This past year has seen failures of government around the globe. In Greece, Italy, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Canada, and the United States, austerity budgets have been doled out by governments while corporate profits have hit record-breaking highs. The tax-paying citizenry has not failed to notice. Despite persistent, vocal, and widespread protests, governments ostensibly for and of the people have failed to respond in the people’s clearly stated interest. Instead, governments have opted to “stimulate” and support the very economies responsible for these conditions, and they are wrongly imposing austerity measures on their populations to compensate.

In a different incarnation, similar governmental failures are present in Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Iran, China, Thailand… Oppressive regimes have done little to relieve widespread poverty while crushing dissent and paving the way for a small few to accumulate extraordinary wealth and power. Again, the citizenry has not failed to notice. Uprisings and protests have done little to evoke meaningful change, and in some cases, have provoked murderous retaliation.

Now we are watching as Japan – a country with the most dazzling design and technical artistry – is suffering nuclear fallout. Only months earlier, its technological kin in the West, the great United States, had an entire coastline destroyed by an offshore oil leak. Both calamities could easily have been avoided if the governments of these modern “democracies” prioritized the safety, health, prosperity, and happiness of the people they serve rather than facilitating the piling of heaps of cash by a select few.

What is happening the world over is – as the 50,000 participant’s in Montreal’s March 12 demonstrated – “a question of choice.” Any fool can do the simple math required to understand that if we want a society with appropriate funding to do things right: proper safeguards on energy facilities, schools that teach everybody well, responsible industrial development that gives people opportunity for fulfilling employment and protects the environment that sustains our existence, hospitals that treat all comers, et cetera – we cannot simultaneously allow a tiny number of people to horde money. There really is enough to go around, if we have the will to ensure it is indeed redistributed equitably.

It is abundantly clear that the powers that be are not capable of making the decisions necessary to secure the well being of their citizens. This is either because they lack the intestinal fortitude required to take on the big bullies that pull the purse strings, or because they are those big bullies. Regardless, they aren’t what “Johanne the plumber” needs from government.

What irks me the most about this whole charade of governing “for the people,” is not that the purpose is corrupted. That goes without saying. It’s that these charlatans go so far as to tell us that the fundamental flaw of the economies they implement is, in fact, a feature: “you too can become filthy rich,” “you too can be the President one day,” “you too can dance with the stars.” This simply isn’t true. It is not possible for everybody to have excessive levels of wealth or power, but it is possible for all of us to have more than enough. We need governments that will end excessive accumulation of capital and excessive profits so that everybody can share in the wealth we all contribute to generating. Until we force them to make that choice, our governments will continue to aid and abet the liquidation of the public trust, in both its political and financial incarnations. ο

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As far back as the age of eight, I remember having whole afternoons dedicated to sexual education at my elementary school in la belle province. As boring as it was at times, we were introduced to reproductive biology by specially trained educators. By the end of elementary school, sexual education actually taught us about sex, and the changes we were going through were explained plainly and clearly. We were given instruction about the pleasures we could derive from our bodies in both solo and partnered sexual activity. We were taught not to judge the sexual preferences of our peers. The dots were connected between pleasure, reproductive biology, and the pubescent transformations we were experiencing. And of course, it was repeatedly explained how to avoid STIs, and how to plan pregnancy. All of this by the age of 12.

In high school, things took an edgier turn. Our government, understanding that teen sex happens regardless of puritanical beliefs that it shouldn’t, periodically sent well-trained sex educators to engage us in open conversations about sex. They created an environment where the most bizarre questions were welcomed and answered: “No, a woman can’t get pregnant by shaking hands after you’ve masturbated.” We even had the luxury of being herded into our auditorium to listen to people like Sue Johanson discuss in plain English our genitals, orgasms, masturbation, sexual positions – all the things nobody else talked about. Some of the videos we were made to watch about how to use a condom still make me laugh: my favourite featured a wooden penis with a big smile named – wait for it – Woody.

But when MELS decided it needed to make itself appear more useful, it implemented sweeping changes to the way we perform elementary and high school education. Many of the changes were controversial, and education professionals are still quite polarized in their opinions of them. Some of the changes, however, are unambiguously stupid. Eliminating specific requirements for dedicated sexual education is certainly one of them. Now, it is simply up to a particular teacher to decide if they want to talk sex. Most don’t, and even when they do, they aren’t trained to do it right.

I have a number of friends who teach high school and were around both before and after the reform. All are reporting that when they choose to talk about sex, they now discover that their pupils are awkward, shy, and silent, or vocally ignorant and inappropriate. A friend who teaches English recently told me that when she broached the topics of pregnancy and STIs, she was shocked to discover that more than half her class was readily convinced that if you avoid insemination by not ejaculating in a woman, you also avoid all STIs! None of her grade nine students had been instructed about prophylactics of any kind. She probed further and discovered that although many of her students were sexually active, they had never been instructed about how to have sex. One of her female pupils described having regular sex, but neither her nor her partner had ever taken their clothes off: they didn’t know that was normal, and the girl had no idea that she could experience pleasure, let alone an orgasm. Forget any notion of intimacy.

