Tagged: Stephen Harper
Halifax press corps flunks Sable Island 101
Reporters attending Parks Canada’s Sable Island announcement this morning at the Halifax Citadel were apparently in stenography mode. Or perhaps they had been instructed to fish for soundbites on more urgent stories, like the confusion around environmental and salvage measures for the grounded bulk carrier MV Miner.
Whatever the cause, they came ill-prepared to probe the most contentious issue surrounding plans to make Sable Island a national park: the Harper Government’s impulse to promote private sector tourism development on the island. Environment Minister Jim Prentice touched off a furore in January, 2010, when he first announced plans to make Sable a national park or a national wildlife area. As the Halifax Chronicle-Herald reported:
”Sable Island would be well-protected, and it would be an area that we would encourage visitors to come to and they would be well taken care of while they’re there,” he said after a news conference at Citadel Hill in Halifax.
He said he expects private businesses would transport people to the island, about 290 kilometres southeast of Halifax near the edge of the continental shelf
Prentice’s threat to unleash tourism entrepreneurs on Sable has dominated public discussion of the issue ever since, but reporters apparently didn’t bother to google the subject before proceeding to the Citadel today. They didn’t ask a single question about the tourism promotion flap. In fact, they hardly asked any questions about Sable at all. According to one person present, there were “two questions on MV Miner, one on HRM’s proposed stadium, and two or so on Sable.”
“[H]onestly, that’s the first I’ve heard of it,” a reporter confessed.
“Why have you chosen this windmill to tilt,” another asked.
Adventure tourists from the “expedition ship” Polar Star visited Sable in October, 2009, one of four or five such cruise ship visits to the island. (Photo: Zoe Lucas, Sable Island Green Horse Society)
“Tilting at windmills,” of course, is a figure of speech derived from Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, in which Quixote jousts with windmills he imagines to be giants. I assume the reporter used it metaphorically to imply I am attacking imaginary enemies, or fighting futile battles.
The enemy is not imaginary, nor is the battle futile. Moreover, the issue is too important for reporters to arrive at a news conference ill-prepared.
It’s important because Sable is one of the province’s premiere natural landscapes, a category that has steadily dwindled (most recently with the province’s egregious failure to buy Pollet’s Cove when it had the chance). Sable has many remarkable features, including terrain, vegetation, wildlife, and habitat, and a unique location. It is the only island lying roughly 100 miles off the east coast of North America, a vantage offering significant opportunities for scientific research on air quality.
The Sable National Park announcement where no one asked about tourism. (Alex Boutlier photo)
Most people with deep knowledge of Sable recoil at the idea of encouraging private sector tourism promotion because of the damage unrestricted visitation would cause. But people are people, and when they see a gorgeous landscape, the impulse to develop it is hard to resist. The need for constant vigilance in protecting natural treasures is what gave rise to the national park systems in the US and Canada.
Sable is unique in that creating the usual park infrastructure and encouraging normal park tourism would be highly destructive of its many fragile natural elements. I would have preferred a custom-made solution for Sable rather than a National Park. People who take the opposite view worry that a one-off solution would always be vulnerable to change or abandonment in a way that a National Park will not be. I hope they are right. Some people with very deep commitment to Sable — specifically Sable resident Zoe Lucas of the Green Horse society, and Mark Butler of the Ecology Action Centre — hold that view, and I have to concede they may be right.
Still, Prentice’s comments were so reckless and disturbing, they need to be challenged throughout the process.
There was no public consultation before this park decision was made. All consultation came after bureaucrats, meeting privately, chose a park over a national wildlife refuge. That made the post-decision public consultation look like window dressing, but hundreds of Sable lovers weighed in anyway, and they overwhelmingly opposed accelerated tourism development. The hapless bureaucrat who had to report the results of these consultations at a public meeting said the message had come through loud and clear. I hope it will be enough. But with pro-development ideologues running the country, one never knows.
Reporters assigned to this story in future may wish to consult:
- The balanced discussion of the tourism issue on Zoe Lucas’s Green Horse Society website, the definitive source for information about Sable.
