The Sixth Estate

I just about fell off my chair when the Globe & Mail’s Tuesday editorial actually suggested that a suitable first task for newly minted Religious Freedom Ambassador Bennett would be an inspection tour of Tibet:

Sending the freshly minted ambassador would surely anger China, a major Canadian trading partner. But if the Harper government’s much-touted initiative on religious freedom is to have credibility, it should accept this challenge.

Without even touching the fact that the Harper government has obviously lost whatever interest it once had in challenging the totalitarian dictatorship in Beijing, this proposal betrays a startling amount of ignorance about how diplomacy works. Contrary to the dreamy imaginings of the people who supported the creation of this office, Canada’s Religious Freedoms Ambassador can’t just wander the globe at will, stirring up trouble.

The notion that an ambassador would visit a country against its will in order to inspect its internal affairs is asinine. What’s even worse is that the “Religious Freedom Ambassador” isn’t actually an ambassador in the technical sense. He’s not accredited to China, or anywhere else. For all intents and purposes, he’s just a private citizen with a fancy badge until China says otherwise.

This discussion is also an entirely moot point. Shortly after it published this editorial, the Globe dazzled its readers with up-to-the-minute news that the Chinese government has told our actual ambassador in Beijing that he is not allowed to visit Tibet. If our actual ambassador to China isn’t allowed to visit Tibet, it’s a safe bet that our fake ambassador won’t be allowed to either.

Maybe it’s just a typo, but it’s a little depressing to see the state broadcaster’s science reporters — people whose salaries I pay — utter statements like the following:

if you went back thousands of years and “replayed the tape of life,” would you end up with humans and the species we know today, or would small differences caused by chance result in completely different plants and animals?

Doebeli was surprised to discover that in his study, all three bacterial populations evolved in almost exactly the same way, suggesting that chance or randomness doesn’t play a big role, at least over a short period of time, such as 1,000 generations, and in laboratory conditions.

I can answer that question, for the good reporter Emily Chung: yes, if we turned the clock back several thousand years and replayed it, there would still be humans. And basically all other species we know today, too. I’m not sure this is actually the pressing question amongst biologists that she claims it is.

It’s worth noting that a thousand generations — what she calls “a short period of time” — is actually several tens of thousands of years, in human terms. That short period of time encapsulates the entirety of the history of civilization, with plenty of room to spare. The entire history of post-Copernican science spans maybe a couple of dozen generations.

It’s also worth noting that if a single anonymous medieval peasant woman had conceived in May of 904 A.D. instead of April, probably none of us would be alive today. Food for thought, for those who say you can’t change the world.

An editorial from a small local newspaper out west was sent to me by a reader this week. The paper in question is the Prince George Citizen:

To our shock and dismay, multiple incidents of plagiarism were uncovered from work over the last number of months. The staff member plagiarized various online new publications, while writing opinion pieces that appeared in this space. Entire paragraphs were copied and then blended into articles, removing a word here and there, or adding a clause to link certain phrases, but leaving the words of the original writer all or mostly intact, without attribution to the original writer or publication.

As of Tuesday morning, that news staff member is no longer employed at this newspaper.

Well done, Prince George Citizen. A bit over the top, mind you. I can think of a much more important paper than the Citizen which showed us that when a minor charge like serial plagiarism comes along, there’s certainly no need to fire anyone as long as the writer in question says it was inadvertent and is willing to print a vaguely worded apology.

On a similar note, the manager of a Vancouver real estate company just resigned, saying he was accepting formal responsibility for two employees who pretended to be buyers in order to make the company’s homes look more in demand than maybe they really were.

Managerial responsibility? What’s that?

I mean, it’s not like a manager should be expected to resign if, for instance, he sends his staff to impersonate new Canadians at a citizenship ceremony for the benefit of the news cameras or anything.

I have to say, the childish credulity of the professionally faithful is kind of amazing. We all knew that the Harper government was creating the Religious Freedoms Office because his religious base would love it. I don’t think until this week that I realized how truly silly they are, how willing to accept even the most piddling and pointless of scraps from the master’s table. To wit: Catholic priest turned National Post columnist Raymond de Souza and Christian TV personality and occasional Globe & Mail columnist Lorna Dueck, who on previous occasions has claimed that God intervenes in court cases.

