All elections are choices among imperfect alternatives, and this one more than most. Each of the parties has gaps, deficiencies and failings. But choose, voters must.
The election of 2015 has been powered by a well-founded desire for change. But it has also been an election where the opposition has recognized the electorate’s desire for stability and continuity on all things economic. That’s why the Liberals and the New Democrats, while running on the rhetoric of change, put forward economic platforms built largely on acceptance of the Conservative status quo.
The key issue of the election should have been the economy and the financial health of Canadians. On that score, the Conservative Party has a solid record. Hardly perfect but, relatively speaking, better than most. However, the election turned into a contest over something else: a referendum on the government’s meanness, its secretiveness, its centralization of power in the most centralized Prime Minister’s Office in history, its endless quest for ever more obscure wedge issues, and its proclivity for starting culture wars rather than sticking to the knitting of sound economic and fiscal stewardship. It turned this election into a referendum on the one-man show that has become the Harper government.
In an election about the economy, the Conservatives might have won, and would have deserved to. But thanks to the Harper government’s own choices, this election has mostly not been fought on the Conservative Party’s strong suit. Attention has instead been turned to the rotten culture of Mr. Harper’s government.
The thing is, the other two major parties have so much respect for the Conservatives’ record on economic, fiscal and tax policy that they propose to change almost none of it. Did Tom Mulcair’s NDP run on a promise to raise income taxes? To massively increase spending? To run deficits? No, no and no. The NDP tax platform was, essentially, the Conservative Party’s, plus a small increase in business taxes. The slogan may have been about “Change,” but the platform was about trying to reassure voters that an Orange Wave would leave the Conservative economic status quo largely in place.
The Liberals have in one respect been slightly different from the NDP in offering change – their call for the federal government to spend more on infrastructure, financed by two years of small deficits, deviates from the Harper government brand (though not its record) of balanced budgets.
But leaving aside a few billion dollars’ worth of extra borrowing, key planks in the Liberal economic platform were cribbed from the Conservative textbook. They promise to one-up the Conservatives, with a cut to the middle-class tax bracket, and one-up them again with an increase in benefits to families with children. To pay for this, they would raise taxes on the highest income earners, and similarly target family benefits to everyone but the rich.
But pushing marginal income tax rates on high-earners above 50 per cent in some provinces is likely to be counterproductive – promoting brain drain in a country that needs to attract the world’s most talented people.
Over the course of this long campaign, Mr. Trudeau did well to market himself to the country. But beyond the selfies and the smiles, the substance has proved difficult to find. Mr. Trudeau’s has been a skeletal vision and is therefore unpersuasive. With Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne at his side, he would undoubtedly return to a bigger government footprint, and the spectre of waste and debt rears its ugly head. Who would apply the brakes if he is handed a majority? If he achieves minority government, Mr. Trudeau will need the NDP on critical economic issues to prevent his government’s collapse. That, together with his inexperience as a leader, is a recipe for frailty.
This election should have been about jobs, taxes and the economy. This has been the Conservative Party’s strong suit. But the Harper government pursued a multi-year plan of distracting voters from its accomplishments, focusing attention on its faults, pushing up the number of Canadians upset at it for reasons having nothing to do with their pocketbooks, and whittling down its supporters to an ever narrower base. Watching the self-immolating Harper government in action is to watch a tired group trying to shrink itself back to the old Reform Party. To the distress of the country and thinking Conservatives, it is succeeding.
Unbeknownst to you, a dirt clod is flying through the air, directly toward your head. You’d hope some bystander would see it in time to shout, “Duck!” But that doesn’t happen. So afterward, as you wipe the grit from your eyes, you’re inclined to a moment of self-reflection. Should you have known the clod was coming?
Here’s where the Harper campaign finds itself today. Hungry for votes in the Greater Toronto Area, they embraced the populist might of Rob and Doug Ford, welcoming them this week to a campaign event in the Fords’ stomping ground of Etobicoke, arranging to share the spotlight with them on Saturday at a rally for the Prime Minister in Toronto. The brothers’ propensity to share unwelcome thoughts (Rob mused in late August about Doug replacing Stephen Harper, should the Tories lose) mattered not. Nor did Rob Ford’s admission to using crack cocaine while mayor of Toronto. This was Team Blue closing ranks.
So Rob and Doug hit the pavement, cameras in tow, to knock on doors in key swing ridings such as Etobicoke–Lakeshore and Scarborough Centre. “I think we’re doing well out there,” Doug Ford boasted on Tuesday. “We’ve had a really good response.”