- The Hands Off Sable Island Facebook page I started to protest Prentice’s reckless speculation.
- Previous Contrarian posts on the issue here, here, here, and here.
- Park’s Canada’s FAQ page for Sable’s designation as a national park, which includes various tips for would-be Sable tourists.
- The federal-provincial MOU that kicked off Sable’s process leading to Sable’s designation as a national park.
- The official Visitors’ Guide to Sable Island by the Canadian Coast Guard, which currently controls access to the island.
- The report [pdf] of Ottawa’s after-the-fact public “consultation” about Sable’s park designation, in which officials were innundated with pleas to restrict tourism.
- The Nova Scotia Museum’s extensive Sable Island website.
- The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic’s Sable Island website.
- The Coast’s coverage of the Sable Park tourism brouhaha.
- Nature Canada’s comments on the Sable Park tourism brouhaha.
- Incredibly, officials did not release the federal-provincial agreement signed yesterday, but promise to do so soon, at which point I will link to it.
- The original Herald article sparking the issue is no longer archived on line.
A final notes: There is a rational case to be made for limited Sable tourism. Zoe Lucas and others make it eloquently on the Green Horse Society page devoted to the national park designation.
[L]imited tourism has not had a negative impact on the island, and some people feel it has been a positive force. Individuals who have seen Sable first-hand have been able to share with others their enhanced appreciation of the island as well as their understanding of the critical role of the Station. Many have subsequently supported efforts to ensure that year-round environmental stewardship for Sable Island is maintained.
I agree with this, but Prentice was not proposing “limted tourism.” Plenty of people would leap at the chance to open up the island to commercial exploitation. Sable’s fervent cadre of supporters need to guard against that. And senior Halifax reporters need to do their jobs.
[Disclosure, I visited Sable twice as a reporter in the 1980s and 1990s. Both trips included a few hours on the island under the watchful supervision of Zoe Lucas and then-station chief Gerry Forbes.]
Jobs and LSD
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald points out that last week’s flood of Steve Jobs hagiographies mostly tiptoed around one inconvenient facet of the Great Man: he took LSD. He not only took it, he regarded having taken it as one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. Greenwald:
Unlike many people who have enjoyed success, Jobs is not saying that he was able to succeed despite his illegal drug use; he’s saying his success is in part — in substantial part — because of those illegal drugs (he added that Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once”).
An excellent Time magazine piece by Maia Szalavitz delves into the connection between Jobs’s use of psychedelics and his creative genius:
As attested by the nearly spiritual devotion so many consumers have to Jobs’ creations, the former Apple chief (and indeed many other top technology pioneers) appeared to have found enduring inspiration in LSD. Research shows that the psychedelic experience is, in fact, long lasting: a new study published last week found that people who took magic mushrooms (psilocybin) had long-term personality changes, becoming more open, more curious, more intellectually engaged and more creative. These personality shifts persisted more than a year after taking the drugs….
Greenwald connects the ironic dots:
America’s harsh prohibitionist drug policies are grounded in the premise that the prohibited substances have little or no redeeming value and cannot be used without life-destroying consequences. Yet the evidence of its falsity is undeniable. Here is one of the most admired men in America, its greatest contemporary industrialist, hailing one of the most scorned of these substances as integral to his success and intellectual and personal growth.
Under Stephen Harper, Canada is falling into step behind America’s punitive approach to drug use: mandatory prison sentences for smaller and smaller amounts of the least harmful substances, and relentless campaigns against harm-reduction strategies like safe injection sites. The Conservatives are quick to condemn the nanny state whenever environmental or consumer regulation is proposed, but eager to bring the full force of state power down on anyone whose personal choices happen to offend their arbitrary moral standards. Even personal choices one of their business heros regards as one of the most important and beneficial he ever made.
From the folks who brought you a non-random, self-selecting census
A report last week in the prestigious scientific journal Nature revealed that the hole in the ozone layer over the Arctic was the largest ever recorded—comparable for the first time to the man-induced hole that appears every year in the ozone layer over the Antarctic. But when reporters asked Canadian scientist David Tarasick, who was involved in the study, to explain its findings, Environment Canada refused to let him speak.