(He does not, however, intervene to prevent the crimes from being committed in the first place, which in my humble opinion would be rather more helpful.)

Anyways, this new office can be easily refuted. We don’t have offices to promote any of the other Constitutional freedoms. The new “ambassador” won’t have any power to prevent religious atrocities. It’s a safe bet the Canadian government would never jeopardize any real economic interest, for instance, in order to prove a point about freedom of religion. Yet Dueck happily lists several recent persecutions of religious people as though Canada’s new Religious Freedom Ambassador, if he were already on the job, would have instantly hopped on a military jet and flown off to rescue the people involved. This is at best an office which will be long on talk and short on substance. You know, like church.

But I don’t think anyone needs me to repeat the tired arguments about the pointlessness of this office. Instead I want to tangle something a little bit more fundamental, which is the fact that the legion of conservative Christians who have suddenly re-discovered their libertarian streak don’t actually believe in freedom of religion either. Not, at least, as de Souza defines it here:

Religious liberty is the first liberty… If a person is not free before God,… then there is no basis for his freedom before the state, and his property and other rights are of little avail. The state that claims the right to interpose itself between man and God is by definition a totalitarian state, even if should be a softer sort of totalitarianism, at least at first.

Let’s suppose — to take a story that in this context isn’t entirely random — that you believe God has told you to hold a human sacrifice to prove your loyalty to him. At this sacrifice, moreover, the victim won’t just be some unfortunate passerby you swipe off the street: it will be your son. Now, I don’t think de Souza or anybody else thinks that in this situation it would actually be wrong, let alone “totalitarian” for “the state” to “interpose itself” by arresting you and locking you away in jail.

I don’t imagine de Souza would find it totalitarian if we arrested people for practicing infant genital mutilation, either. Nor do I imagine that he, Dueck, or anyone else of their persuasion are troubled by the possibility that the new Religious Freedoms Ambassador will condemn, let’s say, the Saudis for arresting someone on the charge of converting to Christianity (to use one of Dueck’s examples), even though doing so would be our state “interposing itself” between the Saudi officials and their God.

We can continue with this list of examples as long as we like, but I’ll just skip to the main point: none of us actually support freedom of religion as a “first right” from which all other rights derive. At best freedom of religion is a derivative right — because we have freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, that means we must be free to believe things about the divine and to speak about those beliefs. The religious have it exactly backwards here: religious freedom flows from our other basic human rights, not the other way around.

Which is why the skeptical among us wonder why there’s an Ambassador for Religious Freedom and not an Ambassador for Freedom of Conscience, an Ambassador for Freedom of Expression, or even, for that matter, an Ambassador for Democracy.

Interestingly, the same Muslim legal interpretation which leads to the jailing of Christians in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere is also the basis of jailing and/or executing atheists. But that doesn’t seem to concern any of the religious who are so excited about the new office, and I don’t imagine it will concern the new ambassador as much, either. It’s not nearly as worrying when the Egyptians jail someone for refusing to believe in any God as it is when they jail someone for believing in the Christian God, is it?

Here’s a puzzle for my readers: try and guess which one of the following two editorials, each of them discussing a slight bump in the tax rate for the wealthiest individuals, comes from the Globe & Mail, and which one comes from the local leftist rag:

Just kidding! They’re both from the Globe and Mail. The one on the left was published a year ago, when the Ontario NDP agreed to support that province’s budget in exchange for a slight bump in the upper-bracket tax rates. The one on the right came out this week, after the rather surprising news came out of B.C. that one of the country’s most right-wing political party, the so-called BC Liberal Party — actually a coalition of Harperite Conservatives and unreconstructed Socreds — was contemplating an equally minor tax increase to “balance” its own budget.

I use those quotation marks advisedly. The bottom line is actually a deficit according to any reasonable accounting standards — hundreds of millions of dollars in Crown-owned properties are going to be liquidated to make up the difference, which doesn’t really count as an ongoing revenue source, I should think. That hasn’t received much criticism from the media either.