This is a modern tragedy. Childhood and adolescent sexual health education is a must if we want a society that practices safe and fulfilling sex, and plans reproduction responsibly. Although we expend a great deal of energy analyzing the abundant and growing problems with our post-secondary education system, we often do so while taking quality elementary and high school education for granted. But bad policy decisions are everywhere. We need to look at our education system holistically, because we are now failing to succeed in the most basic forms of teaching, including the development of awareness and understanding of our own bodies. ο

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There is a whole lot wrong with the entire premise of snow plowing. Canada spends about $1 billion per year largely clearing the way for cars. In Montreal alone, it’s an annual average of $145 million. Most of that is spent making it easier for 1.3 million cars to circulate through Montreal’s streets every day. In the long run, it would be nice to get rid of most car traffic in the city, but until that day never comes, it’s a losing battle for pedestrians and cyclists who are left to navigate mountains of snow and lakes of slush created as the way is cleared for their vehicular enemy. The way we plow continues to support the primacy of the motor vehicle over all other forms of transportation.

The cars aren’t without complaint either. As the city of Montreal’s Snow Removal 101 website gladly informs us, snow removal occurs in four phases, only one of which is actually removal. Until then, snow is simply pushed to the sides of roads and sidewalks so traffic can flow. Woe to you who might be parked – you are likely to find yourself digging out of a snowbank. If not, then you’ve probably parked long enough to be towed in the process, and were the unhappy recipient of a $117 ticket.

Pollution is a problem too. In the name of fuel efficiency, the more than 2,500 machines performing Montreal’s snow removal are exempt from strict emissions regulations. The “melters” (largely salt) used to thaw ice and snow can contaminate fresh water and soil.

On top of all this, almost every year, a few people are put to pasture by snow plows – some of the accidents are gruesome, and most Montreal pedestrians have likely had a brush with death at the hands of some kind of deadly snow removing contraption.

Last but not least is the wide variety of property damage that plowing creates. In that category, the favourite perennial complaint is the pothole: the more and better our plowing, the deeper and deadlier are our famous craters.

Despite its many shortcomings, snow removal is, to some degree, a necessary public service, and we do it exceptionally well. I was recently in the Netherlands and it was pandemonium after only a few centimetres fell. The country’s traffic was crippled for days. They were so unprepared that they ran out of salt and the country’s roads turned into skating rinks. Even the militant bicycling culture was sidelined. When I tried to relay to my relatives how absurd this seems to a Canadian because we have such breathtaking plowing, they had no idea what I was talking about.

So, I’d like to nominate our snow removal for addition to the list of things Canadians brag about to the world. Because our previously world famous social systems – health care and education, in particular – are being systematically dismantled and privatized, I’m not satisfied that all we’re left with is hockey, Tim Horton’s, beavers, politeness, our shitty climate, and not being American.

We need a solid public service on that list. Since the automobile and oil and gas industries evidently aren’t going anywhere, and climate change only seems to be making our winters more erratic, I bet our remarkable snow removal will be around for the long haul. So let’s secure our place as the goofy, backwards north, and start bragging about how we kick winter’s ass with remarkable speed and efficiency by pouring money into snowbanks instead of, well, everything else. We certainly don’t have much else to show the world at the moment. ο

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The government’s coffers are bare for three main reasons: mismanagement, corruption, and tax policy. First, there is near parity between the number of managers and administrators (100,000), and the number of actual health care providers (108,000 nurses, doctors, orderlies, therapists, et cetera) in our health care system – just one example of poor management. Second, it costs about 30 per cent more to build a road in Quebec than it does anywhere else in Canada – a perfect example of corruption. Finally, we have gone from over twenty income tax brackets to three, and we have the lowest corporate taxes in North America.

One would think that with the hundreds of millions spent on managers and bureaucrats, the hundreds of millions overspent on infrastructure, and the billions in amazing tax breaks for industry, that Quebec would be the economic engine of Canada. But it isn’t. In terms of per capita GDP, Quebec is the seventh-best province in Canada.

God help me for using this terminology, but the “neoliberal” experiment has clearly failed: the “emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.” Yet, the government persists with its present course, and worse, it is ramping up the rhetoric of specialization, privatization, and divestment of social programs. These are the final steps in dismantling our public social systems – those intended to make us all a bit more equal in this gloomy world. Why? Because the government isn’t interested in the “common good,” it is interested in the wealth accumulation of the small fraction of our population that constitutes the “upper class.”

If we want to maintain a social and civilized society, one where the sick are healed, the poor are fed, clothed, and sheltered, and all have access to education, we need to make some choices about what our government is supposed to be doing, and who we want running that government. We cannot continue to allow the same people who benefit from mismanagement, corruption, and tax breaks to set policy. We need a new government and we need to revitalize what we believe our social contract is.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. The facts are well documented, often by the government itself, which makes no attempt to hide its actions. It does, however, attempt to mislead the public in two very important ways. First, it cites demographic changes, economic hardship, and increasing demand on social programs as the cause of its financial problems. Then it pretends that its proposed solution – selling them off – is the only and obvious response to its financial woes. Make no mistake about it, this is a plan that is ideologically driven; it has little to do with economic and demographic pressures, and a lot to do with specific choices designed to sequester the wealth and resources of our society to a limited number of people. We are in the final stages of the plan’s execution.

The true modus operandi of the current regime is the privatization of social programs so that the wealthy don’t have to pay for them, and instead can profit by replacing the government as their providers. These are the same people that received the benefits of the mismanagement, corruption, and lower taxes which have made that privatization appear to be necessary.
What we really need to do for the benefit of our society is to: 1) slash our expenditures on failed corporate-style management of public programs; 2) make serious efforts to reign in the widespread corruption in our government and “public” service; and 3) reinstate the taxation of excessive income, profits, and capital accumulation.

The government has made it abundantly clear that it is no longer in the business of ensuring universally accessible services and support to its citizens. In its next budget, the government is planning to cap health care and education spending and to increase income tax breaks. While divesting from social spending, the deficit created by income (corporate and personal) tax breaks will be reduced by doing the opposite: raising tuition rates, consumption-based taxes, electricity rates, and user fees for access to social programs and services.