David Tarasick, muzzled by Environment Canada
Environment Canada scientist David Tarasick, whose team played a key role in the report published Sunday in the journal Nature, is not being allowed to discuss the discovery with the media.
Environment Canada told Postmedia News that an interview with Tarasick “cannot be granted.” Tarasick is one of several Environment Canada ozone scientists who have received letters warning of possible “discontinuance of job function” as part of the downsizing underway in the department.
Meanwhile, the Harper Government is cutting back on ozone monitoring. CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks host Bob MacDonald decries the government’s behaviour:
How has this country turned from a world leader in environmental protection, to one where scientists are forbidden to speak and the government seems to have turned its back on environmental protection?
….Scientists are our eyes on the planet. Their detailed monitoring of changes to the atmosphere, water, and movements in the ground, give us a window into the complex interplay of the Earth’s many systems. They also see how human activity has an effect on those systems and the courses they will take in the future.
Over the long term, the scientists see trends, such as warming temperatures, loss of Arctic sea ice, shifting ocean currents or changes in biology, that are used to make predictions about the type of world our children will inherit.
H/T: Elizabeth May
iPolitics and ‘Mr. Sunshine’ – feedback
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Re iPolitics.ca’s coverage of the Prime Minister’s visit to flooded areas of Manitoba, Myra Barss asks:
Did Mr. Sunshine walk on water while viewing the floods?
Pundits’ Guide begs the question
Last Thursday, Contrarian got into a bit of a Twitter dustup with Alice Funke, whose blog, Pundits’ Guide, features statistical analysis of Canadian election results.
In a post titled, “Mommy, They Split My Vote,” Funke purported to show that few if any of the 27 Liberal seats lost to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in the May 2 election had been lost due to vote-splitting. Her complicated argument defies succinct exegesis, but you can read it here.
In response, I tweeted:
This unleashed a torrent of counter-tweets that, for the time being at least, you can find here and here (by scrolling back to May 12). Funke followed up with an email buttressing her position (which I quote with her permission):
Of course in a multi-party, first-past-the-post electoral system, there are seats won by less than 50%. But the people currently arguing that “vote-splitting amongst ‘the left’ is allowing the Conservatives to win”, honestly do not know their election result data.
Outside of the very few core urban seats in Canada, where the Liberal vote falls off, it largely falls off to the Conservatives’ benefit, or stays home to their benefit. So, there are vote splits alright, but on the right-hand side of the spectrum. But this is not what was being argued as the cause of those Liberal seats falling…
[Y]ou can’t simply add the Liberal and NDP votes in any given election together, because for the “vote-splitting” argument to work you need to prove that any voters who stayed home in 2008 but showed up to vote this time, would have also showed up to vote in the case where there was a single, let’s say Liberal, choice on the ballot.
In the suburban Toronto and 905 seats I presented in detail, either:
* the Conservative vote hikes came from Liberals, and the NDP gains came from previous non-voters and previous Greens, or
* the Conservative vote hikes came from previous non-voters and previous Greens, and the NDP gains came from Liberals
Mathematically, there are no other generalized possibilities.
If there were a preferential ballot in Canada, and there were no more “vote splits” by your definition, it is not at all clear that it would have the outcome everywhere that you believe. In core urban seats, yes. But they are not the majority of ridings in Canada, though everyone who spouts the current version of the vote-splitting argument seems to come from one and believes that voting pattern to be universal. It’s not.
I do not quarrel with Funke’s arithmetic. My problem is that she begs the question.* That is to say, her definition of vote-splitting is so narrow as to all but guarantee the result she found. To certify a loss as one due to vote-splitting, Funke requires two conditions:
- The party gaining the seat does so by gaining fewer votes than the party losing the seat loses, and that
- Some third party gains more votes than the losing party loses
When we encounter a definition this odd and this technical in a blogpost with the churlish title “Mommy, They Split My Vote,” we may be forgiven for wondering if it was devised to be unmeetable (at least in a transformative election).