More appalling is the generally resigned but accepting attitude that has been taken with respect to the tax increases themselves. Which aren’t major: the highest personal income tax bracket gets bumped up slightly, as does the corporate income tax rate and the provincial medicare insurance premium. Nothing to write home over really. The business groups have responded with the usual refrain that this will make B.C. uncompetitive.

But their criticism has been fairly muted, all told. The Globe & Mail, which has never met a right-wing budget it didn’t like, said that the corporate tax hike was “regrettable,” but that the increase in the health tax, which is a flat tax, is actually a good thing because it will “heighten awareness of health-care costs.” Har. And why don’t the tax increases on the wealthy and on corporations serve the same purpose, you might ask?

Anyways, the sneering classist bigotry aside, I can’t help noticing how mild-mannered the media is being about this. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that a Liberal-NDP coalition in Ontario brokered a similarly slight boost in the upper-income tax rates, and, well, all hell broke loose. One business group leader claimed that small increases in income tax were morally equivalent to ethnic cleansing. If we let the NDP influence taxation policy, he claimed, it would be like watching Rome get sacked by the barbarians all over again.

I can’t help but notice that the only obvious difference between the evil barbarian Hitlerite tax increase in Ontario and the regrettable but acceptable and maybe even praiseworthy tax increase in British Columbia is that the Ontario tax increase was brokered by a coalition vote with the NDP, while the B.C. tax increase has been introduced by one of the staunchest right-wing political parties in the country.

Lest you think I’m overplaying the hypocritical-media-partisanship angle, let me pose a thought puzzle: how do you suppose the national media would have reacted if it had been an NDP government, instead of a Liberal-Conservative one, which brought in a modest tax increase in B.C. this week?

Like many of my readers, I am old enough to remember the beginning of January 2013, when the press was all abuzz over reports that Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page had completed what promised to be an incendiary sequel to his takedown of the F-35 project, this one involving the Joint Support Ships which the government will soon be building a cost of more than a billion dollars each:

The parliamentary budget officer has been examining the program and is poised to release his findings once MPs return from their Christmas break.

Interesting, that. The MPs have returned from their Christmas break. Now they’re gone again on their February holidays. (Like all responsible employers, Parliament has set up its calendar such that MPs get at least one week off per month, in addition to their winter and summer holidays.) Kevin Page is now days away from his forced retirement. No successor has been chosen.

And the Joint Support Ship report has apparently vanished without a trace. The media isn’t even talking about it anymore.

What’s up with that?

Today’s column comes to you courtesy of Rex Murphy. When I was growing up, I remember listening to Rex on the radio and liking him. Later, he turned to newspaper columns, and I think it was only then that I realized what a dunce he was. And is. After poking fun at the Europeans for the latest tainted meat scandal — it seems that eastern Europeans are raking in money by labelling horsemeat as “beef” and shipping it west to unsuspecting buyers — Rex just can’t resist getting another dig in at the pesky greenies across the pond:

Lay aside the dubious pork, that maybe-it’s-beef, for a while. Britain and Europe have an easy way out: meat from the multitude of our country’s vast seal population. Seal meat is a wonder — very nutritious, nice game taste, can be prepared variously, makes splendid “flipper pie.” It is also, almost by necessity, organic. And free range? The whole North Atlantic is their pasture. Seal meat will see Europe through this crisis.

I’m trying not to take this too seriously, because no doubt Rex doesn’t want his readers to see him as a serious, insightful critical thinker. But the fact that he can even utter such an asinine statement is proof of how appallingly ignorant the denialist right has become when it comes to environmental issues. That’s the same denialist right, incidentally, 40% of which tell pollsters that a 20-foot sea level rise wouldn’t pose a significant problem for coastal cities. (Don’t get too upset at me, right-wingers: I’ll be turning my guns on the denialist left in just a moment.)

Because here’s the thing: someone who makes a statement like this proves, by saying it, that they have absolutely no idea what the ecological footprint of the human race has become. They are absolutely, appallingly, utterly ignorant on the subject. Which I suppose goes a long ways towards explaining why Rex Murphy is something of a climate change denialist. Even in jest, it’s just a really stupid thing to say. It’s like saying: “oh, you don’t like driving in to work from the suburbs every day? That’s okay: invest in a kayak.” It’s nonsensical.