We also know that the government has refused to investigate rampant industrial corruption, all the while promising to increase “public-private partnerships” for the provision of education and health care. All of these measures are well studied. We know exactly what they accomplish: they disadvantage the poorest members of our society while topping-up the bank accounts of those who are already quite wealthy. Enough is enough.

At  noon on March 12, concerned citizens and public actors from across the province will be converging on Montreal’s Place du Canada (At René-Levesque and Peel) to protest our government’s plans. This protest is supported by the province’s largest labour unions and student federations, as well as over 115 community and social groups. Combined, these organizations represent over 1.25 million Quebeckers, including all of the students at McGill. The protest is expected to be huge, drawing up to 100,000 participants, and we should all be there. Please take a few hours out of your day and come help demand an equitable and rational society that supports us, its citizens. o

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According to the World Health Organization, more than a billion people don’t have access to drinking water. As the global population grows, the problem worsens, and it is compounded by the creeping privatization of the world’s fresh water supply. The bottled water industry is a huge part of the problem, and it’s still growing.

The Polaris Institute puts it simply: “The marketing of bottled water, which the industry claims is a healthier, purer, and more convenient product, has led to a distrust of public tap water systems.” Not only is this bunk, the marketing strategy “sets the stage for water privatization.” The nature of the multinationals spearheading these initiatives means that our local consumption has global impact.

According to Food and Water Watch, “Despite the marketing, bottled water is not safer than tap water.” An independent test of ten types of bottled water found that they “contained 38 chemical pollutants, with an average of eight contaminants in each brand.” In fact, when bottled water is found to be clean it often comes from municipal tap water. Unlike bottled water sources, tap water is usually tested for pollutants on a daily basis.

In terms of consumption of bottled water, Canada was ranked 37th in the world in 2004. However, according to Statistics Canada, between 1998 and 2006, the bottled water industry has been growing by an average of about 5 per cent per year. But that growth rate is increasing: between 2005 and 2006, the increase in consumption was 18.1 per cent, to almost 2.2 billion litres, with an estimated production value of $708 million.

Although Infrastructure Canada claims we have “more than one-quarter of the world’s freshwater reserves,” paradoxically Statistics Canada reports that in 2006, our imports of bottled water began exceeding our exports. We are engaged in the global water trade by both exporting our water in bulk and importing the water of other nations. In the meantime, our water supply infrastructure is decaying.

So what’s the problem? According to Polaris, increased consumption of bottled water distracts from the need from the increased investment in safe public water services, ultimately “transferring public service costs over to the private sector.” This phenomenon is not restricted to “Banana Republics;” it’s happening right here in Canada.

Our government is systematically offloading to private industry its responsibility to provide clean water to us. In a 2006 letter, Maude Barlow, currently the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, wrote that the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board invested $1 billion into Anglican Water, “one of the world’s largest private water companies,” and our government consistently opposes recognizing water as a human right.

This position, and its corollary – that water can and should be subject to privatization – is not only allowing Canada to help privatize and usurp foreign water supplies, it’s also destroying our domestic supply infrastructure. According to the Council of Canadians, “Decades of cuts in infrastructure funding, coupled with the downloading of several programs and services to municipal governments, have resulted in a ‘municipal infrastructure deficit,’ … [leaving communities] in desperate need of money to pay for water pipes and filtration systems.”

For Canadian students attending publicly funded educational institutions, the proof surrounds us. A 2008 survey by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Canadian Union of Public Employees and the Polaris Institute entitled, Corporate Initiatives on Campus: A 2008 Snapshot, paints the picture. While more than 90 per cent of respondents have reported that their campus has an exclusivity contract with Coke or Pepsi, they also report that water fountains are being removed, left unrepaired, blocked by vending machines, and not installed in new buildings. Cold water taps are also being taken out of washrooms.

This is serious: we’re talking about losing access to one of the most important substances on Earth. So, when you see organizing on campus that is asking you to stop buying bottled water, to demand access to drinkable tap water, or to oppose exclusivity contracts with beverage companies, don’t scoff – lend a hand. As an added bonus, remember this: safe, publicly sourced tap water costs one one-thousandth of poorly regulated, often contaminated bottled water.

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The World Health Organization estimates that “about 2.6 billion people … lack even a simple ‘improved’ latrine and 1.1 billion people have no access to any type of improved drinking source of water.” According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 925 million people are “undernourished.” The resulting annual rates of disease and death are in the millions, largely affecting children.

In January of this year, the FAO reported that “world food prices surged to a new historic peak … [which] clearly show[s] that the upward pressure on world food prices is not abating.” This is despite a massive surge in investment in global agribusiness. For instance, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a World Bank group, “has made [the global] agribusiness a priority … combin[ing] investments and advisory services to help the private sector address higher demand and escalating food prices in an environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive way.” Bullshit.

Between 2000 and 2009, the IFC increased its annual investments “across the agribusiness supply chain” by approximately 670 per cent, to $2 billion. So why are the practices of global agribusiness investors making the world, on the whole, hungrier? The privatization, globalization, and deregulation of the world’s food supply chain and food trade “from farm to fork,” means that pressure from the excessive consumptive demands of rich foreign markets, such as ours, drives the price of food out of the reach of the poor local populations where investments in food production are made.
The story doesn’t end there. When poor countries develop major economic problems and ask for our help, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization take the opportunity to hoodwink them. We promise to rescue and “develop” floundering economies through loans. These are contingent upon risk management in the form of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) and bilateral trade agreements. These are Trojan horses.

