Occupons Montréal: Don’t Listen to the Media

He was working at the base of the statue of Queen Victoria when I photographed him. The tools of his trade were a simple black marker & a small sheet of plywood. What he was drawing was a beautiful, if a little terrifying, piece of artwork. This was the moment that my scepticism about Occupons Montréal faded & was replaced with hope – cautious hope, cautious optimism – but hope nonetheless.

The reason I had felt sceptical, the reason I had felt that Occupons Montréal might fade into irrelevance until I saw it for myself, is rooted in my understanding of other occupations worldwide – most notably, Occupy Wall Street, where the message is much clearer than the media is portraying it to be & the protestors’ organizing prowess & sense of community repeatedly seems to win out against the established powers & authorities. Globally, we are seeing a sort of 1968 all over again – a mass protest movement, simultaneously local & international in scope, with issues ranging from ending war, economic justice, student debt, unemployment, animal rights, etc. The momentum of this movement seems implacable & the energy of the people participating in it is contagious when you are around it.

So when I saw, over the weekend, a headline on the Le Devoir website saying that Occupons Montréal was associating itself with a march for Québec independence (the headline has since been removed), I felt my heart sink. The rest of the world was challenging an unfair, unscrupulous & predatory economic system that is pushing governments to austerity & here I was seeing my city’s Occupation rehashing old battles & using old, still-divisive politics to undermine its own message & popular support with nearly half of Québec’s population.

Except it wasn’t, and it isn’t. The Occupation General Assembly’s Minutes don’t mention a word about sovereignty or independence. The Occupation seems to be about changing the system to make it fairer for the people in our society who aren’t at the top of the wealth & power pyramid; the old battles are being brought up in the media, but not in the discussions I heard people having down in Square-Victoria-cum-La-Place-du-Peuple. Some of the ideas being discussed are frivolous, unachievable, blue-sky pushes for revolutionary, total world-system reform, but mostly what’s talked about seems to be about making the movement work, making the occupation durable &, beyond those goals, it seems to be about making the world better for people who need it. Allowing people not just to exist, but to live.

 

So yes, my scepticism faded. It faded because of the message of the Occupation, which is simply “Here are the problems foisted on our society by the wealthy & the powerful at our expense & in our name. Fix them. Now.”; it faded because of the people at the protest, who are living together with a sense of community I have simply never seen in Montreal; it faded because artists are sitting next to enthusiastic political activists, drawing pictures & sculpting stones while someone lectures about inequality and social justice, just because this place has given them the opportunity to express themselves in a way they could not before; it faded because in a city where people will riot because a band can’t play a gig for being held up at the border, there is a village of tents cooperating in an astonishing display of direct, deliberative democracy to change things for the better & not only has it not descended into chaos, but it has grown larger, more organized & more beautiful.

The artist with his plywood canvas sat on the plinth of a statue in a true, 21st Century Agora. If nothing else is accomplished by this movement, the community & the sense of being at the bustling, creative heart of a true democracy will nevertheless stay with me always.

The Animosity in Canadian Parliament - A Letter to Stephen Harper - Video

A Letter to Stephen HarperI sent this email to the Prime Minister a moment ago

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The Animosity in Canadian Parliament - A Letter to Stephen Harper

Mr. Harper,

The events of the last week have me concerned, I'm afraid, for the future of my country. I have stated, in public and on my blog (http://moopthas.blogspot.com), that the Canadian electoral process is inherently undemocratic and that the minority forum of parliament is the only way of approaching, through that process and in a representative fashion, the true desires of Canadians. So understand that I do not believe that the mandate to govern falls necessarily on the winning party of an election (in your case, the Conservative Party), but rather on the House of Parliament, whose makeup is reasonably close to the will of the Canadian people.

So it is with consternation that I witnessed your move to consolidate your party's power and capitalize on your Opposition's divided nature. It is with consternation that I witnessed your shock as your Opposition banded together to decry your heavy-handedness. It is with consternation that I witnessed you accuse the opposition, who together hold a majority of both the popular vote and the House, of acting undemocratically and it is with consternation that I witnessed your Sun King approach to party politics, reining in the dissent of those members of your party, such as the Honourable Mr. Day, who disagreed with your approach to the situation.

The absolutist approach you've employed, Mr. Harper, has given you one advantage. It is an advantage you can use to save your party's government from being toppled by the coalition; it has drawn responsibility away from your party and onto yourself and so, by your resignation and by your party's nomination of a new leader, you can save the Governor-General from setting a new, dangerous and potentially costly precedent in Canadian political history.

Please understand that I send this letter as a concerned citizen, looking to protect my country. I want the last year's economic growth (because while our neighbours to the south suffered a recession, our economy grew 1.7%) to continue and I want our country to survive what is a very uncertain economic period. I want the government to remain stable and I want you to resign, Mr. Harper, in order to accomplish that.

My name is Steven Alleyn, I thank you for your time and I hope this letter finds you well.

P.S. I do not support them, but the Bloc Québécois is a legitimate political party seeking to protect the interests of the Province of Québec. While their charter establishes them as a separatist party, history shows that they have acted in the interest of Quebec and Canada and have not directly acted against Canadian unity. Attacking their credibility and their legitimacy can be construed as an attempt to discredit the opinions and legitimacy of the entire French Canadian franchise; it is not in keeping with the political shrewdness you have demonstrated over the last eight years.

Democracy's End

Here's how Harper pissed off the opposition to the point where he can now declare his political career officially dead:

He presented preliminary financial measures, leading into the budget to be released next month, which undermined the already tenuous democracy of Canada's electoral process. His measure rescinded the right of political parties to receive public financing for every vote garnered at the polls, which would have effectively rendered every vote not cast for a winning candidate utterly worthless.

