The trouble with too much democracy

By Andrew Potter - Friday, August 5, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 30 Comments

Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

The most telling moment of the recent standoff over talks to raise the American government’s debt ceiling came on July 22, when President Barack Obama called a press conference to announce that House Speaker John Boehner had backed out of the negotiations. “I’ve been left at the altar twice now,” Obama pouted. In case the image of the President as a jilted lover was not clear to everyone watching, he added that he had spent the previous day waiting for Boehner to return his phone calls.

The whole affair has left a lot of Americans in a state of bipartisan disgust, with citizens from all points on the political compass cursing out their elected representatives. Yet it doesn’t seem to have occurred to many people that there is something structurally flawed with a system that allows the head of just one legislative house to treat the supposed leader of the free world as his last choice for the senior prom. If there’s anything that needs cursing out it isn’t the elected politicians, but the constitution of the United States.

America is a mess. The economy isn’t growing, the job market is a wasteland, its infrastructure is crumbling. On any number of measures, from education to health care to technological innovation, the country is getting beat by up-and-comers in Asia, Scandinavia, and South America. But the real threat to America right now is not economic decline or technological stagnation—those are just the knock-on effects of a much deeper rot.

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The forgotten members of the mission in Afghanistan

By Andrew Potter - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 5 Comments

Photo courtesy of Renée Filiatrault

The big story in Canadian foreign affairs for the past month has been the end of our “combat mission” in Afghanistan. Lost amid the narratives of firefights past and memories of dead soldiers has been much recognition that what has come to a close is not just combat, but our complete whole-of-government approach to aid, economic development, and governance in Kandahar. The civilians have all pulled out as well, and their return to life in Canada, professionally and personally, is in some ways going to be far more difficult than it will be for their comrades in the military. Their great fear is that they will be just as ignored by their managers back in Ottawa as they have been by the Canadian media.

Two things everyone always noticed about the Canadian civilian contingent in Afghanistan is how young they all were, and how many of them were women. They were drawn from all branches of the bureaucracy, early- to mid-career public servants attracted by adventure and the promise that the skills and experience they acquired abroad would be a golden ticket to promotions and choice assignments back home. It hasn’t always worked out that way, and a great number of returning civilians are suffering, both personally and professionally. Anger and disillusionment is growing within the Afghanistan cohort, with many people—some still serving in theatre—saying that they feel they were sold a bill of goods.

From CIDA staffers working on development projects to communications officers for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), a lot of them spent more time travelling outside the wire than the vast majority of soldiers who booked their entire tours billeted at Kandahar Airfield; suicide bombings, IEDs, and other threats were part of their daily work life. As a result, at the end of their deployments they faced many of the same stress-related disorders as the soldiers. But the military learned the hard way that everything from burnout to full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has to be taken very seriously, and there are now cultural and institutional mechanisms in place to help returning veterans cope. If anything, there is far less stigma associated with PTSD within the military today than there is within the broader public service.

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Sorry Rob, the gay pride parade is part of the job

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 31 Comments

Tory Zimmerman/TORONTO STAR

From kissing babies to sitting through interminable public ceremonies, the cost of being a politician in a democracy is that you have to submit to a handful of ritual humiliations simply because the people expect it. The prime minister of Canada has to pretend to like hockey. The American president has to attend church and otherwise act like he believes in God. Even Kim Jong Il has to feign interest in mundane things. As for the mayor of Toronto, he has to march in the annual Pride parade that celebrates the diversity of human sexuality in the city’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community.

The current holder of that office, Rob Ford, does not agree. He has made it clear that he has no intention of attending the annual parade, which often takes place over the July 1 long weekend. And despite being strongly encouraged to change his mind by virtually every newspaper columnist and editorialist in the land, Ford is digging in. Yet oddly enough, it is the mayor’s own bizarre recalcitrance that forms the strongest argument for why he needs to be there.

There are actually a number of reasonable arguments to be made in support of Rob Ford’s position. To begin with, suppose we take at face value his claim that it’s nothing more than a scheduling problem, that the Pride parade conflicts with a decades-old Ford family tradition of spending the weekend at the cottage in Huntsville, Ont. To the extent to which Pride is about engendering respect for love in all its plenitude, a magnanimous LGBT community should be willing to grant him his traditional hetero-normative family time.