Essentially, we assess a country’s resources, and in return for “investment,” require them to restructure their economy. This typically involves large foreign corporations gaining the right to harvest a country’s resources, and to turn the country into a production engine of goods for trade in the global market. Increases in gross domestic product (GDP) are meant to trickle down to the local population, but because the corporations are foreign-owned, so are most of the profits. Promised local development and wealth generation never happens, quite the opposite.

When this restructuring is applied to agriculture, the situation is even worse. A 1997 article in Culture and Agriculture puts it plainly: “Despite the growth in the GDP, structural adjustment does not appear of much help to the agricultural sector. In theory, devaluation, by lowering the relative price of farm commodities on the international market, should make a country’s agricultural exports more competitive. However, it is by no means certain that increased exports compensate for the loss of purchasing power of a cheaper currency.” After this required restructuring, poor countries can’t even afford to buy the food they are forced to produce.

Because local governments accept SAPs under extreme duress, appropriate industrial and labour regulations are never put into place. Local firms, in this case farms, are forced out of business. Populations are displaced as enormous swaths of traditionally managed land are converted into factory farms. Our companies loot and pillage with abandon, often resulting in ecological and social disasters that ultimately deepen the crises these companies were supposed to help relieve.

On top of all this, the implementation of poorly-planned factory farming can destroy their local environment. Arable land is exploited to the point of infertility. Irrigation systems are not properly developed, and coupled with abusive use of pesticides and fertilizers, local water systems become deeply damaged, which can devastate the ecosystems they support.
While globalization and privatization of the world’s food supply might be great for the bottom line of large companies headquartered in the well-fed developed world, they are also starving the developing world.

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To be continued next week with “The World’s Water.”

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According to the National Council of Welfare, “benefits” for a single Quebecker classified as “employable” were $7,312 per year in 2009. Statistics Canada pegs Quebec’s 2009 minimum wage at $9 per hour, and its average wage at $20.80. A family friend and former partner at a big law firm used to bill out at $625 per hour. For argument’s sake, let’s pretend that’s a gross hourly wage. Using a basic tax calculator, and assuming a fifty-week work year at 35 hours per week, we can estimate the after-tax hourly wages for all these Quebeckers: welfare, $4.18; minimum wage, $8.16; average wage, $16.59; big shot lawyer, $332.85.

Now let’s take a quick look at the globe. The World Bank’s 2008 data indicates 14 per cent of the world “lives” on less than $1 per day (ultra poor), and 80 per cent on less than $10 per day (very poor). Assuming those are net income figures, hourly wages based on our standard work day are $0.21 and $2.09 for the ultra poor and very poor, respectively (weirdness is due to rounding to whole pennies).

Given that the price of an iPhone is just about globally constant, at our standardized net hourly wages and work week, how much time would it take each of our earners to work their way into an iPhone if it costs say, $650? It would take the lawyer almost two full hours of work, the average employed Quebecker a bit more than one work week, the minimum wager almost 2.3 weeks, the welfare recipient about 4.5 weeks, the very poor nearly 9 work weeks, and the ultra poor 1.8 work years. Remember, though, that we’re talking 100 per cent of what these people earn in the listed time. That is, the ultra poor would have to survive almost two years with absolutely nothing but the promise of an iPhone.

One of the key pieces of rhetoric surrounding the idea of “globalization” and “globalized capitalism” is that we can raise the world’s standard of living to our standard. Does this make sense? Let’s assume that it’s reasonable for the average Quebecker to sacrifice an entire week of salary for an iPhone – she can live fine on the remaining 49 weeks of salary. If a very poor person was to sacrifice the same one week per year in to acquire an iPhone, it would take almost nine years of saving to make the mark.

If a globalized “free market” were to remedy this disparity (which you will notice, it has not managed to do) we would expect both wages and the price of the iPhone to change. With a few conservative assumptions, the World Bank’s claim that about five per cent of the world earns the same or more than the average Quebecker, and a bit of arithmetic, all would be fair if both the world’s very poor and the average Quebecker earned about $3.30 per hour, and the iPhone cost about $115.

Now here’s the rub: let’s assume that the roughly 60 million iPhone sales since 2007 came from that five per cent of the world’s rich. Let’s assume further that the same proportion of iPhones get sold to our 5.15 billion nouveau riche as were sold to the original rich. That’s over one billion more iPhones, and we haven’t finished bringing the other 15 per cent of the population up to speed.

Uh oh… what happens when they want no-foam lattes, furniture from Ikea, and a Prius too? Looks like planet Earth is going to run out of stuff mighty fast.

This brings me to an actual point: the developed world has deemed acceptable and normalized what, from a global vantage point, is conspicuous over-consumption by “average” people. It is undeniable that we have maintained our level of consumption by brutally exploiting and oppressing the developing world – if we didn’t, the planet would be out of stuff, plain and simple.

Our culture systematically conflates both “quality of life” and “standard of living” with capacity to consume. Worse, we are justifying our global piracy by deluding ourselves that we can bring our “standard of living” to the rest of the world. If we succeed in globalizing our culture and logic of consumption, we will necessarily destroy our planet. Something’s gotta give. Perhaps we can start by concentrating on the idea that “the best things in life aren’t things.” Ironically, I saw that quote on a bumper sticker.

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Admissions criteria pretend to filter out those who are deemed a priori not to have the capacities to complete a program of study. The criteria might seem reasonable on their face, but do they actually select correctly?

