Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

2012 climate change fast

Back in 2007, I participated in a climate change fast. It seems an appropriate sort of moral gesture to make in response to the problem, given that it is highly likely that climate change will disrupt agricultural patterns and lead at least some people to suffer from hunger as a result.

This year, between September 21st and October 2nd, another fast is being held in response to climate change: A Fast and Vigil for Climate Justice. The main twelve-day fast will be happening on Parliament Hill. The organizers are calling on people to contact their elected representatives, asking them to take action on climate change and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. They also encourage people to write letters to the editors of newspapers, and to participate in one day of the fast themselves.

There is a website where people can pledge their support for the event.

I was also sent this program for the event by one of the organizers.

Massey College at the end of summer

Massey College is full of luxurious silence. At night, it is usually only possible to hear the water flowing into the pond in the main quad and the chirp of a few insects. The contrast with a room overlooking College Street is excessive, and the new transition has been a reminder of how important a home’s acoustic surroundings are for determining how pleasant or unpleasant it is to occupy.

We will see if the place becomes less tranquil as more of the junior fellows move in. For now, I am enjoying the ease with which I can pretend I am in rural Vermont, rather than the middle of Canada’s most sprawling metropolis.

It’s also remarkable to be living in a building designed by a single person (and a British Columbian) with the clear purpose of serving as a home for a group of young scholars. Some of this is revealed in tiny details, like how the desk chairs in the studies tuck elegantly against the side of the desk, or how the lamp behind the bed is designed to be easily turned on or off by a person reading. To get myself thinking about communal and intentional forms of living, I have been reading the Rule of Saint Benedict. It contains some good advice for people and communities in general, though I am glad not to be living in a place where supreme obedience to an abbot and scripture is a central part of life. Rather, the main aim will be to devote myself to scholarly work – research and writing.

Organizing and analysis

During the last couple of months, I have been involved with establishing a local chapter of the climate change organization 350.org. Since the organization has no money, it relies upon the work of volunteers during their spare time. This is good in many ways, since it means the group consists of people who have a personal conviction that it is necessary to take action on climate change and that they are willing to devote their talents to the project.

All told, the process of organizing differs substantially from the kind of analysis that happens in government and academia. Indeed, I wonder how much the skills required for good organizing and good analysis overlap. The key requirement for organizing seems to be an ability to motivate people to take action. For that action to be effective, it is obviously necessary to have a big-picture understanding about the science and politics of climate change. At the same time, an active awareness of the scale of the problem may hamper effective organizing. It is impossible to honestly claim that any single action or campaign will make a major difference in the trajectory of Canada’s emissions, much less those of the world as a whole. Motivation requires the hope that one person’s actions will make a difference; analysis often suggests that the actions will have no perceptible effect.

Climate change is a problem without precedent. That means we cannot know in advance which strategies could succeed in curbing it. Given how threatening and urgent it is, I think we need to try everything simultaneously: technological development, political lobbying, grassroots organizing, and all the rest. If nothing else, organizing 350.org is a way of getting in touch with people who are serious about the problem. Together, we can do a better job of evaluating our efforts, spotting opportunities, and correcting mistakes.

P.S. If you are in Toronto and interested in helping to prevent dangerous climate change, I would appreciate if you would join the 350 Toronto mailing list. If you really want to make a difference, please get in touch with me about joining our organizing team.

Writing to ministers is rarely a good use of time

In Canada, there is a large apparatus that exists to handle correspondence sent to federal ministers. This is because they receive a large volume of correspondence, much of it consisting of large numbers of form letters sent by supporters of various non-governmental organizations.

When a letter to a minister is received, it is usually sent to a low-level civil servant who works on files vaguely related to the subject matter of the letter. If at all possible, the response drafted will say that the matter is outside the minister’s area of responsibility (since this keeps things simple). Letters may also be forwarded to other ministers deemed better suited to answering it. For instance, letters to the prime minister are often sent to the minister responsible for the files described in the letter. These ministers may in turn pass along the letter to yet other people.

When a response to a ministerial letter is drafted by a civil servant, the standard practice is to ignore whatever the letter writer is urging the minister to do. Say you write a letter objecting to the construction of a new power station. The response you get is unlikely to mention the power station or any of your concerns. It is also extremely unlikely to promise any new action. What it is overwhelmingly likely to do is to list a number of popular actions already taken by the government in your general area of concern, and then to list a few more actions in the area that have been promised.

Once a maximally bland letter has been written by a civil servant, it will get passed to the political staff in the minister’s office who will add a bit of their own content.

