Not In My Name

There are despicable acts being carried out against a group of workers in our country, and it is being done in all of our names.

Let's first take the employer, Canada Post. A Crown corporation, supposedly at arm's length from the government, but there are two ministers with responsibility for it, among other things, so it would be difficult to say there is no influence. This is an employer that has shown itself to be draconian in many ways in the past, even timing bathroom breaks. They fired the first shot in the current dispute by suspending the benefits of their employees before there was any strike action on the part of the employees. Who does this? Private employers don't do this. There is historical practice of respecting the expired collective agreement until a new one is reached that has been ignored here. In all of our names.

The union started a series of rotating one-day strikes in selected cities. Yes, that's disruptive to the business, but I have to say that as an end user, I still got mail, just not on the two days that my city was touched by those strikes. Since midnight on Tuesday, 14 June, the corporation decided to lock out its employees across the country. I have not received a single piece of mail since then. So who is depriving me of my mail delivery? To me, it looks like it's the company. In all of our names.

Faced with this 'intolerable' situation, the government decided to legislate an end to this dispute rather than working to ensure that the two sides would negotiate their own settlement. Worse still, they decided to further undermine the collective bargaining process by reversing elements that had already been offered by the company, namely wage rates. Now this is not the central issue of the dispute for the union — this is much more about the effects of new technology and work safety, as well as pensions — but where does the government get the idea that it is appropriate to reduce the employer's offer of wage increases? Not much encouragement for the employer to take the subsequent negotiations seriously, in fact an assurance to the employer that the government is ready to give them everything they want and more. In all of our names.

Today is the Fête nationale in Québec and some are decrying the fact that the debate is being prolonged through this important national holiday, especially when the outcome is assured by the majority conservative government. Well, I have two things to say about that. First, I can't think of a better way to defend the values of Québec than by standing up against attacks on workers and the collective bargaining process. Bravo to our new NDP MPs for doing this. Second, does the fact that about 25% of the population (roughly 40% of the roughly 60% who voted) voted for a particular party, with our flawed system giving them a majority of seats as a consequence, mean that the rest of us should shut up and take it for the next four years? Would the Tories' supporters agree to do the same after losing a next election? I don't think so. The opposition is standing up to show their opposition to something that is wrong.

And I am glad they are doing this in my name.

Lanterns and Sleepers and Bears, Oh My!

Okay, not a movie review here, but the review of a movie experience anyway.

We went to see Green Lantern tonight, an extra Thursday movie outing in a week with a Friday statutory holiday. Yes, it was an action movie and there was plenty of that on the screen, but — much to our amusement — there was more in the cinema itself!

Well into the movie, in the midst of some of the corny dialogue, people around me started laughing. My first thought, of course, was for the poor director, whose movie was being laughed at. I was wrong and discovered that moments later when my own ears tuned into the sound of one moviegoer snoring. Rather loudly.

Now, I have been known to nod off in a film, even in the trailers beforehand. In fact, I have hardly been known to be awake for the whole of the cinema experience on any given night. I am [self] assured, however, that the first hint of a sleep sound from me is enough to wake me up, if only temporarily. I chalk all of this up to bad sleeping habits, not advancing age, of course.

Back to tonight's experience. This guy was loudly snoring in the front section of the cinema while a good two-thirds of the audience was laughing at him and our action film was unfolding on the screen. It was too much for one movie-goer: we'll call him the Bear, for reasons which are obvious for anyone with any degree of familiarity with gay archetypes.

The Bear got up, walked up to our snorer and gave him a smack, ending the snoring and starting an embarrassed awareness that eventually drove the snorer from the room in disgrace.

When one of my companions and I went to use the men's room after the film ended, there was the Bear and his companion! I felt the yellow force of fear rising up in me, hoping my breathing wouldn't set either of them off! I quickly locked myself in the handicapped stall (no reason to lack elbow room!) and the wildlife had moved on by the time I was done and came out.

I'm safe for another day, but I'm on the lookout for plaid and keeping my flight instincts tuned.

You Can Do It That Way If You Want

A classic story from my family.

My sister, visiting from Australia, decided to go into the card store to buy some postcards of the local scenery to send to her friends and family back home. The postcard display announced that they were 25 cents or 5 for a dollar, tax included. She selected 15 postcards she liked and presented them at the cash.

The cashier counted them carefully and announced that it would be $3.75. My sister said "But they're five for a dollar" and got the reply "But you have 15."

Frustrated, my sister pursued her line of argument. "You mean I could buy 5 for a dollar, go outside, come back in and buy the next 5 for a dollar, repeat once more and get the 15 for $3?"

