Discrimination: it’s more complex

NEWS reports of antagonistic public statements or actions by one individual or group against another have recently increasingly used hate as the description of such negative behaviour, and major news outlets have now standardized the category of hate crimes.

For example, Ottawa police reported a nearly 24 per cent increase in hate incidents in the first half of 2023 compared to the same time last year. The most frequent targets were the Jewish, LGBTTQ+, and Black communities, in that order. The alleged crimes included mischief to property, uttering threats, assaults, criminal stalking and harassment, and mischief to cultural property.

Patrick Macdonald of Ottawa is the first person in Canada to be charged with hate propaganda offences for advocating violent, far-right ideology. He was charged with facilitating terrorist activity and wilfully promoting hatred for a terrorist group.

The criminality of hate is based on Section 319(2) of the Criminal Code which makes it an offence to communicate, except in private conversation, statements that wilfully promote hatred against an “identifiable group.”

Stopping youth violence in Winnipeg

A 15-year-old, a 14-year-old, now a 12-year-old.

These young people have been charged with manslaughter and assault with a weapon and nobody seems upset — at least, not upset enough to ask for solutions. Have we accepted murder and assault by children as normal?

A group of young teens swarmed a young man at the Millennium Library. The young man died after he was stabbed. A 15-year-old has been charged with manslaughter. A group of people leaving a concert at the Canada Life Centre were harassed by a group of teenagers. When an older teen intervened, he was swarmed and killed. A 14-year-old has been charged with manslaughter.

The latest news is a group of children and youths in downtown Winnipeg confronted two older teens and demanded their property. Even though they gave up their property, a 12-year-old has been charged with assault with a weapon after one of the group carved up the victim’s face with a machete. We use the term ‘ganglet’ to describe the fluid gathering of children and youth armed with knives and bear spray and occasionally guns who have nothing else to do but wander the streets waiting for a victim.

A different deal

AT a time when Manitoba needs to grow its trade to fund services at home, the opportunity to do so just got a significant boost. But it will only benefit the province if exporters and support agencies start to think differently about trade.

The good news for Canadian and especially Manitoba business is that the United Kingdom is about to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade pact whose members circle the Pacific Ocean, include Canada and now extend to Europe.

It’s a big deal when a trade pact that already has close to 15 per cent of global GDP adds the world’s fifth-largest economy to the fold. The problem with this good news is that the first question from business, the media and governments is invariably — how much more corn, cattle and canola will we ship to the U.K.? Not finding a ‘sound bite’ answer, attention is immediately lost and with it the opportunity to expand trade — in Asia. Yes, Asia.

Think of the opportunity presented by the new trade pact as a bank shot as opposed to a straight shot in a game of pool. Or, along these lines, think of it as greatly expanded NAFTA.

Myths in Canadian health care

Canada’s premiers recently met in Winnipeg and, as expected, asked Ottawa for more health-care funding and balked at having to justify how they were going to spend the money.

Health care is our jurisdiction, they shouted — just give us the money and don’t question what we are going to use it for.

This constant finger pointing between the provinces and Ottawa over health-care funding is not productive.

The result of this bickering is that Canadians are losing faith in their health-care system. In fact, 70 per cent of Canadians felt health care was worse post COVID-19, 45 per cent felt our health-care system is in crisis and 38 per cent did not trust any level of government to solve the problem, according to a 2022 Nanos poll for the Globe and Mail.

Spanish election: Franco’s ghost?

“Europe is threatened by anti-European mobs who destroy police stations, burn libraries and stab babies,” explained Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox Party and the bogeyman in this Sunday’s snap election there. Some delusional panic-mongers even see him as the Second Coming of dictator Francisco Franco.

Mexico’s democracy under threat

AFTER hounding Mexico’s independent watchdogs by questioning the autonomy of the election agency, publicly pressuring the Supreme Court and browbeating the press, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is now threatening the country’s democracy by undermining one of its most basic tenets: an even playing field.

It’s a dangerous regression that could further damage Mexico’s already degraded political culture. At the same time, it also shows a potential path forward for the country’s beleaguered opposition.

For most of the 20th century, Mexico was governed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRI was a hegemonic party that emerged from the Mexican Revolution, and it built an internal system of presidential succession that guaranteed its hold on power. The successor was colloquially known as “el tapado” (“the covered one”), whom the incumbent president would at some point choose to “uncover” before the public as his political heir. This system was often criticized for being undemocratic, as it allowed the president and the party to avoid any input from the public.

At first glance, the methods used by Morena (López Obrador’s party) for selecting its presidential candidate seem to be an improvement over the PRI’s system. It involves a series of polls, to be conducted by firms approved by the party. However, a closer look reveals a more ominous picture. López Obrador has far outdone the PRI’s illiberal ways. The main contenders for the position are among the president’s closest allies: Adán Augusto López Hernández, his recent interior secretary and longtime friend; Marcelo Ebrard, his recent foreign secretary; and, crucially, Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, whom López Obrador has long seen as a “political daughter” who is widely understood to be his chosen favourite.

Empty pride

RECENTLY at the Calgary stampede, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith fell into some controversy by being photographed with a supporter wearing a “straight pride” T-Shirt. Since the incident, both conservative leaders have said they do not stand by the shirt’s message. However, both in online comment sections and in publications like the National Post, some have argued that there was no reason to apologize.