To see what I mean, juxtapose the following two statistics. First of all, even using decade-old figures, the European market consumes 35 million tonnes of meat per year. About one-fifth of that is beef. There’s also 80,000 tonnes per year of legal horse meat — i.e. the horse meat people actually want to buy, not the stuff included in the new “horse-beef” scam.

Second of all, although I’m not sure what the total North Atlantic seal population is, I can tell you that according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans the northwest Atlantic seal population includes 8 million harp seals, 600,000 hooded seals, 350,000 grey seals, and 1 million ringed seals. Assuming that every one of those seals is at the top end of the weight range given by Wikipedia for each species, which they obviously aren’t, and that every pound of animal weight can be turned into a pound of marketable meat, which it obviously can’t be, by my math at any rate, that adds up to a hypothetical meat supply of a few million tonnes.

Or, put another way, if Europeans did what Rex Murphy is telling them to do, they’d eat their way through the entire Canadian Atlantic seal population in a couple of months.

Which is where Rex Murphy, curiously, runs into the left-wing environmental denialists. These ones aren’t like him. They embrace climate change. Believe in it, even. But they also think that the way forward for humanity is to get simpler: organic food, country living, small farms, no more nuclear power plants, 100 mile diets, etc, etc.

It won’t work, folks. There are too many of us now. Like it or not, at its present population level and given present growth projections, humanity requires large-scale industrial production just to stay alive, just to keep treading water. Given presently used and foreseeable future technology, said production will send us careening into an existential crisis in very short order. Left to its own ends, evolution is inexorable, inescapable, and inevitable. We’re committed to our present course, just as surely and for the same reasons as a few lost migratory birds “decided” a few million years ago that on the small islands they were marooned on they didn’t really need wings anymore. Those birds became dodos. What we will become remains to be seen.

So far the only difference between us and them is that a few of us can see the trainwreck coming, which is enough to qualify us as unique. Actually stopping the train requires us to pull off two miraculous exceptions to the natural order of things. Now there are actually quite a number of people who have won the lottery, but I’m not sure how many of them have won the lottery twice.

Events of the past week have demonstrated what the limits of responsibility are in the Harper government. Violating the ministerial code of conduct is fine — Jim Flaherty’s letter to the CRTC, for instance. Expensing a $16 glass of orange juice — okay, too. Bilking tens of thousands of dollars from taxpayers through residence flimflammery, like Mike Duffy or several other senators — also good. Sexual assault, however, is not okay — Patrick Brazeau.

Which is why I have to wonder very seriously why it is that Aboriginal Affairs minister John Duncan has announced his surprise resignation over a letter he sent to the Tax Court almost two years ago on behalf of a constituent. It’s a very long time ago and it’s the sort of influencing that the Prime Minister has tolerated in the past from Flaherty, amongst others. It can’t be Duncan’s own decision to “accept responsibility,” which is how it’s being spun, or he would have resigned a long time ago — or, better yet, have never sent the letter in the first place.

That said, Canadians very much need to know the details of this alleged incident. The rules that caught up Minister Flaherty a few weeks ago are just slightly ambiguous, because it’s commonly accepted that backbench MPs can lobby so-called “quasi-judicial” councils like the CRTC on behalf of constituents, whereas ministers are not allowed to.

But the Tax Court of Canada is not a quasi-judicial organization. It is a judicial organization. The rules were written the way they were because it was assumed that no Cabinet minister would be bone-dead stupid enough to do this. What was Duncan thinking? Who was he intervening on behalf of? What were the contents of the letter? What was the expected result?

Imagine, by way of comparison, that one of our Cabinet ministers wrote a letter to whichever judge Senator Patrick Brazeau will be appearing in front of on his sexual assault charges, trying to influence the outcome. This would be an unthinkable abuse of the justice system. Well, guess what: it’s the same thing. The Tax Court is a court too, even if it isn’t exactly a high-profile one.

