It's A Confession

In the wake of Rachel Notley stepping down as leader of the Alberta NDP,  the geniuses over at National Post decided to publish an "opinion" piece that tries to lay all of Alberta's political problems at her feet. 

Besides being partisan drivel, it's interesting to go through this particular example because it's so revealing of the rhetorical acrobatics that the writer engages in to twist things to suit his particular worldview. 

First, wearing a watch - any watch - is not a statement about someone's politics and policies.  If that's your evidence for her being "woke", and "ideological", it's pretty slim pickings.  Calling a leader whose government operated to the political right of where Peter Lougheed sat "ideological" and "Marxist" is more of a confession of how far to the extreme right today's conservatism has slid since Grant Notley was alive. 

Uh yeah - here's the thing about that.  Oil patch executives ASKED for Tzeporah German to be part of the panel.  So, if that was a "provocation", it was only a "provocation" to Alberta's political conservatives.  Considering the hundreds of thousands that the UCP has thrown at people who have led their various faux-consultation panels since 2019, the $20,000 or so that Tzeporah Berman took home seems like a pittance. 

Ah yes, the requisite whine about Bill 6 - and misrepresentation of it Bill 6 that the conservatives have used as a bludgeon since day one to rile up rural Alberta followers.  Bill 6 was intended to address one key thing about farming:  workplace injuries.  Period.  Alberta is decades behind other provinces in recognizing that farm workers are disproportionately affected by workplace injuries, and leaves those workers without any kind of coverage for recovery.  The claim is made that this is about "families" - it's not.  The family farm is a cutesy little myth that conservatives trot out when it's convenient, but then they ignore the "corporate factory farm" model that dominates today's agricultural world.  A world where the people working the land are employees, and unlike other heavy industries, those employees have between few and no protections if working conditions are unsafe. 

So, yeah, real divisive there.  The divisiveness was sown by, and fed, by the conservatives who jumped on it to spread fear among rural Albertans that the government was coming to take away their lifestyle.  

That was a scorched earth campaign?  Wow - did you pay attention to the 4 year long rage campaign that Kenney and the nascent UCP conducted starting in 2015?  The one where everything the NDP ever said or did was attacked no matter what it was?  

Yeah, I don't think the divisiveness was the NDP here.  Again, the conservatives chose the path of anger, rage, and fear mongering.  Alberta sees the consequences of this every day, whether it is the regular outbursts from the idiot Convoy organizers, or the closed arrogance of a UCP government that has chosen a "burn it all down" approach to governing. 

Alberta spent decades voting as if it were some kind of political monolith.  That wasn't democracy - it was single party rule, and that party got pretty rotten over the years.  It took decades for Albertans to even notice.  Healthy democracy lives not by unity of ideas, but by a willingness to see the ideas that differ from your own as valid and worthy.  Conservatives have eschewed that in Canada, becoming increasingly insular and closed-door, only saying what they think will get them elected in public. Other approaches to politics and governance are sneered at and derided.  

The UCP is moving to isolate Alberta from the rest of Canada, against the wishes of the vast majority of its population on matters like the CPP.  And we're supposed to believe that somehow or another this is all about Rachel Notley?  Wow. 

For National Post and its writers to claim that "it's the NDP's fault" is laughably silly.  

Corcoran Misses The Point On Income Disparity

On CBC's "The House" this weekend, I heard an interview with the Financial Post's Terrance Corcoran, in which he was basically poo-pooing the very real issue of the growing disparity between Canada's top earners and the rest of Canadians.  He made a comparison between a pensioner pulling in $20,000 a year and an executive making $190,000 and said "who cares?" - a statement which trivialized the entire discussion and leftA little digging this morning, and I find that he has more or less made the same points in one of his FP editorials.

If Canadians actually seriously look at the income data instead of following instant Occupy interpretation in much of the media they might end up feeling pretty good about income distribution in Canada.  The Canadians within the top 1% cover a wide cross-section of professions and occupations.  Almost 70% of the 1% have univeristy educations, as does 50% of the top 10% of income earners.