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Toronto's war on fun

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 36 Comments

Jessica Darmanin

You can interpret a city’s ambitions by the face it presents to the world. When it comes to Toronto, its streets fretted with bars called Harlem and Brooklynn, the skyline spiked by condo developments with names like The Manhattan, and the Legoland imitation Times Square installed at the corner of Yonge and Dundas, it is clear that the city wants to be New York. Which is funny, because there are few large cities in the world that are less like New York than Toronto. Where New York is dense and chaotic, Toronto is sprawling and orderly. New York has endless canyons of stunning architecture, while Toronto’s flat streetscapes look like they were designed by blindfolded six-year-olds. And while New York is resolutely devoted to upholding its rep as the city that never sleeps, Toronto wages a relentless war on fun.

Let’s start with an old favourite, the municipal ban on ball hockey on city streets. Every Canadian kid plays street hockey, but only in Toronto is it a furtive activity, occurring under the reproachful gaze of signs declaring “Ball and Hockey Playing Prohibited.” Defenders of the bylaw argue it is harmless because it is so seldom enforced, and that trying to get rid of it might cause more problems than it solves. But that misses the crucial point, which is that it is a fundamental principle of a free society that what is not explicitly prohibited is permitted. A city that feels the need to prohibit many things is one that deep down does not trust the citizens with their freedom.

It isn’t only homegrown pastimes the city finds objectionable. Last summer, Toronto became one of the few jurisdictions on Earth—along with the Taliban regime that terrorized Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001—to prohibit kite flying in a park. The ban was a response to complaints about debris left from kite-fighting competitions held by members of the city’s Afghan and South Asian communities­—the leftover string was apparently disrupting lawn mowing and fouling trees, and there were concerns that some of it was embedded with glass shards that could endanger birds. A year later, city officials are trying to come up with a compromise. Part of the proposed solution involves a prohibition on “competitive kite flying in parks that have significant bird activity,” though the definition of “significant” remains unresolved. At any rate, it doesn’t appear to concern anyone that the freedom to fly a kite without being harassed by petty little officials was one of the reasons many of these people moved their families thousands of kilometres away from their homelands in the first place.

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Where shock art is still dangerous

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Tobias Hase/dpa/Corbis

One of the defining characteristics of Western culture is our inability to be shocked by art. It has been almost 100 years since Marcel Duchamp submitted a stock urinal to an art exhibition as a work he called Fountain. Ever since, artists have struggled to replicate the effect it had of a grenade exploding in an innocent culture, but with little success. Sure, there are stray ripples of outrage, but whether it is the intimacy and sexuality of Tracey Emin’s My Bed or the theo-scatological juvenilia of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, the public generally just shrugs and goes about its business. As a result, we have become complacent about art, in particular about its capacity to challenge authority and upend the status quo. But for artists looking to transgress the boundaries, they might take a bit of inspiration, and a great deal of caution, from what is going on in China.

In early May, the Chinese performance artist Cheng Li was sentenced to a year of “labour through re-education” and sent to a prison camp for the crime of disturbing the public order. Cheng was arrested after he and a female partner had sex on a balcony in front of a crowd of patrons at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Beijing. Cheng billed the performance piece, entitled Art Whore, as an indictment of the “popular trend of commercializing art.”

In North America, public sex is about as banal as art gets. When a Northwestern University professor staged a live sex-toy demonstration for his human sexuality class last month, the school responded to calls for his dismissal by…cancelling the course next year. As for the idea of art commenting on its own commercialization, that’s one of the oldest (and most lucrative) tricks in the book. The prankumentary Exit Through the Gift Shop by the shadowy British street artist Banksy might have grossed only $5 million or so, but it served as a fantastic advertisement for Banksy’s own works, which sell at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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The Greens? Care about the environment?

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 7:00 PM - 46 Comments

Frank Gunn/CP

Getting banned from the leaders’ debates was probably the best thing that could have happened to Green party Leader Elizabeth May. It gave her serious national media attention for the first time since the writ was dropped and earned her the support and sympathy of pundits across the political spectrum. It also allowed May to strike her favourite pose as the innocent victim of our first-past-the-post electoral system—which, face it, is the issue May and her party care most about, certainly more than they care about the environment.

