Stephen Harper has managed to silence one of the most vocal and activist groups battling against his plan to give prairie farmers the right to opt out of selling their wheat and barley through the wheat board. Namely, the Canadian Wheat Board itself.
The board’s directors had, since the Tories’ election, been running a relentless campaign to protect their “single-desk” marketing monopoly. They regularly funded studies and surveys that invariably concluded the CWB’s model was the most profitable, most popular manner for grain marketing; when Ottawa held a plebiscite in 2007 that resulted in a majority of barley farmers voting for marketing choice, the directors launched a publicity campaign undermining it as rigged and irrelevant; they urged farmers to write the agriculture minister in protest
The Opposition Liberals entered high dudgeon when the Harper government attempted to silence the directors. They seem to have forgotten that the CWB is just a government agency. It functions under an act of parliament. It was also a wartime measure that long, long since outlived that particular war, and several wars since. The government's incremental campaign against the CWB has been one of the few positive accomplishments of the Harper era.
I've often been critical of their approach to the CWB, but they've stuck with it so far, when many other old Reform Party planks have been discarded in the political ditch. It's pretty reasonable to assume that a majority Tory government would spell the end of the Wheat Board, and its monopsony over western farmers. Now Old Publius is not a farmer, not even directly from farm folk. Maternal grandfather was a day labourer in the Alentejo, many moons ago. I live in the heart of the Imperial Capital (Toronto). Couldn't tell wheat from barley from a cow's behind. What irks me is that fellow Canadians don't have the right to sell what they produce to whom they choose, all on the filmiest of collectivist pretences. If farmers can't sell their wheat, how safe is anyone else's right to make a living?
It's not a thought that enters most Ontarians heads much. Electorally Ontario is the kingmaker for the federal government. The CPR, the National Policy, the CWB and NEP have benefited Central Canada disproportionately. It's a sad maxim of the human condition that we only remember our rights when they are being threatened. When someone else's rights are being denied, whether a comic in BC or a farmer in Alberta, we tend to give a shrug of the shoulders. In the long run it can be a fatal indifference.
Michael Taube says that Rocco Rossi is the man to save Toronto. Even if he is a Liberal:
What makes Rossi my choice for mayor? His commitment to smaller government, fiscal prudence and protecting our municipal tax dollars.
Take Rossi's plan to sell off Toronto Hydro. This makes perfect sense.
First, there's no valid economic reason our city has to own or control a public utility.
Second, it would encourage more private-sector firms to enter the marketplace and offer competitive hydro rates. Third, Rossi estimates the sale of Toronto Hydro could generate around $2 billion – almost enough to pay off the city's hefty $2.4 billion debt, courtesy of Mayor David Miller.
Taube then highlights Rossi's other proposals, which include term limits for councillors, outsourcing for city services and professional management for the TTC. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It's not that I object to any of this, it's all perfectly sensible stuff. If Rossi was running in Mississauga he'd have a strong chance, provided Hazel McCallion wasn't on the ballot. In Toronto? Oh, dear.
The bit about professional management for the TTC, from the private sector no less, is almost too painful. He might as well call for privatizing the sidewalks, something Publius has been demanding for years. It's about as politically plausible. No disrespect to Rossi or Taube, but Toronto's productive classes are too busy producing to vote in municipal elections. So who votes? The government dependent classes. They're not going to like Rossi.
Sell Toronto Hydro? Like the Queen selling the Crown jewels, or more accurately dismissing the footmen and courtiers. Big government owned utilities are wonderful engines of patronage. Professional management at the TTC? The first thing a professional manager would do is slash wages and dismiss featherbedded employees. Which would provoke "wildcat" strikes, work to rule and general chaos. Does Rossi have Thatcherite steel? Do Torontonians? If so why is he a member of the Liberal Party? Why is he in the nowhere's land of municipal politics, which to most professional politicos is two steps above joining a condo board.
Saving Toronto will require breaking its overweening public sector unions, which function as a kind of fourth branch of municipal government. They're not interested in negotiating their surrender, which is how any sensible concession on wages and outsourcing will be seen. Public sector unions' principal interest is in extracting the maximum amount of economic rent. Is Rocco willing to rock the unions? Is he willing to fight the nastiest political war in this city's history? Against a council where at least third, probably closer to half of its members will oppose him tooth and nail? Will the voters of Toronto back him when the garbage is pilling up? When they take three hours to get to work, and another three back home? Will he fight them in the Beaches as well as in Chinatown? Let's see.
Last night’s defeat by the House of Lords of the aggressively anti-Christian provisions in Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill should not be allowed to gloss over the malevolent intent of the House of Commons in promoting this legislation. The impertinently intrusive provisions of the Bill demonstrated that the state has acquired pretensions far beyond its legitimate scope and urgently requires to be cut down to size.