How did admissions criteria arise? Faced with limited capacity, academic institutions developed criteria to select applicants to whom places in programs of study would be awarded. These criteria, however, are arbitrary. In almost all cases, admission to post-secondary education (PSE) programs depends most heavily on final secondary school grades. However, study after study re-confirms that secondary school grades and standardized testing such as the SATs are little better than a flip of a coin at predicting PSE success.

There are two very important implications, then, of using grades and test scores to regulate admissions. First, students with low test scores might be prejudicially barred access to PSE. Second, given the repeatedly demonstrated fact that better standardized test scores, and to a lesser extent school grades, are correlated to socio-economic status, using these as selection criteria shifts these little better than random selection criteria from the general pool of applicants into the wealthy pool. The same socio-economic status differentiation likely applies to admission criteria such as interviews, where the well coached and “put together” outperform their less polished, “DIY” counterparts.

How then might administrators come to sensible and less arbitrary admissions decisions? The answer might be fairly simple: intentionally and systematically violate each admissions criterion for a percentage of admitted applicants. The idea is to see if those that don’t meet a criterion might succeed were they nevertheless admitted. There are two possible outcomes. An admissions criterion might turn out to be virtually useless. Alternatively, we might better quantify how individual criteria should factor into admission decisions – that is, how good or bad of a predictor of “success” the criterion is, and what impact it should have on applicant ranking.

This idea was tested in the sixties and seventies at Williams College in Massachusetts. Over a ten-year double-blind experiment, ten per cent of admissions were drawn from applicants that failed to meet the college’s grade and test score criteria. The result: 71 per cent of those admitted in flagrante still graduated, down only 14 per cent from the college’s overall average. Seems like they were very much onto something.

As it turns out, this principle is used in an engineering field called system identification: when faced with a “black box” – a system whose internal workings you can’t figure out – you can still develop accurate predictions of how it will respond to inputs by injecting it with random inputs (a.k.a. “noise”) and seeing how it responds. In fact, applying this technique to what are thought to be well-characterized systems sometimes elicits output from a system that theretofore you had no idea was possible.

Why not treat our PSE system with similar analytical rigour? One might argue that it isn’t fair to exclude in the name of social experimentation a few people from their “rightful” spot based on current admissions criteria. But if the criteria are flawed, then they may have been unfairly excluding others from a prized gift for decades, and that situation is what the evidence points to.

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2010 was particularly bad for my friends and family. Untreated, growing, and ultimately debilitating paranoia, anxiety, and depression caused a close friend to drop out of graduate school. His rapid deterioration led his wife to abandon him, taking their newborn child with her.

Two years into their relationship, the girlfriend of my 22-year-old roommate cheated on him with his best friend. This triggered a psychotic break which hospitalized him for nearly a month, prematurely terminating his exchange studies and forcing his early return to France.

My sixty-something-year-old landlord once again stopped taking the medication regulating his bipolar disorder. After what sounded like a very exciting manic episode, he was found unconscious in his apartment, and was hospitalized for three months. He returned last week in what appears to be just as frenzied a state as when he left. I’m getting really tired of 4:30 a.m. blaring sessions of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” on continuous repeat.

Over the course of a few years, I watched as what I thought was my friend’s pot-induced paranoia blossomed into full-blown schizophrenia at the ripe age of 28. Unable to get his condition “under control,” he was removed from the home he shared with his common-law partner and their two young children. My friend’s disease has claimed, among many other things, a number of his teeth and his ability to truly believe that we, his friends and family, are real people.

A few things have struck me about the nature of mental illnesses. They have the ability to “take down” the most intelligent, creative, and strong-willed people I have known, just as easily as they can lay waste to those that appear more vulnerable: nobody is “immune.”

Like physical ailments, mental problems can develop in a slow, creeping fashion or like a bolt of lightning. Unlike with physical ailments, those suffering from mental illness and the people around them are often reluctant to believe that these problems really exist – or they believe that the mentally ill are wilfully not controlling them, that they’re “letting themselves go.”

That last part, in my opinion, is particularly devastating, because it can prevent the stricken from seeking or accepting treatment when it might benefit them the most. Worse, it engenders the notion that the sufferer is somehow at “fault.” This can cause the stricken to isolate themselves, or cause their friends and family to withdraw contact.

True, we humans are peculiar creatures. It is often very difficult for the untrained to try drawing a line between healthy and pathological behaviour and thought patterns in themselves and others, particularly when things turn a bit bizarre. However, if in doubt, there is no harm in asking yourself or someone you care for, “Are you alright?” If there is uncertainty, there’s no shame in seeking a professional opinion, just like you would do for a dubious wound.

It’s very important to understand that, “A complex interplay of genetic, biological, personality, and environmental factors causes mental illnesses,” as the MHA writes. It’s equally important to understand that these illnesses can be fatal. Again, in the MHA’s words, “Suicide is among the leading causes of death in 15-24 year old Canadians, second only to accidents.”

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A number of resources are available for McGill students. McGill Mental Health can be reached at 514-398-6019 and at www.mcgill.ca/mentalhealth. If you’re not sure and just want to talk, try Nightline, at 514-398-6246.

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Age, however, erodes everything, and that has included my belief in my own faithlessness. I’ve had a number of opportunities to discover just how full of faith I am. Particularly, I’ve found it necessary to try to describe that feeling of connectedness and purpose that, from time to time, arises apparently from nowhere, perhaps that place some call “soul.”

A life of scientific study has led me to believe that although I can’t write you a system of equations to describe it, this feeling of connectedness is an emergent property of the interactions of various actors and forces in the highly complex, dynamical system we belong to, and which science seeks to describe. Simultaneously, my activities in industry, academia, and politics have all led me to understand that one cannot have blind faith in science, regardless of what it purports, since it’s produced by people. Not only are people subject to a number of corrosive influences which taint our products, “to err is human,” and those errors appear everywhere.

