, Toronto. 2013. p. 87-8. Square brackets in original.
Indistinct nationalities
It was easy to guess why the American had been selected to deliver the message: other countries in the NATO alliance were describing their presence as a humanitarian gesture. A British minister infamously predicted the military surge would happen without a shot fired, and the Canadian military was pushing journalists to write about medical programs. By contrast, the Americans advertised their willingness to draw blood. The US colonel aimed his words directly at the insurgents: “If they want to die, stay,” he said. “If they don’t want to die, give up.” This prompted a look of discomfort from a Canadian press officer, who immediately tried to soften the message.
“I would simply add that…” he said.
“I thought I answered it pretty good,” said the American colonel, with a smile at the journalists. The Afghan press didn’t get the joke, however, because to them differences among the foreigners were hard to understand. They found it difficult to imagine that English-speaking soldiers who wore similar uniforms, carried the same weapons and fought on the same side would have fundamental disagreements about the war. They saw all of us as Americans.
Smith, Graeme. The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan. Knopf Canada, Toronto. 2013. p. 58-9. Italics in original
Peter Russell’s forthcoming book
In a recent briefing on Canada, The Economist discusses my committee member Peter Russell’s forthcoming book:
After Britain wrested control of Quebec from France in 1763 its new French-speaking subjects resisted assimilation. So did Canada’s indigenous groupings: Inuit, First Nations and mixed-race Métis. Such resistance was sometimes met with oppression and cruelty, and Canada’s treatment of its indigenous peoples has been atrocious in some times and places. But as Peter Russell, a Canadian historian, argues in a forthcoming book, their “incomplete conquests” forced Canada’s overlords into habits of accommodation that have shaped the country ever since. “Diversity is our distinctive national value,” he says.
The book Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests is coming out in early January, and was refined in part by a series of seminars taught on each chapter in progress. I am looking forward to seeing the finished text.
It’s interesting to see Dr. Russell described as a historian, given that he was long on the faculty of the political science department and is not a professor emiratus in that field.
“We won’t stop using fossil fuels tomorrow”
Sometimes paired with the fallacious argument that only people who use no fossil fuels can legitimately oppose fossil fuel development is the statement: “We won’t stop using fossil fuels tomorrow”.
The logical error associated with using this statement to defend new fossil fuel infrastructure like fracking wells and bitumen sands pipelines (as well as new fossil fuel vehicles or power plants) is so obvious that it may seem unnecessary to state, but the quip is so popular among those trying to delay adequate action on climate change that it requires a quick rebuttal.
It’s true that human society is dependent on fossil fuels, and not only for discretionary activities that people can legitimately be asked to give up. That said, it’s now entirely evident that climate change threatens human civilization if unchecked, to say nothing of the profound damage it’s already doing to non-human nature. Preventing the worst impacts of climate change requires a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, and that is fundamentally incompatible with building new fossil fuel infrastructure.
Under contraction and convergence, it is plausible that some poor places can legitimately build a modest amount of additional fossil fuel infrastructure. This is most defensible in places that have low per capita emissions, low historical emissions, and where new fossil fuel use will address basic human needs instead of luxuries. None of these conditions apply in Canada or the United States, where per capita and historical emissions are both unconscionably high, and where most citizens routinely make heavy use of fossil fuels for trivial purposes.
The line about not giving up fossil fuels tomorrow is rhetorically appealing because it makes the speaker seem like a level-headed pragmatist and suggests that anyone who disagrees is out of touch with reality. In actual fact, our existing dependence on fossil fuels is an argument against new fossil fuel infrastructure, not for it. The media, members of the public, and decision-makers need to accept this.