The opposition exploded; an attack on democracy and, more importantly for the self-interested politicians, an attack on their bottom line! It was unacceptable - it is unacceptable. The public financing measure was the only thing standing between Canadian Democracy and its transformation into a complete farce.

For those of you who find the coalition proposition undemocratic, I've got news for you; the opposition, between them, control a majority of the seats in parliament. The coalition is essentially more democratically legitimate than the minority conservatives, in that it has the support of 163 MPs, versus the 143 seats held by the Conservatives.

Democracy in this country is a joke.

I Was Wrong

Okay, so my prediction could have been a little bit better; the final results can be found here if you haven't gotten a glimpse of them, yet. It's my fault, really, for calling it based on the polls running up to the election; I should have called it based on the fact that the prairies are, by in large, polarized rather than scattered across the political spectrum.

As I drove home, last night, from an evening spent watching the election results come in at my friend's house, I heard commentators on CJAD (a local AM news station located at 800 kilohertz) declare that "the only wasted vote is a vote not used!" Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the function of the Canadian Electoral System knows that such a declaration is naïve in the extreme, the most glaring example of the fallacy of his statement being the polling results for the NDP and the Bloc Québecois versus those same two parties' seat results. With nearly ten percent more votes than the nationalist Bloc, the NDP somehow managed to gather 13 fewer seats.

The fact is that the First-Past-the-Post electoral system is broken, it yields shoddy results at best, and gives a party with less than a majority of the popular vote a carte blanche to do as it pleases at its worst. The fact is that anyone not voting with the majority in their particular riding is wasting their vote, because short of a small stipend paid to their party, the people they voted for can do exactly nothing with that vote.

Canada is not a democracy - as long as we have minority governments, it is close to one, but do not, for even one moment, think that we live in a country which in any way democratic. If we did, the liberals would have two thirds of the seats of the conservatives (and not a small fraction up from half) and the NDP would be a close third, with the BQ trailing far behind and the Greens a little bit behind them.

Oh, and we might have a minority that represented us, for once.

Russian Roulette Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

The argument that we aren't in colonial times anymore, that planting a flag somewhere is not proof of conquest anymore, is not really a valid one. This is because it is redundant; it isn't valid because it isn't valid and that's why it's not done anymore. There are other arguments, however, which invalidate the Russian bid to secure arctic control with a flag and a submarine. One of them stands out above the rest.

Occupation. Use. They are the sole determinants of whether or not a piece of land belongs to anyone - short of a land deed, proving ownership through acquisition. Unfortunately, this doesn't bode particularly well for Canada's land-claim, either, but the fact of the matter is that, unless either country can prove that it has the means, desire, opportunity & motivation to make use of the arctic and arctic waters - even if those motivations are martial & defensive in nature.

The deep water port & icebreakers proposed by Harper's government would prove that martial intent, but until they're actually built & deployed, it's still anyone's game. The arctic is no man's land and the Russian flag sitting on the bottom of the ocean under miles of ice won't change that. Not until they decide to use it.

Reciprocating Redundant Repetition

Why does this province's democratic process seem to be on an endless cyclical loop, rehashing the same subjects over and over with little-to-no apparent progress or Will to Progress (yes, I've been reading Nietzsche) since 1970? Is it simply agenda pushing idiots who've gotten us caught up in this political quagmire or is there some sort of greater cultural problem at work here?

This week, again, saw hue-and-cry over the Canadian Health Care system and a rash of people calling to privatize the system ASAP. I have already dealt with this, briefly at moopthas' old address and I'll expand on a few different themes here.

The main problem with establishing a private system is maintaining a parallel social system; regulations cannot be extended too far into the private sector because if they are, it simply won't establish itself, so with reduced restrictions a series of private hospitals and clinics would, as soon as they entered the market, begin competing not only with each other, but with the social system aswell. And here's the big, dirty secret about the private sector: competition isn't limited to consumer-side services. Supply-side services compete with each other, aswell.

Doctors want better wages, like anyone else, for that matter, and so do nurses and orderlies and everyone else involved in the health system. The private sector, unregulated, has no problem offering them. It pays based on individuals' merit and therefore soon draws the best of our professionals out of the public system. In order to preserve even a modicum of competent function in the public system, the wages within that system will have to be raised in order to match the private ones. The private system, in charge of its own pricing, will be able to compensate and maintain its hold on those doctors who represent our best and brightest.

The same is true of every kind of specialist and professional involved in medicine. Of course, the consumer will not tolerate an endlessly rising inflation and, based on his/her Will to Pay, the prices and wages would inevitably stabilize at one point; it would not happen before the public system had been ravaged - irrecoverably demolished.

The cost of professionals wouldn't be the only thing to suffer - the cost of procedures and insurance would soar, briefly, as they acclimatized themselves to a new market (as they surged to compete with and overthrow the social system). A look at the US system is the simplest way of confirming these suspicions; drug companies would follow suit as deregulation and increased insurance coverage would give them the leeway they need to gouge more and more out of their hapless customers.

They may have had some success with the system in Great Britain and Europe, but the facts of Québec's almost perverted mixture of right- and left-wing politics/government, along with this country's proximity to the USA and the bleed-over effect of their instant-gratification culture on our own make any proposal to privatize a segment of the Canadian Health System completely unviable. Unfortunately, our geo-political climate makes it an all-or-nothing situation and scrapping public health simply is not an option; it is unethical and contrary to the basic human rights we believe in - or claim to believe in - in this country.