So a sensible view of the future is nebulous at best. Who knows whether we’ll maintain the course that promises answers and unifying theories, or if we’ll even survive long enough to realize them. After all, the universe is pretty complicated. In fact, science itself has revealed the fundamental uncertainty underlying observation, and if our observations are inherently uncertain, perhaps that’s reflected in our conclusions. There is no finality in conclusions derived from this continuing discourse – there is no “end” to learning. Similarly, there is no end to history or end to evolution. In fact, it’s unlikely there’s even a final destination. And that brings me to a very important idea about humanity, where we came from, where we are, and where we are going.

The human race, like any other, is evolving. We have been and are subject to the various forces of speciation inherent to that process. Our minds and bodies are simply not exempt. One implication is that to deny the differences between peoples is plain wrong. That idea alone has far-reaching, and sometimes uncomfortable, consequences. Another implication is that if we set and achieve goals, we should only expect those achievements to be met by still more goals. That’s the nature of the game. We never “reach the end” of anything, really, and that translates to our position in history. We haven’t reached a final destination, nor should we expect to, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

What bothers me about many who claim to be “non-believers,” often those simultaneously claiming to “believe in evolution” (a bit of an irony itself) have a habit of exempting humanity. This can make it easy to maintain a number of politically avant-garde, but fundamentally rigid, beliefs about various forms of “equality.” This Cartesian-style logic is not only tragic, but very dangerous. It denies the very real and important plurality of “human kinds,” both in space and in time. By its corollary it also denies the need for the constant and widespread dialogue necessary to satisfy the evolving needs, desires, and goals of those kinds: it kills community. In fact, this type of thinking, which on the surface appears to safeguard a number of “human rights,” is actually the bedrock upon which those rights have historically been removed.

This brings me to another matter of my faith. In place of a rigid political ethos, I believe that somehow good deeds and tolerance beget the same. The hope is that sustained effort and input, even without promise of returns in our lifetime, eventually elicit response in kind. Equally, I believe the opposite is true: put in ill will, greed, egoism, and intolerance (in their many forms), and expect the same in return. I believe we are indeed all “connected,” past, present, and future, even if the math of it is presently beyond our grasp.

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My mother is a hospital social worker. Like most front-line workers, she’ll stupefy you with stories about our health care system’s management. I’ve listened to these stories the better part of my life, but in the past ten years they’ve become increasingly difficult to stomach. The substance of the transformations she describes is nauseating. I’ve managed to subdue discomfort with the idea that years of thankless service have compounded her cynicism. The article on her desk says otherwise.

In September, an article in La Presse reported statistics from the Fédération des médecins spécialistes du Québec explaining that since 2000, the number of administrators of Quebec’s health care system grew 52 per cent and the number of managers grew thirty per cent to a total of 100,000 employees. In the same period, the number of caregivers (doctors, nurses, orderlies, physiotherapists, et cetera) grew by only six per cent to 108,000. Administrators and managers (A&M) accounted for 85 per cent of that 40,323 increase in employees. For argument’s sake, assume that additional A&M earn a modest average $50,000 per year (undoubtably an underestimate). That’s two billion dollars, which, according to Statistics Canada’s 2009 figures, is over ten per cent of the total cost of health care and social services in Quebec.

In the face of exploding waiting times for everything from emergency services to long-term care, the A&M of our health care system have proposed what exactly? More A&M. I called my mother to enquire, and what a timely call. She directed me to an article in the Gazette describing a patient unable to return home, which is both his wish and the best option for his care. There is no more funding for the approximately fifty dollars a day of home-care he needs, so instead he’s stuck in an acute care hospital bed costing our government almost $1,000 daily. It turns out, my mother is the patient’s social worker. The whole story is painful.

My mother described a one-hour meeting that included herself, another clinician, and five managers, convened to “solve” this non-problem. The whole scenario is like a Marx Brothers film. The meeting’s conclusion was to order an assessment of the patient’s home environment, a procedure inherent to the care request submitted by the patient’s clinicians weeks prior. That assessment finally took place nearly two weeks after that meeting and reported that the patient’s home requires a standard piece of equipment. That piece of equipment, which I found used on Ebay for $100, deliverable in a few business days, would take our health care system at least another two weeks to acquire.

Perhaps if all that new A&M had instead been health care workers and equipment, the assessment wouldn’t have been needlessly delayed, the equipment would have been available, an unnecessary meeting wouldn’t have occurred, and there’d be plenty more coin in our government’s coffers. The best part is that when my mother expressed how unacceptable her patient’s situation is, she was “questioned” by yet another manager for expressing frustration. How many managers would you guess my mother reports to? In 1991, when she would come home excited about the amount of work she’d completed, she had one boss. Today, when all my mother seems to do is express exasperation, she’s reports to four bosses. If you think this particular case is some kind of exception, you are mistaken.