"You can do it that way if you want" was the clever clerk's reply.

You can believe that this has become a catch phrase in my family: since each of us is always right in whatever we do, the sibling doing it differently is inevitably greeted by a chorus of "You can do it that way if you want" followed by peals of laughter.

Torn, and Not Torn

This last week has been a fascinating one in the federal election campaign. It will be very interesting to see if the results tomorrow evening bear out the trends in the polls.

Suddenly, Québec seems to have fallen in love with the NDP, and people elsewhere in Canada are noticing and, to a lesser extent, following. I don't think anyone could have predicted this, least of all the NDP itself. They have been caught out with a few candidates who were placeholders, but all of the other parties have these for ridings where they don't expect to have a chance. The media, focused as they have been on the leaders (I blame the publicity machines of all the parties), have not shared with us the various qualifications and accomplishments of some of the candidates, and this applies to all the parties.

Many years ago, after the death of MP Jean-Claude Malépart, there was a by-election in what was then and is still my riding. As was my wont, I volunteered for the NDP candidate and voted for her, too. But I couldn't help noticing the candidate who won and who has been my MP ever since: Gilles Duceppe.

This was a turbulent period in politics in Canada. The Meech Lake Accord, an attempt to bring Québec into the constitution, had just failed. Even the Liberal government of Robert Bourassa was sounding like it was ready to hold a sovereignty referendum. Mr. Duceppe, then a union advisor, ran as an independent candidate under the slogan of the newly formed (but not yet officially recognized) Bloc québécois. He could have stood up, at this point in history, and wrapped himself in the Québec flag and been elected in a landslide. He did more than that, speaking out on issues of poverty and housing and other issues of importance to the people of the riding. I will always respect him for that.

He was briefly leader of the Official Opposition in Ottawa, before the Reform Party rose to displace the Bloc from this role, and I have to say that here, too, he was impressive. While English Canadians might think of the Bloc as being uniquely focused on Québec issues, Duceppe took this role seriously, and travelled across the country to better understand the perspectives of Canadians from every region. I have always thought we were better off having a Liberal government being criticized from the left than the same being criticized from the right (as we got when the Reform Party took over) or a Conservative government criticized from the centre.

As an MP, he has always been very effective in his job. Most Canadians don't realize the importance and usefulness of turning to their local representatives at the federal and provincial levels to navigate the sometimes murky waters of items in their respective jurisdictions. Duceppe and his staff have always been very good at helping constituents. We had occasion recently to assess this on a more macro level, as a dispute between the federal Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration and the Association des pharmacien-ne-s proprietaries du Québec (APPQ) led to a cutting off of coverage for medication for immigrants and refugees covered by the Interim Federal Health Program. Our letters went unanswered by the minister and his colleague the minister of health, also by the critics and regional representatives of the other parties, but Gilles Duceppe and his staff intervened to negotiate with the APPQ to end their pressure tactic, as it was hurting the most vulnerable among us.

If the rise of the NDP turns out to be real, I might very well go back to them. Not this time, though. There are some inconsistencies with my own values (Free vote on the gun registry? Really?!! Mixed messages on the status of Québec?) that I know I'm going to have to work through if I ever do go back there.

The lefty in me can't begrudge the NDP its success, but it also has a problem abandoning the party with good left wing credentials and policies that we already have. I have an even bigger problem even thinking of abandoning the person of my MP, Gilles Duceppe, for whom I have such great respect.

On the Hustings

So I have taken a little time to consider what we've heard from the candidates in the federal election, as well as what we've seen, and I'm finally ready to say more about this democratic process in which we are involved. And what a windbag I will be today.

Democracy

Let's start with getting one issue out of the way: the nature of our democracy and the current electoral system. No matter how often he repeats his "coalition" mantra in a fatherly voice, sounding almost half as bored with it as we all are, Steve-O is wrong about the nature of our democracy. While coalitions are not a common phenomenon in our country, they are a way of life in a number of other countries that none of our politicians would point to as being undemocratic.

Steve-O with a foil hat to protect against coalitions

The other thing is what happens after the election. The Governor General speaks to the sitting Prime Minister and invites him (or her…we might wish) to form a government. Generally, if the sitting Prime Minister's party has lost the election (come back with fewer seats than another party), this invitation will be refused and the Prime Minister will resign. The GG then invites the leader of the party with the most seats to form a government, which s/he tries to do, to be confirmed by a vote of confidence in the House of Commons. If the party with the most seats doesn't have a majority and can't gain the confidence of the House, the GG tries with the next party. This is our system, flawed as it is. If Steve-O doesn't understand the system or seeks to misrepresent it, maybe he shouldn't be Prime Minister at all.