The lesson:  Getting the right higher education pays.

How generous of Mr. Corcoran to patronize us with the old saw about higher education.  Education is important, but it is far from the entirety of the story. I do note that he turns the knife with an extra twist by adding that it has to be "the right" higher education.  Presumably, like most of the far right in this country, Corcoran is among those who believe that the only degrees which matter are the so-called "useful" degrees:  Business, Engineering, and so on.  "Lesser degrees" like English, Philosophy and so on don't count.

That's not the Occupy idea, which is that inequality is a function of a corrupt 1% populated by system manipulating, fat-cat bankers, investment executives and Wall Street/Bay Street corporate gougers who are skimming massive bonuses out of semi-corrupt boards of directors ... 

Having sat close enough to the executive suite in my own career, watching a company grow from a modest size to being part of a frighteningly huge organization, I have seen first-hand the way that decisions get made.  A smaller organization's leadership is closer to the day to day business problems and is capable of responding to them appropriately - balancing both financial and human factors appropriately.  At a certain size, things become entirely abstract in the boardroom, and the business' leadership is dealing not with people and clients but all the executive sees are numbers.  People become numbers, salaries are numbers, and profits are numbers ... so are the bonuses.

When business starts looking at its people as "expenses", rather than as assets, things go seriously awry.  We are seeing this in the service industry today - companies like Wal-Mart, Loblaws, Sobey's are all cutting staff and wages to the point where getting service in their stores is next to impossible.  (The Sobey's near me has had seriously empty shelves in the produce area on Saturdays quite frequently, and their shelves are often half empty in the rest of the store)  There are explicit policies in companies like Wal-Mart which are designed to cap a worker's hours to limit the company's "wage expenses".

These are very real problems.  Worse, they are symptomatic of a malaise that reaches much further than the service industry jobs (which are often the entry level jobs for so many beginning their working careers).  In higher paying, professional companies, there are similar games going on which are designed at their core to tie the worker to the company and its fortunes.  I've written quite a lot on this subject on this blog under the label of Corporate Feudalism.  Make no mistake about it, the whole "outsourcing" game of sending jobs overseas where wages are cheaper and laws are more lax about how employees can be treated is another dimension of the same evil - and it's an approach to business that is similar, only it ends up affecting higher paid, professionals such as IT specialists.

What Mr. Corcoran, sitting comfortably in his high chair at the Financial Post is misconstruing about the "Occupy" movement and its offshoots (or unions come to that) is that they are really about the growing exploitation of the lower income earners by the top income earners.  It is about the sociopathy of large corporations and their boards which are so abstracted from the people that their decisions affect that they make increasingly abusive decisions.

Income disparity is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself.

That Would Be No Loss

So...CanWest is threatening to shut down the National Post.

Somehow, for a paper that has focused more on being partisan than doing actual journalism, I just don't feel like there's much of a loss involved here.

National Post was started because Conrad Black had a snit with Jean Chretien - it wasn't started because the country needed - or would benefit from - another newspaper. It was started to foment a campaign against the governing party. When the Aspers acquired it (as Conrad Black's empire was crumbling), they proceeded to drive the whole thing off the deep end of partisan extremism.

If ... and I think it's a remote if right now ... CanWest does shut down the NP, we will have simply lost another media source that overplayed its hand - not unlike the former "Alberta Report" publication which tried to go national.

More Conservative Chicanery

It's not like these allegations come as any surprise. After tossing MP Bill Casey out of caucus, the Con$ descended into character assassination in a bid to prevent him from being re-elected.

I find it interesting that both the CBC and The Globe and Mail actually carried this story, but it's suspiciously absent from the pages of the National Post - probably the best indication that there's more than a touch of veracity to the story. I'm sure if we had access to the telephone records for the National Post - and I'll bet that as soon as this broke, the phone lines in the National Post were being lit up by calls from CPoC headquarters telling them what to publish.

One hint to the keepers of the National Post - quit playing Faux News to the Canadian Con$, and start doing real journalism. You might actually sell something.