Pay to Go Politics in YYC

So, yesterday there was an "all candidates forum" sponsored by The Calgary Chamber of Commerce, the Urban Development Institute - Calgary and The Canadian Homebuilders Association - Calgary Region.

I did not attend this forum - for several reasons.  We already know that the developer community (or at least notable cabal within that group) have a "bone to pick" with the incumbent city council, and would dearly like to make things more "developer friendly" in the future.  They are entitled to that opinion and to advocate for it.  I have enormous problems with the obvious attempt to sponsor a slate of candidates trained by the right-wing Manning Centre - but that is because I object on general principals to the obvious play of partisan politics that smacks of.

However, there is a little nugget about last night's forum that I want to bring to your attention:

That's right - they are charging $25+GST / head ($26.25) for people to hear what candidates have to say.  If there is one thing that makes me angry, it is this notion that during an election, voters should have to fork out money to hear what the Candidates running to represent them have to say.

I'm sure that the sponsors would all wring their hands and talk about "cost recovery" and so on.  I have news for you - what you did by making that a "pay to attend" event is you immediately placed a price on information during an election.  Screw you.

The manufactured outrage that you have been fostering in this election campaign is revolting, and it is clear that you are only interested in talking to those willing to let you influence them with your propaganda.  Ever since the 2010 election, the right wing in this city has been on an anger-fest over Mayor Nenshi.  Big money lost that election, and they are trying to manufacture outrage to overturn Nenshi - or at least get enough of "their people" on council to make Nenshi's life hell for the next four years.

The UDI put out the following in a brochure at the start of the election:

UDI - Calgary calls on all 2013 municipal candidates to:
1. ACKNOWLEDGE the ongoing need for a strategic, innovative, and collaborative approach to managing growth in Calgary.
2. RECOGNIZE Calgary for what it is, as well as for what it was designed for - a UniCity with room for growth within City boundaries.
3. DEMONSTRATE leadership in putting Calgarians first when working to balance municipal fiscal capacity and control with business certainty and consumer demand. 

What this boils down to is that the developers in this city want to keep their business model as it is.  Why?  Simply because it is easy for them.  They know they can make money developing this way.  The rest of us have to live with the results.

If I were running any of those firms, I would be looking at changing the business model to adapt to the inevitable changes that are coming.  Calgary cannot be allowed to sprawl indefinitely for the next fifty years.  Doing so is unsustainable on so many levels it isn't funny.

We saw that when the initial builds for Douglasdale, Mackenzie, Mackenzie Towne caused traffic lights to be installed on Deerfoot Trail.  Possibly the dumbest decision ever made, but one made out of expediency.  Deerfoot is already running over capacity, even with all the lights removed, after a decade of construction projects to replace controlled intersections with interchanges.  ... and that is just the infrastructure that we can see.  The miles of water, wastewater, gas and electrical infrastructure that have to be installed in subdivisions is huge, and that means upgrades to sewage treatment facilities, the pipelines that feed them, new reservoirs for water (anybody else notice that Calgary is fairly arid most of the time?), generation capacity for electricity and so on.  We can't seem to keep up with the infrastructure problems we have now (there are roads in my home community that are crumbling and should have been replaced years ago)  Public transit in Calgary is a bad joke.  If you live east of the Deerfoot in south Calgary, it's even worse.

Calgary is growing.  There can be no mistake about that.  We need to find ways to grow that are more practical than simply spreading out indefinitely.  I may live in a suburb today, but I have long since recognized that the psychology of the suburb is rapidly becoming non-viable.  We need to change how we build this city.  Continuing to do what we are doing today will simply exacerbate the problems that are already brewing.

The developers are trying to protect their business model - and they don't give a damn about the long term problems that they are creating.  As a Calgarian, I want something better than that for the generations to come.  More of the same isn't it.

Calgary Sun Plays The Racist Card ...