The state of affairs reminds me of a FedEx commercial where an employee in training is asked to perform a basic task and says, “You don’t understand… I have an MBA,” to which his trainer replies, “Oh, you have an MBA? In that case, I’ll have to show you how.” To the workers that actually provide care, these types of “problems” are an absolute no-brainer. Additional A&M, in a variant of Parkinson’s law, doesn’t solve care provision problems, it often creates them – at an opportunity cost of at least two billion dollars – so that they can then be solved by people who actually do the work: that’s a triple whammy and everybody is suffering. o

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Apple is no longer the benevolent underdog of the tech world that made superior products, but somehow couldn’t break into the average consumer market. Au contraire: in May, with a market capitalization of $227 billion USD, Apple took Microsoft’s crown as the queen of tech. This was accomplished in part by ditching its proprietary hardware, opting instead to equip its Macs with Intel guts. Not only is a great deal of Intel’s Pentium technology designed and manufactured in Israel, this hardware is also the exact same junk you find in PCs. Worse, Apple’s “brilliant” operating system (OS), adored by its consumers, is actually just a flavour of Unix, the proprietary counterpart of Linux. They are selling otherwise totally free, open-source, community-built and supported software at an exorbitant price. When you buy a Crapple computer, you are paying a massive premium for a con job: ultra-clever marketing and the slick aesthetics of a plastic casing house a computer running essentially free software on hardware priced at about three times that of an equivalent PC.

iPhones and iPods are even worse. The iPhone is the glitchiest piece of garbage you can piss away $700 for. It freezes regularly, doesn’t support standard stuff like Flash (wtf?), has abominable reception, and its battery can’t be changed unless you know how to solder. iPods are nothing more than offensively overpriced standalone versions of the media players that are usually integrated into the average smart phone. I can’t even begin to describe the ridiculousness of the iTouch’s mere existence in the marketplace. Finally, consider that Apple makes a great deal of these products at companies like China’s Foxconn. I’ll save you a search: Foxconn has a serious problem with employee suicide. Recent research from Chinese universities has indicated that Foxconn has really bad labour practices – working conditions are unsafe, it forces copious amounts of illegal overtime on its workers, and perpetrates several other forms of worker abuse, including violence.

Although it is committed to a number of sustainability initiatives, we shouldn’t forget that Ikea is a monstrous multinational corporation selling mostly crap that breaks (particularly if any part of a product moves). If you’ve ever wondered where all that beautiful stuff comes from and where it goes to, the answer is every corner of the globe. In 2009, Ikea was operating 301 stores around the world, and had a revenue of about $37 billion USD. Again, labourers and the environment suffer as thousands of tons of cargo needlessly circle the globe from pools of cheap material and labour, to markets that bear high consumer prices. Ikea is the face of a globalized economy, its products making their way into millions of homes, including those of “anti-capitalist” and “anti-globalization” activists.

My favourite, though, is Motorola. The development of the Android OS has allowed several companies to produce smart phones competing with Apple’s iPhone. In some cases that’s a good thing, but not when it comes to Motorola, whose Milestone smart phone gave the company record-breaking sales. The problem is, Motorola likely wouldn’t exist in the absence of military contracts. Tons of military and police telecommunication equipment is produced by Motorola; in fact, they invented the first portable telecomm device, the walkie-talkie, for the military.

When we go to buy something that is highly visible in our day-to-day lives, it pays to do some homework. Not only are we easily fooled by beautiful marketing and package design, we may be contributing substantially to the corporate “ha-ha factor.” I often picture the “chiefs” of our economy laughing about people drafting boycott, divestment, and sanctions posters on their Macs, while sipping organic, fair-trade coffee brewed in their FÖRSTÅ, and “tweeting” the evils of the military-industrial-academic complex from their Milestone. What a farce. In particular, when I see “activists” of various kinds casually turn to these sorts of products, I barf in my mouth a bit. Five minutes of research into probably the most expensive consumer goods they own should have been enough to lead them elsewhere. Clearly, however, aesthetics, marketing, and sheer laziness win the day.

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Can Canadians count? Again, not really: according to HRSDC, as of 2003, 56 per cent of Canadians lacked the math skills to “function…well in Canadian society,” and another thirty per cent met only the minimum level of numeracy associated with successful participation in society.

If the differences in the literacy statistics between 1994 and 2003 indicate a trend, we’re doing nothing to fix the situation. In fact, the situation has become worse. There was a decline in the number of people who have “strong literacy skills” and “strategies for dealing with complex materials.” It seems reason and another roughly thirty per cent can just barely read or count their way out of a paper bag. That leaves maybe about twenty percent of our population with sufficient literacy and numeracy to understand what the hell is going on in our country.

Compare this with voter turnout in federal elections. According to Elections Canada, in the past four polls (about ten years), voter turnout has hovered around sixty per cent. This should sound blaring alarm bells. At best, about forty per cent of voters have little to no ability to understand the election platforms and financial plans they voted for. What really worries me is the following: if so many voters can’t do their own homework, what makes them decide how to vote?
A book I recently read springs to mind: Chris Hedges’s Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. It’s nicely summed up by Barnum and Bailey’s Circus’s exhortation to pay to “come see the Egress!” I’d like to focus on the rise and role of social media – blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, et cetera – in our political discourse.

Lauded by their proponents for the ability to broadcast “information” to huge audiences, social media are undoubtedly an important vehicle for “the triumph of spectacle.” The masses are easily fed ridiculously decontextualized and often bizarre interpretations of current events, rhetoric, and personal ideology. Risking poor analysis, I’ll venture that if the functionally illiterate majority of the population wanted to pretend that it wasn’t, it might turn to “information” sources that allow it to propagate its delusion of literacy.

Enter social media: small, easily-digested, low-complexity text. Popular consumption of social media necessarily comes from the quasi-literate majority, those for whom they were designed. Combine this with the narcissism (and often megalomania) of most social media “authors,” and you have a recipe for disaster. Consider that more than a quarter of our population is in reading level two, and according to the Canadian Literacy and Learning Network, “often do not recognize their limitations” – they can’t identify or dismiss tripe, nor demand better.