There are basically two ways you can influence the way policy gets made in this country. The first, and most direct, is by working within a large political party to gain political power so you can make policy yourself. The second is by lobbying politicians to implement the policies you want. Since it was formed in 1983, the Green party has been an ineffective hybrid—a single-issue lobby group that also happened to run candidates in federal elections, finding no great success by either measure.

Elizabeth May’s victory in the 2006 leadership race was supposed to change all of that. Electing the popular and charismatic May was the party’s attempt at becoming a serious political party, with the overarching goal of an environmentally sustainable economy served by a broad electoral platform promoting smart jobs, green energy and fair trade.

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One of these things is just like the other

By Andrew Potter - Friday, April 8, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 131 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

After a week of strutting and taunting and double-dog-daring, it doesn’t look like Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff will be going head to head in a televised debate. Which is good news, since it means Canadians will be spared the spectacle of watching two men fight to lead a country that neither has ever shown much interest in, or loyalty toward. For months leading up to the election, Conservative attack ads pressed home the point that Michael Ignatieff didn’t go to Ottawa for you. The problem is, neither did Stephen Harper.

The questions surrounding Ignatieff’s commitment to Canada are well known. When he wandered up from Harvard and presented himself as a candidate for leader of the Liberal party almost six years ago, he arrived with a great deal of baggage, most of it covered in travel stickers from places that were a long way from Canada. Some of that baggage was ideological, such as his support for such decidedly non-Liberal adventures as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But the biggest problem was what became known as his “pronoun problem.” After a quarter of a century spent anywhere but here, he had taken to using the first-person plural (we, our) when talking to people who weren’t Canadians.

Ignatieff has never completely shaken that stigma. And while his political supporters and allies in the press like to accuse anyone who brings it up of xenophobia, it’s a real problem. While two generations of Liberals were engaged in the most wrenching fights in this country’s history, Ignatieff was travelling the world, making documentaries and writing novels and popular philosophy. That isn’t to belittle the work he was doing; he just didn’t betray any great concern for the land of his birth.

And beyond the sheer length of his absence, Ignatieff proudly adopted the pose of the upper-crust cosmopolitan in much of his writing. Even when he said nice things about Canada, as at the end of the preface to his 2000 Massey Lectures, it was with a dash of condescension: “The exercise of writing these lectures has deepened my attachment to the place on Earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” It would seem that countries, like taxes, are for little people.

But if anything, Stephen Harper’s commitment to Canada is even more suspect. If Ignatieff spent most of his life ignoring Canada while promenading in the grander salons of the world, Harper has come at it from the opposite direction. Even though he grew up in Toronto’s placid Leaside neighbourhood, he quickly adopted the colonial mindset of the insecure migrant, becoming culturally more Albertan than Albertans. Harper even has his own version of Ignatieff’s pronoun problem—the infamous Alberta Agenda letter he co-signed after the 2000 election and sent to Ralph Klein, encouraging him to “build firewalls” around the province to protect it from “an aggressive and hostile federal government.”

Setting aside the firewall letter, Harper has never really hidden his disdain for parts of Canada that aren’t as successful at digging oil out of the ground. He accused the Maritimes of having a “culture of defeat” and once said that Canada “appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status.” Never mind his own recent boasts about the economy and his education plan: these aren’t the instincts of a man blessed with an expansive and generous view of his countrymen.

And so it is that Michael Ignatieff and Stephen Harper, for all their differences in world view and intellectual temperament, have both spent their careers riffing off the same underlying theme, that Canada itself is irrelevant. Given all of this, it isn’t clear why either man wants to be prime minister. Harper—who most days could win handily an angriest-man-in-Canada competition—clearly loathes his job, the press, and the daily imperatives of life down on Supreme-Soviet-Upon-Rideau. As for Ignatieff, he has certainly worked hard to dispel suspicions that he’s off to Harvard at the first opportunity, but his job application True Patriot Love is such a cloying Via Rail portrait of Canada that it is hard to take seriously the idea that he actually believes it.

So when Canadians head to the polls on May 2, it is with the rather unpleasant knowledge that whoever ends up prime minister, we will be led by someone for whom the federal government is little more than a convenient vehicle for his own snobbery, condescension and resentment. It’s a depressing choice: Stephen Harper, the alienated and embittered Albertan, who has perhaps come to appreciate the rest of the country for which he has shown such contempt. Or Michael Ignatieff, the gallivanting, sugar-spun cosmopolitan, who has finally decided he needs a country after all.