The Bill attempted to force churches to employ people even if they do not lead lives consistent with the teachings of the Christian faith. On a narrow interpretation the Bill could even have compelled the Catholic Church to ordain women as priests. The Bill’s supporters want churches to employ homosexuals and transsexuals. The theology of the Catholic Church condemns homosexual practices as one of the Four Sins Crying to Heaven for Vengeance and, as with any other mortal sin, teaches that those who die unrepentant face damnation.
The point, of course, is not whether Catholic theology is sane, sensible and correct, but whether it is the role of the state to play theologian. In truth I don't have a dog in the fight between Catholic Reformers and Catholic Traditionalists. It is very much in the vein of how many angels there exist on the head of a pin. Arbitrary assertion versus arbitrary assertion. Yet if the right of association is not absolute, then so much of the rest of the undergirding of a free society goes with it.
In Canada the right of association was first seriously attacked by the Human Rights Commissions, which began by denying the right of employers and landlords to employ and rent to whom they chose. This was done, as are many things, in the name of justice and fairness. Specifically these laws were imposed to prevent discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities. Few opposed such laws, who, after all wants to defend bigots? The state has no special gateway into the human soul. Whether a man is truly a bigot, a malcontent, a fool, a saint or moral nullity is a deep enough question for the philosophers and psychologists. The bureaucrats have no inklings of it.
The state is also no wiser or more virtuous than those it governs. A society of bigots will have a government of bigots. Had HRC equivalents existed a century ago, they would have employed the intellectual fads of the time. Arguing, perhaps, that the racial hygiene of the Anglo-Saxons required that their rights be protected, by say banning immigration by non-Europeans. When the state becomes the enforcer of decency and right, rather than simply a defender of the right to be left alone, its remit becomes unlimited. We all have our ideal world. We have no right to impose it on others by force.
Note the hat at the Super Bowl half-time show (video may follow). Far better performance than one had expected, and the music still has intelligence--if not wit. May the Saints go marching in.
Update: Holy...A great football game and, until the late fourth quarter Saints' interception return for a touchdown, no turnovers that I can recall. Save perhaps for the Saints' recovered onside kick at the start of the second half which led to a touchdown. And very few penalties. They played the game, very well both teams. Did anyone really think after the first quarter that the Saints had a chance? The experts at CBS (and most everyone else including non-expert me) got it wrong.
There are moments when, very quietly but persistently, the little voice in my brain says: "Please, someone save Objectivism from the Objectivists." I've heard it often enough. Way back when I was a teenager progressing through Rand's formidable output, I heard it first. Stuff which seemed plain common sense when she wrote it, was transformed into stark nonsense when uttered by her legion of admirers. I recall, years ago, the noted Toronto columnist Robert Fulford writing a piece that was highly critical of Rand and her admirers. It was a rather disappointing piece. Its analysis summing as: Rand was an odd woman, who wrote odd books and whose admirers are equally odd. It was disappointing because I expected something a little more incisive. Fulford is a very fine and perceptive writer. Even if he finds Rand's ideas repugnant, he could have done better than a flip dismissal.
As I grew older I realized Fulford's point. It's not that I agreed with his analysis, not then and not now, but I sort of got where he was coming from. You see he had actually met Objectivists. Having met a very large number too, my own anecdotal assessment is that about three-quarters are high-functioning neurotics. Highly intelligent, quite disciplined, but utter social misfits with low self-confidence. They are walking, and sadly talking, liabilities to the philosophy. Now this will seem like an admission of guilt. Wacky people adhere to wacky ideas. Hardly. Some of the most wacky ideas in history were adhered to by perfectly ordinary and decent people. Take socialism as a modern example. Some very important ideas, like representative government, were early on advocated by people who were certifiable flakes. I don't think the wall between personal philosophy and personal psychology is an iron one. There is some overlap. Jean Jacques Rousseau, for example, was the embodiment of his beliefs. An emotional mess of a man advocating an emotional mess of a philosophy.
But new and radical philosophies tend to attract marginal people, those somehow discontented with life as it is. The early Church Fathers were unlikely to have been laugh-riots. Something very far in the flesh from, say, William F Buckley, Jr. They were misfits attracted to what was then an extreme, radical and highly subversive worldview. The type of people we today associate with kind-hearted country vicars would, in Imperial Rome, probably have been good upstanding pagans, and would have regarded Christianity as something profoundly weird and unhealthy. Only in the last decade or so has Objectivism become mainstream enough to attract a large number of "ordinary" adherents.