Oh, and "the party that wins" doesn't mean that whoever gets the most seats, even if it isn't half and they only got 37.63% of the vote (of 58.8% of eligible voters, making it 22.13% of all Canadian voters who actually supported them), they don't get absolute control over everything. If you want total control, you will have to take a plurality of a majority of ridings (fingers crossed that this doesn't happen).

Doublespeak

I find it fascinating that some of the parties seem to be emitting different messages to different audiences, like we don't move around or talk to one another. The Conservatives, for example, have unilingual French posters in my neighbourhood with the slogan [my translation] "Our region in power," while in the neighbouring riding, mere blocks away, all is bilingual and proclaims "Here for Canada." Do they think I don't travel to the downtown area?

The Liberals seem to be doing this, too. Web ads and TV messaging in French encouraging us to be a Canadian and a Quebecker in whatever order we want. I think that the rolling over of Pierre Trudeau in his grave must have been measurable on the Richter scale, and I doubt that this message is in any way communicated in the rest of the country.

The ultimate doublespeak award, however, has to go to the Conservatives again, when caught out on a candidate bragging about the imminent de-funding of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. You will notice that the spokesperson said that the group could continue to be funded if it responds to the criteria set out in the mother and child health program of the government. Left unsaid: this is the program that was criticized for excluding abortion services, criticism resulting in the de-funding of a number of venerable women's organizations who had spoken up against it.

Just to be fair, some good direct messaging from the very active group decrying the theft of money from the Employment Insurance fund (pictured above) and some messaging from the Communist Party that is lost to me in the jumble of too many fonts. With serifs, no less! (For shame!)

Promises

Here, finally, I have a little criticism for everyone. Well, everyone who took part in the debates. :-P

Tories up first. A lot of promises to bring in programs in four years or so if we can afford them then. I don't know how motivated I would be by a promise for which I would have to elect the same party in another election later on. The only promise they seem determined to keep is to let the corporate and wealthy-people tax rates go down as previously planned by them. This in a time where money is short and deficits are high. And if we made it through the most recent recession in better shape than some, it is likely only because we are very small-c conservative about regulating our economy and not scrapping regulations on banks and such as would be your natural tendency.

The Liberals seem to be promising a whole lot of things that are not in the jurisdiction of the federal government, namely education and health care. Stop rolling, Pierre, we are back to invading provincial jurisdictions and buying power with money. Not everybody appreciates that.

There is a certain amount of that jurisdiction invading by the promises of the NDP, too, but what really gets my goat is how I have heard the promises delivered on the TV ads. Jack Layton telling me "I will fund more doctors and nurses" makes me nervous about the jurisdiction thing, but also about the perception that the government will be him, and not the work of a team.

The Bloc has come out for a couple of big-ticket items: compensation for the harmonization of the provincial sales tax with the GST, which Québec did at the beginning (reasonable), contributing to the building of a new Colisée in Québec City (stupid) and the replacement of the Champlain Bridge (there seems to be a non-Tory consensus on this one, but I don't think the environment of Montréal needs more cars from the south shore). The worst criticism I have (leaving aside the stupid Colisée) is the attitude about the promise of the Tories to support with loan guarantees the building of the Lower Churchill hydroelectric project. I don't get the outrage and feel a little embarrassed by it.

As an aside, I truly enjoy this message posted at the entrance to the aforementioned Champlain Bridge by the Catholic Archdiocese of Montréal as part of their annual fundraising campaign. For the linguistically challenged, it reads "Say your prayers."

We may all be doing that this time next week, even those of us who don't believe.

Lossiversary

This week marks an anniversary of sorts for me. Ten years since I made the decision to resign from the Bar and let go of that official status that I spent so much time and effort acquiring and maintaining. Not an easy decision, but one probably made more inevitable by my HIV status and my own expectations about my longevity and my immediate future.

Chalk that one up as a loss.

Two things are odd about my having decided to commemorate this milestone today: that it is the tenth anniversary, and that I’m focusing on the loss.

I can hear you saying it: “What’s so odd about marking a tenth anniversary?” This is because you don’t know me as well as you might. I am a tireless warrior against the tyranny of the fives and zeroes, as I like to say. This means that I have made my whole family (except the ornery ones…you know who you are, and, more importantly, I have not forgotten who you are!) put strange times on the timer of the microwave when heating something up. Never a round number, always something with an odd number of seconds. We even had quite a time last summer when I was visiting, ensuring that we set the TV volume to a prime number. I never claimed not to be an odd duck.