Many Canadians would define vote-splitting as any seat where a Harper candidate beat a Liberal or NDP incumbent but took less than 50 percent of the vote. I am inclined to accept Funke’s point that such outcomes are inevitable in a first-past-the-post election with three or more parties.
In the context of the election just past however, vote-spitting could be reasonably defined as any seat where a Harper candidate beat a Liberal incumbent by a margin smaller than the increase in that riding’s NDP vote. A tally of ridings fitting this definition would be illuminating, as would knowing whether Harper would have a majority without them.
By election day, everyone could predict that the Liberals and the Greens would shed votes, the NDP would gain, and the Harperists would either hold or gain. Given those assumptions, it was all but certain the Liberals would lose seats. In some cases, it seemed likely they would lose seats to the Conservatives because too many previously Liberal or Liberal-inclined voters would defect to the NDP.
Such shifts are, to a large extent, hypothetical. The electorate in each riding has changed in the two and a half years since the last vote. Some voters have died, others have come of age, moved in, moved out, attained citizenship, etc. In both elections, many voters stayed home for a multitude of reasons. Those who voted Liberal in 2008 but deserted the party this year may have moved to the NDP, the Harperists, or the Greens—or they may have stayed home altogether. Attempts to parse these shifts without detailed exit surveys are a mug’s game, and given voters’ notoriously faulty reporting, they are problematic even with exit surveys in hand.
But in a highly polarized electorate, where the defunct centre right party has been taken over by the hard right, and where the centrist party in steep decline, it’s legitimate for progressive voters to worry that a shift of anti-Harper votes from Liberal incumbents to NDP also-rans could have the unintended effect of letting Harper candidates slip up the middle to victory.
For millions of Canadians, fear of giving an unchecked majority to a hard right party led by an uncompromising authoritarian trumps their loyalty to either the Liberals or the NDP. Their concerns are legitimate. Pundits’ Guide would perform a service by quantifying them, rather than simply pooh-poohing them.
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* Please note rare quasi-correct use of this figure of speech.
iPolitics.ca and ‘Mr. Sunshine’
Thursday’s “morning brief” from iPolitics.ca led with a puff piece about a Prime Minister Harper’s visit to flooded areas of Manitoba. I’m sure there were stupider things written in Canadian journalism this week, I just cant think of any offhand:
Mr. Sunshine brings better weather to soggy Prairies
Just call him Mr. Sunshine. Stephen Harper came, saw and left behind some improving weather for the drenched people of Manitoba. The prime minister toured flooded areas to the west of Winnipeg yesterday, promising federal help to build better infrastructure for future floods. And while his trip was short on promises of greater relief funds, it did bring a change in the weather. Although it is expected to be cloudy today, only a small amount of rain is predicted for the province. After that, Environment Canada is forecasting five straight days of sunshine and moderate temperatures. And with the better weather comes a delay in the plans for a controlled flood by breaching the levee at the so-called Hoop and Holler Bend.
Mr Sunshine? His trip brought a change in the weather? Are there no editors at iPolitics? Was there no actual news to report in this Prime Ministerial tour? This online journal’s mission statement promises “independent, non-partisan” content “in a spirit of neutral inquiry.” In story selection and slant, it is showing a disturbing starboard list.
That orange wave in QC? Blame Charest
A Nova Scotian who spent close to half his life in Quebec writes:
Harper’s undoing is Jean Charest.
Quebecers know they are going to throw out the scandal-plagued Charest as soon as they can, but they can’t do this with a strong BQ in Ottawa because it throws the federalist-nationalist balance out of whack.
Quebecers like to balance a strong federalist parliament in Ottawa with a nationalist Assembly in QC, and vice versa. They can’t vote Liberal on Monday because, well, Liberals are screwing up in QC. They also know that Harper can’t be seen to kowtow to Quebec, so they’d rather not have him in power or with too much influence in QC. Also, he’s not sympatico. But electing too many BQ’s when the PQ is destined for power at home is crazy because that gives far too much clout to the separatists. Everybody knows that.
It must have been quite a problem. But then Jack Layton won the French-language debate with smarts, charm and a street-savvy yet credible accent that made Duceppe sound like a fop. And so the orange wave began.