Want Harper to be less of a dictator? Give him a majority.

By Andrew Potter - Monday, March 28, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 117 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP

Everyone agrees that Stephen Harper has been running the most centralized, partisan, and unaccountable government in Canadian history. The opposition obviously thinks so—that’s the motivation behind the slate of contempt-of-Parliament charges that threatened to bring down the government—unless, as looked likely at press time, unanimous opposition to Jim Flaherty’s Tuesday budget did so first. The press gallery pretty much agrees, since its members have spent the last five years complaining about Harper’s unprecedented lockdown on communications and access to information. But even the Conservative party’s own political messaging has portrayed the “Harper government” as a one-man show, a Stalinesque fetishization of the isolated leader working long and lonely into the night.

The only way any of this is going to change is if voters come to their senses and give him a majority in the House of Commons.

If that sounds odd, it is because the received wisdom for the past decade has been that minority rule is the answer to everything wrong with our democracy. It forces government to be more open and transparent with voters in order to survive. By requiring that it earn the support of at least one opposition party in order to stay in power, a minority delivers a more consensual style of governing, which enhances national unity and results in more progressive policies. As constitutional expert Peter Russell argued in Two Cheers for Minority Government, minorities empower Parliament at the cost of greater instability, but it’s a trade-off worth making.

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Revolution and liberalism just don't mix

By Andrew Potter - Friday, March 11, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 12 Comments

Kevin Frayer/AP

There’s a great scene at the beginning of Doctor Zhivago when the Bolsheviks are marching through town in peaceful protest, singing songs of freedom and brotherhood while the aristocrats dance and drink in a ballroom that overlooks the street. The party goes uncomfortably quiet as the singing builds in volume, until Mr. Komarovsky, the high-born villain of the story, cracks a joke: “But will they still sing in tune after the revolution?” Everyone laughs, the band starts back up, and the party resumes.

It is increasingly obvious that the outcome of the popular uprisings hopscotching their way across the Middle East will be far messier and uncertain than the fall of Communism two decades ago. While virtually all of the former Soviet Bloc states in Eastern Europe quickly reverted to some form of liberal democracy, none of the countries in the Middle East has any comparable tradition to fall back on. That is why, when it comes to the ongoing turmoil in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere, the worry is not that the protesters won’t manage to sing in tune once they’ve got rid of the strongmen, dictators and corrupt monarchs, it is that they will.

Revolutions are almost always about high-minded ideals like freedom, nationhood or the class struggle. But simmering just beneath the ideals is something more powerful and far less noble: the pull of solidarity, with a people joined in common cause, against a common enemy. You don’t have to be an old-school Bolshevik to appreciate the power of solidarity to excite the crowd. To see otherwise sensible people get taken over by tribalism and blood lust, walk down to the front lines of the next G20 protest, or go to Montreal and check out a Canadiens game during the playoffs. As Elias Canetti noted in his classic study Crowds and Power, the fire does a better job of unifying the audience than the play.

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Why happiness suddenly matters

By Andrew Potter - Monday, February 14, 2011 at 10:08 AM - 6 Comments

Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images

Politics is the art of taking credit, and politicians have been known to insert themselves into the receiving line for kudos for everything from Olympic gold medals to sunshine in July. But what they really like to take credit for is economic growth, which is why an election-starved Michael Ignatieff has been going around lately asking Canadians whether they are any better off today than they were four years ago. The recession bit hard, recovery has been slow, and Canadians and their governments find themselves mired in debt.

What Ignatieff should really be asking, though, is whether we’re any better off today than we were 40 years ago. The economist Tyler Cowen recently released a short e-book called The Great Stagnation, in which he points out that between 1947 and 1973, inflation-adjusted median income in the United States more than doubled. But from 1973 to 2004, it rose only 22 per cent, and over the past decade median income has actually declined. He notes that if pre-1973 growth rates had continued for the next three decades, “median family income in the United States would now be more than $90,000, as opposed to its current range of around $50,000.”

So, what happened?

Cowen’s argument is that the West spent most of the 20th century living off the easy proceeds of the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to machinery powered by cheap fossil fuels, industry grabbed almost all of the low-hanging fruit available for increasing productivity, and that got widely shared out in the form of steadily growing wages for all workers. But now we’ve reached a technological plateau, and while Cowen thinks things will get better, eventually, it will be a while before we see a true dividend from biotech, or clean and cheap alternative energies. In the meantime, income growth will continue to flatline.