So, the pope is retiring. Even in Canada, which is hardly a Catholic country, this apparently ranks right up there with the fact that Harper’s select senators are pilfering the public purse. Which is a story I’ll return to tomorrow. But today the press and, more importantly, the government media page are devoted to glowing retrospectives on Benedict XVI, so Sixth Estate will be, too.

On that note, I’m seriously starting to wonder who writes editorials at the Globe & Mail. Are they just incredibly dense, or is this a joke to them? Honestly, how does anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to world affairs — and we must assume that professional journalists do — write in all seriousness that Benedict XVI “established reasonably solid reforms to prevent… sexual abuse of children,” that he has applied “real freshness” to the role of the Catholic church in the 21st century, and that he has “contributed much to the world as a writer, philosopher, and theologian”?

He has done nothing of the kind, nor could he be expected to. Benedict XVI’s tenure as a pope was a failure, as was his predecessor’s, and as his successor’s likely will be.

It was a failure because Benedict XVI combined the worst reactionary instincts of Catholic dogma with the worst of religion’s routine anti-science bias to make an incredible proclamation that a “contraception mentality” would do even greater damage to African nations, and other human societies, than HIV/AIDS.

It was a failure because he continued to adhere to one of the church’s silliest superstitions of all, the myth that people are made saints because they have performed documented miracles. Benedict anointed two Canadian saints: a long-dead Mohawk woman and a Quebecois faith healer. Kateri Tekakwitha was officially canonized on the grounds that a few years ago an American boy was cured of a life-threatening infection by means of some combination of antibiotics and intercessory prayers to Kateri’s spirit — which is sort of like saying that I quenched my thirst with a combination of water and air. Anyways, Kateri was made a saint, and so was Brother Andre, and the Canadian government fell all over itself in a humiliating display of gratitude. The Catholic Church continues to make a respectable income selling ostensibly magical fluids at Andre’s old site of business in Montreal.

But most of all, Benedict’s time in office was a failure because he took no steps to reverse the Catholic Church’s morally repugnant claim that men enjoy a divinely appointed right to occupy positions of religious authority that are banned to women.  The fact that the largest religious organization in the world, and in world history, continues in the 21st century to preach that men and women are unequal by divine right is a scandal of enormous proportions.

Fortunately, it hardly matters, because the Catholic Church’s influence is declining by the day, which is yet another thing that Benedict XVI’s far-right reign did nothing to prevent.

Jane Taber of the Globe & Mail has acquired from an anonymous sourcea new explanation for why Senator Mike Duffy has an Ontario health card and doesn’t pay resident taxes in PEI, even though he claims that his primary residence is in Cavendish and he is compensated to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by the taxpayer for having said residence while working as a senator in Ottawa:

Mr. Duffy, at the time of his appointment in 2009, was concerned that if he began paying taxes in PEI and using its health-insurance program, he would be forced to seek treatment elsewhere, according to a source who spoke on condition of anonymity.

PEI has no cardiac care centre, so residents have to be treated in Saint John or Halifax.

Yikes. Okay, first of all, and this appears to have sailed right over Taber’s head, this is not an argument for registering for a PEI health card. It’s an argument for not moving to PEI in the first place. If you have a heart attack at “home” (read: your vacation cottage) in Cavendish, they’re not going to open up a special, super-secret cardiac unit kept only for off-island visitors because you happen to have an Ontario health card. If you’re worried about the fact that PEI has no cardiac care unit and you need cardiac care, then you don’t live there in the first place.

Which, as it happens, is exactly what Mr. Duffy stands accused of doing. So much for that particular excuse.

But what this again illustrates is that we’re no longer talking about an issue of merely failing to uphold a few technical rules. We’re talking about fraud here.

The only question is: fraud against whom? Against Ontario taxpayers, for using an Ontario health card when he is really a primary resident of PEI, or against federal taxpayers, for collecting expense fees for his PEI cottage when he is really a primary resident of Ontario?

Either way, I guess we now know why right-wingers are so paranoid that lazy, self-interested gits are ripping off the welfare system. That’s what they think is going on, because it’s exactly what they do when given the opportunity.