Ipso facto duodenum.
I agree with one caveat: According to some polls, the orange wave in Quebec had begun even before the debates.
That “unnecessary election” – updated
On the morning after the English Language leader’s debate, CBC Radio’s James Cudmore ended his reaction piece from Brixton’s British Pub in Ottawa with an audible smirk: “One blessing: the campaign just has three weeks left to go.”
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This is one Harper meme (among several) that many press gallery reporters have embraced with alacrity: the May 2 election is an unnecessary, money-wasting, irritating, imposition on voters who have better things to do than contemplate national issues and chose among those who want to do them.
It is scarcely an original observation that, as we trudge begrudgingly to the polls, citizens of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen have been laying down their lives for the privilege Cudmore and Harper urge citizens of Canada to scorn. As if to heighten the contradiction, Harper enlisted Canadian warplanes in the effort to help pro-election rebels in Libya.
That a PM makes deprecation of democratic norms a centerpiece of his campaign is bad. That some reporters embrace this demagoguery is worse.
[UPDATE] Contrarian reader John DeMings avers:
No, not worse, and not even a tick on Harper’s failing. I think there may be some justification, however, in having entertainment reporters do election coverage and let the ‘political reporters’ stick to committee meetings.
Trending federal leaders in Google searches
Google’s Trend feature lets users track and compare the frequency of searches for particular words or phrases in any country, or worldwide. This chart compares searches within Canada for the full names (first and last) of the five leaders contesting the May 2 Federal Election.
I used Gilles Duceppe as the standard, so you could say Stephen Harper scored 12.6 duceppes; Jack Layton 7.8 duceppes; Michael Ignatieff 7.2 duceppes; and Elizabeth May 4.0 duseppes. (Sorry about the confusing colour assignments. Google picked ‘em.)
A serving of crow, best eaten promptly
After listening to wrongness guru Kathryn Schultz‘s TED talk on the counterintuitive blessings of making mistakes, it seems an opportune moment to get this out of the way. A quiet but astute observer of provincial and national politics writes:
I meant to ask you where you get your drugs from. They are obviously very powerful. I mean, how else can you explain your federal election campaign outcome prediction?
That would be this prediction:
I look forward to their stories a month from now acknowledging April 12 as the turning point when a majority slipped from Harper’s grasp, and a minority Liberal Government became a real possibility.
The post-debate polls are mixed, and mostly flat. They certainly reveal no such turning point. The only real change seems to be a startling rise in soft support for Jack Layton in the unlikely province of Quebec, where he has taken over second place in most polls. Whether this translates into many, or any, seats is an open question, since the NDP vote in the province is inefficient, in the sense of being too evenly spread among many ridings to produce majorities under Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system.
Another friend, a Nova Scotian by inclination currently suffering asylum in Toronto, summed up the election this way:
Isn’t this campaign awful? Layton, my MP, seems to be winning ever since the debate, heaven help us. I have a feeling anything could happen. Two events stand out.
One was the televised English debate, in which only Layton seemed authentic. The other was the Ignatieff interview with Peter Mansbridge today. For a generation over 40, Mansbridge represents something along the lines of Walter Cronkite — the guy who presides at the campfire, the embodiment of Canadian centrality. He’ll be the last one, of course, since now everyone’s a short-lived broadcaster, but to watch his cold, barely concealed contempt for the actor and nimble intellect before him was to realize that even at the top of his considerable game, Ignatieff isn’t achieving acceptance — which is what the polls seem to show, however faulty they may be: he hasn’t moved the dial much.
The other: I spent some of today rapt, watching Day 1 of SUN-TV. It’s lunatic. Prewar Germany. Sex and death. The Americanization of Canada, in the worst imaginable way. How did the country ever beget this Rosemary’s Baby of television? OK, I may exaggerate, but if it’s a taste of Harper regimes to come, we are in the wrong hands to put it gently.
If you are straining to find a silver lining in these trends, it’s this: In the main, the polls point to a Harper minority and a carbon copy of the current parliamentary seat allocation. If that happens, we could be rid of all four leaders before our next trip to the polls. Wouldn’t that be a blessing?