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Nothing to fear but WiFi and fluoride

By Andrew Potter - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 102 Comments

Steve Cole/Getty Images

As the cholera outbreak in Haiti continues to worsen, the population is getting increasingly desperate. In some areas, mobs have embarked on genuine witch hunts, attacking people accused of using black magic to deliberately spread the disease. At least 12 people suspected of being witches were stoned or hacked to death last week, their corpses dragged into the street and burned.

Haiti’s descent into superstition in the face of chaos might afford us a few drops of condescension to mix with our pity at the country’s fate. But it bears keeping in mind that when it comes to confronting fears, Canadians are no less prone to fits of magical thinking.

For example, back in October, parents at an elementary school in Ontario voted overwhelmingly to ban WiFi in the classroom*. Were the parents concerned that surfing the Net during class might be bad for learning? No, they were reacting to symptoms reported by their kids that included dizziness, nausea, and headaches, and which mysteriously disappeared on weekends and holidays. Deftly elbowing past the obvious explanation—going to school makes most kids want to barf—parents concluded that the in-school wireless must be to blame. And so out went the Internet routers, despite assurances from the province’s chief medical officer that they posed absolutely no threat to students.

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What was that about hearts and minds?

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 16 Comments

Erik de Castro/Reuters

At a summit in Lisbon last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed an agreement with NATO and UN officials that would see international forces begin to hand over responsibility for control of the country to Afghan authorities in 2014. While observers are already wondering whether that timeline is realistic, the real question is whether by 2014 there will anything left of Afghanistan worth handing over.

Since the middle of 2009, the coalition’s strategy in Afghanistan has been based on the counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine that is credited with finally extricating the U.S. from Iraq. Unlike conventional warfare, where the goal is to defeat the army militarily, the idea behind COIN is that you protect the population, provide a bubble of stability and security in which governance and the rule of law can operate. This will win “hearts and minds” and prevent the insurgency from getting any sympathetic traction amongst the people.

When Barack Obama approved the surge of 30,000 additional troops in the country last December, the ambition was to get enough troops walking around in the villages protecting the population while quickly training the Afghan security forces. Obama extracted a promise from Gen. David Petraeus that the strategy would show clear progress within a year, so that they could begin bringing American soldiers home by the middle of 2011.

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Where was the youth vote?

By Andrew Potter - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 84 Comments

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

If there is one thing that captures the sad decline of Barack Obama’s place in youth culture, it is the changing nature of his treatment on YouTube. Forget about making “Yes We (Still) Can”—Will. I. Am was busy last month making R-rated videos with sultry R & B singer Nicki Minaj. Comedian Sarah Silverman was too preoccupied with tweeting about her menstrual cramps to encourage students to head back to Florida for “The Great Schlep 2.0.” As for Amber Lee Ettinger, aka “Obama Girl,” the viral-video hottie who had a famous crush on Obama back in 2008—well, she was last seen back in March, as a contestant on Shear Genius, a reality show about hair cuts.

No, in the days leading up to last week’s crucial mid-term elections in the U.S., the most prominent sign of the President in social media was a parody rap video called Head of the State, featuring an Obama look-alike called “Baracka Flacka Flames.” In the video, Obama was played by the comedian James Davis, who bragged about how “I brought you change, nigga” while a Michelle look-alike danced behind him, smoking and drinking.

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Canada has never offered 'a mosaic'

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, November 2, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Francis Vachon/CP Images

Grab as much maple syrup as you can and run for your lives. The menacing hydra known as the “hyphenated Canadian” is stalking the land once again, awakened by some sharp statements out of Germany that have been megaphoned across the Western world by a bunch of dangerously ignorant conservatives.

Yes, ancient obsessions over immigration and social stability are roiling once again, thanks to some widely misconstrued remarks by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Taking note of the high rates of unemployment, poor educational outcomes, and increasing religiosity in Germany’s walled-off Turkish community, Merkel declared that “multikulti” had “failed, utterly failed,” and suggested that immigrants really ought to learn to speak German. While Merkel was clearly talking about a very specific, and very German, failure—40 years of abhorrent treatment of its Turkish community—conservatives across the Anglosphere jumped on her remarks as the final indictment of the whole Western pro-immigration ideal.