The focusing on the loss thing might be less surprising. We in the AIDS movement often talk about (or hear about) losses and coping with them. Here we have something rather significant that I worked for many years to build, with firm intentions for doing something socially useful with my acquired skills, and ten years (yes, ten, *groan*) after having been sworn in as a member of the Bar in Québec, I let it go.

I did gain from my loss, if we must delve deeper into it. I gained a certain ease of my finances as I no longer had to pay those membership fees and compulsory insurance costs that did not differentiate between the guy working for a low salary in the community-based AIDS movement and the one with the wealth clients driving a luxury automobile and taking frequent trips to exotic locales.

And if I am to be completely honest, I didn’t really lose it all. I generally say — much to the chagrin of those who have heard this once too often — that I am a recovering lawyer. I will never really be free of the influence of those years I spend studying law, or explaining the rules as a provider of legal information. It’s a long, long process.

Looking back at this point, how comfortable am I with the decision to resign? I am comfortable with the choice. I took pains at the time to do things in a way that would allow for a potential return to the profession if I should ever reconsider. That possibility gets more remote with each passing year, not only from the decreasing number of years I might have left, or have left to work, but also because the task of updating my knowledge to qualify to practise law becomes more daunting as my experiences grow more remote.

I only have to worry that scientific progress in the treatment of HIV will continue to call into question the wisdom of my perspective, as it continues to push back my expectation of decrepitude and death. I guess that is not such a loss for me.

Bring on the Ballot Box!

It seems that the Harper Government will fall on Friday, 25 March in the afternoon. There will be a motion of non-confidence put forward by the official opposition related to the finding of the government’s being in contempt of Parliament and the vote is supposed to take place at 1:30 pm. I, for one, will try to catch this streaming on CPAC or on CBC.

Now, I have never voted for the Conservative Party or for any of its predecessors, but I want to take a moment to share my perspective on why I think others should avoid them, without necessarily recommending any of the other parties, all of which seem to have their own shortcomings. A little list, then, of terrible things that this government has done that need to be undone.

The In and Out scheme. According to the last court decision, currently under appeal, the party illegally transferred money to the campaigns of certain candidates who were not going to reach their expense limits in order to have those candidates re-contribute the money for ads that were part of the national campaign, which had already reached the limit. This way, the candidates got bigger refunds of their (inflated) expenses and the national campaign got to overspend. One candidate considered the scheme so suspect that he refused to participate. As a voter who expects the rules to be respected and a taxpayer who doesn’t care to subsidize (through refunds of campaign expenses) schemes that skirt around the rules, I feel like I’ve been subjected to a little of the “in-out, in-out” and I’m not feeling like having a cigarette.

Ideologically-based decisions on matters that shouldn’t be politicized. From the cancellation of the prison tattoo program (evaluated as a success in terms of disease prevention and skill development) to the persistent attempts to close down the supervised injection site (that they do no pay for) to a broad rejection of proven harm reduction techniques, this government has ignored evidence to make the decisions they want to make. Worse, they have cowed their own staff and those seeking funding into avoiding key words they know will get them fired or defunded, and that is not supposed to be the way our professional public service works.

Blaming others for the decisions they have made. We saw it with the decision to make the long form census optional (and render it statistically irrelevant, because why would you want good information for your decisions?), when the minister responsible tried to claim that the Chief Statistician at Statistics Canada had recommended the move. The professional resigned. We saw it more recently when a minister had “someone” insert the handwritten word “not” in a sentence that would otherwise have accorded a renewal of funding to a group that is well-respected in the world, and then claimed she didn’t know who had written in the word. A junior staffer took the fall for that. You’re entitled to make your bad decisions as a government, but you should be brave enough to take responsibility for them.

Spending billions of dollars on major projects while not disclosing the whole cost. Not even to Parliament, which actually has a right and obligation to receive such information. In this category, we have the fighter jets, coming in at three times their announced cost and not even subjected to a bidding process (we call this sound fiscal management?), and plans to build prisons for supposedly “unreported” crimes, because I guess we are going to start imprisoning unconvicted felons…or will people be so inspired by the existence of new prisons that are costing them more than disclosed that they will start reporting the crimes of which they are victims? Referring back to our second point, I might add that a few calls to an office do not constitute proof of the level of “unreported” crimes.

So Friday we are set to make history, with the first instance of a sitting government being declared in contempt of Parliament anywhere in the entire Commonwealth. I can only naively hope that some other voters in this country will consider these items and others that I haven’t enumerated here to make a decision based on the evidence, something this government doesn’t seem to like to do.