Using these superficial marketing media techniques as the primary vehicle for important news, or substantive discourse, is spectacle of the first degree. We need a truly informed population that consults meaningfully, and participates in an informed manner, not a population that fools itself into thinking it’s informed. This requires true literacy and numeracy, neither of which are promoted by social media.

Many pointed to Obama’s success as proof of the power of social media for awakening the bright forces of an informed electorate. The recently-concluded U.S. mid-term elections demonstrated what actually occurred in 2008. Identical social media strategies employed by Obama have been put to work against his regime. The content of the messaging was different, but the support elicited was essentially the same: the quasi-literate. Real movements require real intellectual foundations, which in turn, requires substantive communication.

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The political parties controlling our provincial legislature essentially occupy one side of the spectrum: the right. The dying ADQ is a self-proclaimed rightwing party. The PLQ is headed by former federal Progressive Conservative (PC) party leader Jean Charest, and promises an austerity budget in 2012 that will focus on striking a death blow to the public financing of our internationally-acclaimed social systems.

The PQ is centrist at best: in addition to its preoccupation with Quebec sovereignty and strangling the province’s anglo community, it refuses to denounce the Bloc Québécois’s PC founder and leader of the rightwing group Québec lucide, Lucien Bouchard. The PQ’s fiscal policies focus on the “knowledge economy” – code for transferring public wealth to corporate interests – while paying only lip-service to the maintenance and development of our social systems.

The Parti vert du Québec has a number of progressive policies, but on the whole it has avoided developing a fundamentally progressive ethos, opting instead for pragmatic platforms. Discounting fringe parties like the Bloc Pot and Parti marxiste-léniniste du Québec, which are arguably progressive, we are left with the lone ranger, Québec solidaire, and its champions Françoise David and Amir Khadir, the party’s single Member of the National Assembly (MNA).

QS is the only one of Quebec’s political parties that is truly left. The party is committed to forming a “leftist government,” which “rejects neoliberalism,” and is founded on “progressive politics such as social justice, equitable distribution of wealth, gender equality, sustainable development, elimination of racism, pacifism, and solidarity.” If you consider yourself socially conscious and have paid attention to Khadir’s work in the National Assembly, you’re probably already a convert.

If you aren’t, it may be for one of the following reasons. QS operates almost exclusively in French despite the fact that about twenty per cent of Quebec’s population has another mother tongue. Its website sucks, making it hard to find information. Finally – drum-roll please – QS is committed to Quebec independence, but not so fast with the “uh-oh.” Unlike the PQ, QS is not preoccupied with sovereignty: they rarely mention it publicly, and do not call for an immediate referendum. QS posits that its social development plan for Quebec, which is truly wonderful, cannot be realized within what it considers the “the limits of federalism.” It calls on Quebeckers to use sovereignty as a vehicle to define a new country, the one they dream of living in. Via a consultative process of drafting a constitution, QS aims to construct a fundamentally socialized, sustainable, and equitable participatory democracy, the likes of which North America has never achieved.

Reading QS’s 2008 election commitments, one of the only documents it offers in perfect English, is enough to make you smile-cry. Their vision for our province is beautiful: solid, coherent, and deeply social. It addresses and satisfies the demands of almost every progressive group I am aware of. Québec solidaire is the only party I have ever wanted to join. For the first time in forever, I am excited to participate again. Go read that platform now, and let’s put these people in office in the next election.

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As media coverage increasingly describes this grotesque betrayal of the public trust, activists and organizers are able to mobilize ever-larger numbers of protesting citizens. Fixed-term “democratic” governments recognize what is hopefully an imminent translation into votes. Their response is to accelerate the implementation of their wealth sequestration schemes. When they are booted from office, we can expect the cupboards to be bare. It will be left to us to restore the social systems they are wantonly destroying. There is little unique or surprising about these events, and although the cycle is not new, at this point in it, we must ask ourselves, “This time, have we let things go too far?” I believe there is room for things to become much worse if we are not very careful about how we plan our way out of the present state and trajectory of affairs, particularly in activist circles leading the charge against the erosion of our “common good.”

Popular support for “progressive” and more “radical” messages is becoming increasingly possible. While popular awareness of the dangers they foretold lay dormant, a necessary insularism allowed certain groups that fostered these messages to “hold the fort.” Now, however, that insularity may impede their ability to flourish. Indeed, these groups and the individuals that held them together weathered harsh times, and in many cases existential threats still loom large. In their veritable seclusion from popular culture, these groups have developed what seems to me a somewhat exclusive culture of activism, and it threatens their ability to seize the present opportunity to beat back the pandemic of blindness which caused that seclusion in the first place.

There are two phenomena which must be guarded against. First, we must resist the urge to be bitter – we must not close our hearts, minds, and doors to those that did not share the cultural and intellectual hardships suffered in the absence of popular support. The disease we are fighting is blindness. It is our biggest challenge to relieve that blindness, and it cannot be accomplished by shaming those unwittingly blinded. If people become interested in participating, but don’t use the “right” nomenclature or don’t express the outer, more superficial accoutrements of the “activist,” “progressive,” or “radical,” they are not to be dismissed. Their presence and willingness to participate is testament to their will and intent; the rest can be worked on.

Second, we must resist the urge for public redemption that individualizes experience and fractures collective movement. Yes, activists should be recognized for their persistent contributions and fortitude, but our personal experiences are not the message, nor are they an accurate reflection of the problems that we face.

We must focus our energy on putting forth a coherent, common, and well-articulated vision of how the present and future can be brightened by embracing our interdependence, and institutionalizing and expanding the systems that embody it. If we find that our energy is being directed toward individual experience and input to the “movement,” then a disservice is being done to the collective effort and momentum presently taking shape.

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