At no point is the minister likely to see your letter and, if they actually sign it themselves, they are merely likely to glance over the text prepared by their officials. By writing to a minister, the main action that you produce in response is to re-direct a low-level civil servant away from their usual work to write a suitably inoffensive and low-content response to your query.

If you want to write a letter that will actually get read by someone influential, you can consider writing to the deputy ministers of federal departments. They generally don’t have an elaborate system in which other people write their correspondence for them, and they are probably more likely to actually read your letter. While in theory deputy ministers do not set policy, their roles as administrators and as expert advisors mean they are influential people and that it could be quite meaningful to change their minds on a subject. You can find out who the deputy minister of a department is from the organizations website, which will also include their mailing address.

Alternatively, you can always try writing ‘private’ on the envelope of your letter to a minister. Caution on the part of officials may lead to the minister actually opening the mail personally.

Finally, it is worth knowing that all references made in the media to ministers and to government departments are meticulously observed and recorded by civil servants. Even mentioning a minister in a tweet is likely to get you added to a column in some civil servant’s spreadsheet. As such, it can be a more effective use of time to write a letter to the editor that mentions a minister than to write to the minister directly.

Third rule of the internet

Following up on rules one and two, it seems appropriate to add a third: “You should probably worry more about being attacked online by your own government than by any other organization”.

This is really an extension of the point about how governments are more dangerous than terrorists and how institutions of armed power need oversight.

Based on the open source intelligence available, we have to assume that governments all over the world are constantly monitoring the activity of their citizens online, for reasons both reasonably benign and exceedingly nefarious. It is worth remembering that even if the official purpose of a surveillance program is acceptable, it can be abused by anyone who gains access to it for purposes that may be very dubious. Hackers and rogue government agents are well positioned to use internet surveillance to rob or blackmail people, for instance. It is also worth remembering that data is not only being monitored in real time; it is also being archived for unknown future purposes.

Tools for privacy

Thankfully, we do have some tools to make this ubiquitous surveillance more difficult to carry out. You probably cannot encrypt your hard drive well enough to protect the contents if government agents grab it, but you can encrypt your online communications sufficiently well to make it at least challenging to decrypt them. The more people streaming gigabytes of data via encrypted HTTPS connections, the less feasible it is to archive and crack internet traffic taken all in all.

You can also use tools like Tor. People should be willing to assert their right to anonymous communication.

Order and chaos in politics

It has often been pointed out that order and chaos are one of the more important dichotomies in the universe, with time inevitably breaking things apart into senseless fragments and living things often working to produce order and meaning in themselves and in the world around them.

While it may seem as though order is the supreme goal of politics (perhaps especially in Canada, where “peace, order, and good government” is the credo), people forget that unadulterated order produces rigid structures that shatter when struck or strained. When conditions remain constant, a society that has become rigidly ordered can contiue to function, though it usually starts getting sapped and weakened by the self-interested agents who run it.

When conditions change – however – the vital importance of chaos in politics is revealed. Faced with something new, we need to improvise. We need the organs within society that can handle improvisation – that can perceive the possibilities of a new world, try new strategies for dealing with them, evaluate how those strategies are doing, and carry on with this process of evaluation and experimentation. These organs of improvisation include art, and they include the everpresent contest between the different locuses of power that well-designed societies always include. The civil service spars with politicians; the courts assert their role in interpreting the law and applying constitutional principles; academics try to affect policy; companies try to buy politicians (and some politicians try to be bought!); voters punish incompetence or reward the ability to inspire; civil society groups wax and wane in influence, and change their programs of action.

Just as the 20th century involved change of a magnitude and complexity that defied anticipation, it seems fair to expect the 21st century to have a similar dynamic quality. We are going to need our improvisational abilility and the mechanisms of chaos that keep societies from becoming frozen and immobile. That’s not to say we can or should throw everything away. The reason why the balance of power works as a way of keeping government effective is because the different organs have comprehensible purposes and identities which they perpetuate through time. (Canada’s Supreme Court means something as an institution, as does Health Canada and the CBC and the University of British Columbia.) Similarly, reaching back into our own history is a way to identify strategies that could help us. Historians as well as artists can be organs of improvisation.

All told, I don’t much like where the world is heading. I think our leaders are mostly a mix of the seriously deluded and those who are primarily in it for themselves. I don’t think global society is effectively applying the knowledge it possesses about the world and, to a considerable degree, we are being carried in a dangerous direction by the momentum of selfish and short-sighted choices. If there is hope for the future, it is that creative forces of chaos can disrupt the most damaging patterns of behaviour humanity has developed. That process is necessarily messy and it isn’t clear while it is happening whether things are being made better, worse, or just less familiar. Still, if we are going to make it to 2100 and beyond, we can’t keep doing what we’re doing now.