It’s nothing new: when things like LGBTTQ+ pride or Black history month come up, some people start complaining that a celebration of straight pride or white history month would be viewed as bigoted. Of course, some of these people are just trolling, nakedly antagonizing their political opponents without wit or artistic flourish under the guise of calling it comedy. But for those who wish to analyze the world in good faith, it is still worth deconstructing.

Let’s take a clear example. Why don’t we celebrate white pride when society makes room for Black pride? Perhaps, prima facie, that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable question. But what exactly is this whiteness that people want to celebrate? This isn’t like wanting to celebrate Scottish pride or Irish pride, which are clearly defined cultures and perfectly reasonable to take pride in.

Whiteness, however, is an ambiguous social construct. When we talk about white supremacy, it is not such a simple thing as delineating the amount of melanin in one’s skin. There was a time when the people recognized as white today, those same Irish for example, were not recognized as part of the white majority. This had nothing to do with skin colour, and everything to do with the fact that the ruling class viewed them as a useful subservient population, and also a threat to the homogenous cultural supremacy of white Anglo-Saxons if they were allowed to integrate.

No going back after tipping point

“What we’re seeing is climate impacts that scientists thought would accompany certain temperatures happening far more rapidly, with far more devastating effects than had been forecast,” said Dr. Simon Nicholson of the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment at American University.

“We didn’t think that the Arctic would crash by now, and yet it’s almost gone. We didn’t think we’d be seeing these wildfires in Australia and the United States and elsewhere with the frequency and severity that they’re being seen.

“Given that we’re at about one degree Celsius (+1.1 C, actually), we thought those were far-distant prospects. So 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial averages could turn out to be far more devastating than had been imagined when that target was set as the threshold for international action.”

Last month was the planet’s hottest June on record, and probably the hottest in about 12,000 years. This month is shaping up to be the hottest July, and there’s a good chance that August will also break the record, because the relentless upward creep of global heating is being supercharged by the return of the cyclical El Niño phenomenon in the eastern Pacific.

Heat pump plan needs workable economics

Canada faces a difficult and painful task if we are to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as promised by our federal government. Nowhere is this trickier than residential home heating, representing 37 million tonnes nationally, close to six per cent of overall annual GHGs. Across much of Canada, including Manitoba, most residences are heated by natural gas. For more than 50 years, we have relied on natural gas to provide safe, reliable, relatively clean, and highly affordable heating to keep us warm.

Who deserves what?

Affirmative Action was recently outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in two of America’s most prestigious colleges, Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, ending 60 years of actions in the U.S. to erase discrimination on the basis of “race, colour, religion, sex or national origin.” The fundamental argument was that Affirmative Action is unfair, or unjust.

The problems with consultants

IT may have happened far away in Australia, but the scandal involving PriceWaterhouse Cooper (PwC) has national and provincial significance here in Canada. PwC is one of four major accounting firms operating worldwide, who all claim to be paragons of expertise, objectivity and integrity — which also means they should be trustworthy.

In the case of PwC Australia, however, there was a serious breach of trust. A PwC accounting partner working with the national government funnelled confidential plans for tax changes to the consulting side of the firm. Then the firm’s consultants used that information to attract business from multinational companies seeking to avoid new taxes.

PwC managed to cover up the misconduct for four years. Then the company was forced to apologize, nine partners were suspended, the government practice division (representing 20 per cent of its revenue) was sold for one dollar, and several investigations (by a Senate committee, the police and the accounting regulator) are underway.

This was not a case of a few bad apples. The company identified 76 employees with potential knowledge of inappropriate behaviour. Nor was this an isolated incident. In recent years, PwC has been entangled in controversies in Britain, Brazil and the United States.

Our very own epoch

“I WAS there when the Anthropocene was born. It was so amazing,” said Dr. Katherine Richardson, leader of the Sustainability Science Centre at the University of Copenhagen. “It was actually in 2000, at one of these meetings of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Scientific Steering Committee.”

The meeting sounds like a bunch of scientific bureaucrats sitting around somewhere discussing boring details, and probably for the most part, it was exactly that. But Paul Crutzen was there, and he was not a man to suffer fools gladly.

“The different programmes were giving long reports of what they’ve been doing that year and the people that do the paleo stuff were going on and on and on,” Richardson continued. “We’re in Cuernavaca, Mexico. It’s hot. And the vice chair of this is Paul Crutzen, and at some point Paul just lost it.”

“They were saying, ‘Holocene, we’re in the Holocene, and this has happened in the Holocene.’ And Paul just jumped up and said ‘But we’re not in the Holocene any longer. We’re in the…’ He was reaching for a word, and he said, ‘We’re in the Anthropocene’!”

Going underground, large-scale

It is never easy to change. Natural gas has been connected to most homes in Winnipeg since the 1950’s and ‘60s and produces almost 3.7 million tonnes of CO2 annually. Some gas lines have been in the ground for more than 60 years. Their life expectancy is about 75-85 years. Gas companies in Canada spend close to $3 billion annually to renew and expand the pipelines.

This is the problem. The cost of building gas lines is amortized over the expected life of the pipeline. Basically, the infrastructure is paid with a very long-term mortgage. That has kept the price of delivering gas to our buildings low. If gas lines are being renewed and extended, the term of the mortgage is 80 years. If we want to move away from gas to heat our homes, how is the utility going to pay the mortgage when no one is buying gas?

The alternative? Electricity. We can use electricity directly (think toaster elements), use it to extract heat from the air outside, or use it to extract heat from the earth.

Electric heat is more efficient than gas, but at today’s electric and gas rates, it’s about three times as expensive to heat your home with electric heat.