“This is not a lesson for Germany alone,” wrote the American economist Thomas Sowell. Multiculturalism, he said, has become “a cult that has spawned mindless rhapsodies about ‘diversity,’ without a speck of evidence to substantiate its supposed benefits.” Here in Canada, the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente echoed Sowell by noting how Canadians and Germans alike “have been swamped by official propaganda celebrating the joys of ethnic diversity,” and warned of the reckoning to come. “Our tipping point is arriving too,” she intoned. “And once it does, there’s no turning back.”

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Afghan detainees sans scandal?

By Andrew Potter - Monday, October 18, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW POTTER

If there is one thing the hysteria over the “detainees” scandal that preoccupied Parliament for most of last winter points to, it is a widespread resolve amongst Canadians to distance ourselves as far as possible from the abuses of executive authority that stained the American record in Iraq and Afghanistan. The names of prisons like Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram will remain synonyms for the moral collapse of the leadership of the West.

We tend to forget, though, that Canadian officials are themselves just as keen to be seen upholding the Geneva Convention and the basic principles of due process. That is pretty much why I found myself in southern Afghanistan last week, part of a journalistic foursome touring the buffed-up detainee centre at Kandahar Airfield, and, a day later, the infamous Sarposa prison in Kandahar City itself.

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Politics big-city elites, you say. Sound familiar at all?

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Caronna/Reuters

When government House leader John Baird claimed last week that Toronto-based “elites” were behind the push to save the long-gun registry, it had the desired result: Baird was loudly mocked all the way from Front Street to Eglinton Avenue, which pretty much proved his point. But it also marked the final transition of the federal Conservatives into an intellectual branch plant of the Republican party of the United States.

The storyline of the summer was the emergence of the federal Conservatives as a party committed to principled ignorance. Whatever the issue—crime, climate change, the census—the government has made it a point of pride to actively ignore facts, research, and expert opinion. Baird’s crack about “elites” is part of a strategy that believes there is little to be gained in politics by having good ideas and implementing evidence-based policies. Instead, the key to success is being able to control the meanings of words used in political discourse.

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Bird-huggers vs. tree-huggers

By Andrew Potter - Monday, September 20, 2010 at 2:50 PM - 0 Comments

John Alex Maguire/Rex Features/CP

If her recent writing is anything to go by, Margaret Atwood is seriously worried about the future of the human race. In her novels Oryx and Crake and its successor, Year of the Flood, she deals with the apocalyptic themes of runaway technology, the commodification of the body, and environmental devastation. She always describes her work as “speculative fiction” that explores the consequences of social trends that are already underway.

But if her recent environmental activism is any indication, Margaret Atwood appears to think that everything is more or less peachy. At the very least, global warming doesn’t appear to her to be anything worth sacrificing a few birds or a nice view over.

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Chilean miners: That far down, who decides what's law?

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at 9:21 AM - 0 Comments

Ivan Alvarado/Reuters

Reflecting on his trips down a Lancashire coal mine, George Orwell wrote that aside from the lack of fire, “most of the things one imagines in hell are there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and above all, unbearably cramped space.” If Orwell found a few days in a coal mine just this side of hell, imagine what it must be like for the 33 Chilean miners who have been trapped 700 m underground since the main shaft of the San Jose gold and silver mine collapsed on Aug. 5.

When the miners were finally discovered on Aug. 22, rescuers quickly realized that it could take as many as four months to bore a hole wide enough to pull the men out. As a result, a great deal of attention has been paid to the urgent need to secure not only the miners’ physical well-being, but also their mental health. In addition to the food and water being sent down through the four-inch-wide boreholes, rescuers are sending down movies and games, notes from friends and families, and instructions for sanity-preserving measures such as the need to establish a clear night-and-day cycle.

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Aliens like us? I don't think so.

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, August 17, 2010 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments

A few weeks ago, NASA announced that it had discovered 700 new planets in our galaxy, 140 of them apparently “Earth-like.” People immediately went nuts speculating about life on other planets, and many scientists called for a renewed push in the largely moribund search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But before we get too excited about finding E.T., we might ask ourselves a hard question: what’s in it for us?