It's never been a big secret that lurking just underneath the surface of Canada's right wing politics is a religiously-inspired vein of racism.  It reared its head back in the late 1980s when the debate over turbans in the RCMP was at full volume, and the Reform Party voted to ban turbans as part of the RCMP uniform, and frankly has never really gone away.

In the Calgary Sun today, we find a column decrying the alleged silence over various attacks on Christians in the Muslim world.

More or less, the reasoning in the column seems to be that the world community is being "silent" about these attacks, and is somehow being hypocritical about it.

A church is bombed in Pakistan and 85 people are killed while more than 140 more are maimed. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility. 

Violence and civil unrest rocks Damascus and Aleppo, forcing Syrian churches to close their doors, possibly forever. 

Thousands of elite Philippine troops battle Muslim guerrillas of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) who raze churches before they occupy the key port of Zamboanga. 

Christians in the southern Egyptian town of Dalga are forced to watch as a Muslim mob set fire to an ancient monastery and steal its contents. 

All played out against the backdrop of a shopping mall terror attack in Kenya where Muslims are asked to leave before hostages are taken.

The implicit message underlying all of this is that Islam is a "violent religion" bent on erasing Christianity from the face of the earth ... and why, oh why, isn't the world's political leadership speaking out on this?

According to the column's writer, it's because they are afraid of the Muslims:

As long as our ruling elites remain terrified of offending Islam, the self-proclaimed religion of peace that claims sole ownership of the term ‘persecuted minority,’ the fundamentalists will do as they please.

But, it is not so simple as that in reality.  Yes, as the article points out Canada has spoken out on such matters.  What the article fails to recognize is that such statements will have no effect whatsoever.  The radicals which carry out these acts are not themselves governments, and do not care one whit what governments have to say about it.

The only "threat" that we can make to them is a full scale invasion to eradicate the extremists.  Except that anyone with their head out of the sand will have long ago recognized that such approaches don't work.  Western powers have spent the last decade and a bit cleaning up the mess made in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as many had predicted prior to the invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, the radicals had simply gone to ground at the height of the hostilities, and are now quietly re-emerging from the shadows to assert their claims to power again.

But, underlying the column is the usual line of xenophobia about a religion and culture that frankly most people in the western countries simply do not understand.  We're supposed to be afraid of these people because of their religion, instead of the fact that they have organized themselves into what amount to paramilitary gangs like al-Shabab.

Canada is a uniquely peaceable country.  I'm not sure what it would take to provoke the kind of rioting that we have witnessed in Egypt, nor do I particularly want to find out.   That makes it all the more puzzling when we see the kinds of rioting on TV news that has resulted in churches being burned down.  We have space here - lots of it.  What provokes a mob to attack a monastery?  Who knows - perhaps when this land has been occupied by competing powers for a few millennia we will have a more direct understanding.  Many of those religious sites in the Middle East have belonged to different faith communities multiple times, and there are competing claims for the same location.

So ... why is the Sun publishing columns which simply repeat tired, old arguments about the "evils" of a particular faith?  Largely because they can.  It's easy, and it plays to the fears that the Reform/Alliance/Conservative parties have used to build up their base.  There's no secret that the Sun has become the unofficial mouthpiece of the CPC in Canada, saying the things which the base wants to hear, but that Harper doesn't dare allow to be uttered by his politicians.  There is a good reason for this. Fear is a powerful weapon in politics.  Bush II demonstrated that in spades.  The poorly understood, like cultures in far off lands, are prime targets for "othering" - painting in a particular light that seems reasonable until you start asking prickly questions about things.

Why now?   That's a bit more of a puzzle.  It's not like there's anything going on in Canada that justifies this kind of ignorance based attack ... or is there?  In Calgary right now, we are in the throes of a municipal election, and the incumbent mayor is a Muslim.  Make no mistake about it, the Sun and their far right power masters, have been supremely angry ever since Naheed Nenshi was elected in 2010.  They have made no secret of their desire to get rid of him.  If they can chisel away at his support a little bit by calling into question him by way of their characterization of his faith, they will.