Stephen Hawking actually brought this up a few months ago, when he said that while he believes aliens are out there, it is probably too dangerous for us to try to interact with them. “I imagine they might exist in massive ships . . . having used up all the resources from their home planet,” he said. “Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

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Harper is on to something in cutting aid

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

DADANG TRI/REUTERS

Fresh off defending Canadians from the tyranny of the mandatory long-form census, the Conservative government has set its sights on the gang of internationalist do-gooders that make up Canada’s foreign aid community.

Ottawa recently cut $1.8 million in annual funding from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (CCIC), an aid-industry organization that represents as many as 100 NGOs. The money represents more than two-thirds of the CCIC budget, and the organization is now in the process of laying off over half its staff. Its head, Gerry Barr, described the defunding as “partisan brush-clearing.”

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Sometimes a gaffe is more than a gaffe

By Andrew Potter - Friday, July 16, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Blair Gable/Reuters

Since he became Prime Minister 4½ years ago, Stephen Harper has tormented the press gallery with an almost complete lockdown on government communications, with even cabinet ministers informed that the public is not entitled to their opinions. The assumption has always been that he is just a weapons-grade control freak, but a pair of recent exchanges suggest an alternative theory: that Harper knows something about the ideological leaning of his cabinet that he’d prefer to keep quiet.

Last week, Minister of Industry Tony Clement was given the task of defending the government’s decision to eliminate the mandatory long-form version of the census and move those questions to an optional survey. According to Clement, the long census—which asks questions about respondents’ ethnicity, education and income—is “heavy-handed” and intrusive. Clement mounted his libertarian high horse: “You try to limit the amount of state coercion that you have, you try to limit the intrusiveness of government activities, and that’s the balance that we’ve struck,” he said.

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Still here, and more alienated than ever

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Peter Mccabe/CP

If a sign of the relative health of the Quebec sovereignty movement is the amount of anxiety its most outspoken proponents cause in the rest of Canada, then the movement is almost certainly at death’s door. Where it was noticed, Gilles Duceppe’s quixotic springtime tour of the country promoting his vision for an independent Quebec got a friendly, if cockeyed, reception. Then, a few weeks ago, the former editor of Le Devoir and arch-separatist Lise Bissonnette was given a lifetime achievement award by the Canadian Journalism Foundation, for which she was given a warm standing ovation at the gala in Toronto.

But if separatism is dying, that doesn’t mean that la belle province has finally come around to the virtues of federalism. If anything, the alienation of Quebecers from the rest of Canada is probably higher than it has been anytime since the Second World War, and recent polls suggest that if support for separatism is only at about 40 per cent, it is because the question is simply irrelevant.

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Soccer like art? Sure, with more fighting

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 at 8:40 AM - 1 Comment

Darren Staples/Reuters

The World Cup had an early case of life imitating advertising on Saturday, when England goalkeeper Robert Green let a slow shot from American striker Clint Dempsey skip off his hands and into the net. The goal salvaged a tie for the U.S.A., and the deep meaning of it all could be discerned from the comparative reaction of the two countries’ tabloids.

“Hand of Clod!” screamed at least two London dailies, a reference to Diego Maradona’s infamous handball goal that put England out of the 1986 finals. Across the pond, the New York Post captured the spirit of things with its gloating front page: “USA Wins 1-1”.

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This is not Obama’s Katrina. If anything, it’s Bush’s second Katrina.

By Andrew Potter - Sunday, June 6, 2010 at 8:51 PM - 81 Comments

WIN MCNAMEE/ ABACA USA / KEYSTONE

The only substance possibly more toxic than the thousands of barrels of oil that continue to gush daily into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s broken Macondo well is the flood of commentary spewing from the mouths and pens of U.S. Republicans and their allies in the partisan press. The right-wing talking point of the moment is that this spill has turned into “Obama’s Katrina,” marking the moment when the President’s fundamental inadequacies as a leader are laid bare for all to see. But that’s only when they aren’t blaming “government” itself, or at least the quaintly misguided left-wing conceit that government can do anything usefully at all.

There’s been no small amount of revenge-seeking by Republicans who have always felt Bush was treated unfairly over Katrina. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Dubya’s long-serving hit man Karl Rove pointed out that while Bush had to work through and with local authorities in Louisiana, the Gulf is an area of undisputed federal authority. He took great pleasure in turning Obama’s own words against him, suggesting the President might rue his complaint about Bush’s response to Katrina: “I wish that the federal government had been up to the task.”

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