Then, within 36 hours, it was all up the spout. On Wednesday evening, Maclean’s posted on its website an excerpt from Mayor Rob Ford: Uncontrollable, a book written by Mark Towhey about his time as Rob’s chief of staff at city hall. The passage features a harrowing, damning account of Rob Ford in a screaming match with his wife, Renata, in which he berates and threatens her over drugs, money and, possibly, a gun in their house—all while their children were trying to sleep upstairs. Links to the item quickly spread on social media.
By Thursday morning, the Tories were under fire. At an appearance in Trois-Rivières, Que., reporters asked whether Harper was associating himself with Rob Ford, given that Towhey’s account painted a grim portrait indeed of life inside the Ford household. Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said Harper should be “embarrassed that he’s having to count on the support of Rob Ford for his re-election.”
The TTC threatened to sue Bombardier on Friday after the company announced it would not be able to deliver 23 new streetcars by the end of the year, as promised.
The TTC board will consider filing a $50 million claim for late delivery of the streetcars, or may even launch a lawsuit against Bombardier, TTC chair Josh Colle announced in a news release.
"I am incredibly disappointed to learn that Bombardier, yet again, will not be meeting their commitments to deliver new streetcars to Toronto," Colle said in the statement.
Bombardier, which produces the streetcars at its Thunder Bay, Ont. manufacturing plant, has been struggling to build the 204 streetcars the TTC ordered.
Bombardier, in a statement, blamed the latest delay on issues with electrical connectors on two of the new streetcars currently in production and said its given the TTC a revised delivery schedule. Previously, at a meeting with TTC officials this summer, the company blamed everything from changes to their production line to the intricacies of the vehicle to staffing changes.
According to the TTC, there are only 10 new streetcars available in Toronto, when there should be 67 of the vehicles operating in the city.
On news of the death of Ken Taylor, at 81, I called Colin Robertson, another former Canadian diplomat, who served under Taylor in the early 1980s in New York, soon after Taylor became a hero for his role in hiding six Americans in Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979. Robertson, who lives in Ottawa now and works with the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, spoke about Taylor’s glory days following the “Canadian Caper.”
Q: What were your thoughts on hearing that your old boss had died?
A: Ken was a great Canadian patriot, a hero, but Ken was also really cool. I first met him when I was posted to New York in 1980, and he had of course already performed the great “Canadian Caper” in Tehran, and the government had appointed him our consul general there, partly because of his celebrity, the magnetism Ken had, and the importance of New York to the diplomatic establishment.
Q: So it was a good fit.
A: He took the town by storm. Anywhere he went. Even before he arrived, we saw it. Americans everywhere would thank us for what we’d done. Sending Ken to New York was exactly the right thing. He fit right into that highly cosmopolitan city, but he was still proudly Canadian. We had issues he was able to advance.
Q: What was he like to work under?
A: He was an unconventional diplomat, certainly for that era. First of all, he didn’t wear the classic blue suit; he always was always in a fashionable suit that suited him. Of course, he had that great hair, all the curls, and then the dark glasses that were his signature. Always a smile on his face. He was always approachable and personable. He had no desk in his office. He had a coffee table. You’d sit around it and deal with issues.
Washingtonians spend more money than anyone else on reading materials, but apparently they’re not doing enough of that purchasing in brick and mortar stores.
Barnes & Nobles said in a statement Friday that it would be shuttering its last location in the District not affiliated with a university at the end of the year.
The bookstore, located on the corner of 12th and E streets NW, was unable to reach an agreement with its landlord to extend its lease and will be looking for a replacement location in the near future, a Barnes & Noble official wrote in an emailed statement. Washington City Paper first reported on the closure.
“Despite our best efforts to come to an agreement with the property owner to extend the lease, they have decided to move forward with another tenant and the store will close at the end of December,” David Deason, vice president of development, wrote. “The Washington, DC community is extremely important to us.”
But, if Barnes & Noble does not find a replacement location by Dec. 31, that would leave D.C. without any traditional, big bookstore chains. There will also not be any bookstores downtown selling new books.
When Andrew Caesar moved to South Africa from his home in Australia for a job a few years ago, he thought that as a gay man, he’d be welcomed with open arms.
After all, he was heading to the country of Nelson Mandela and, since 2006, marriage equality for same-sex marriages.
It wasn’t so easy. “There’s still a cultural issue with being gay,” says the 34-year-old who worked for a mining industry company in Johannesburg. While the discrimination was nothing he could prove beyond a doubt, he was certain that he was kept on a short-term contract instead of being hired for a post that was never filled, even though he felt he was more than qualified. He finally tired of the uncertainty and moved back to his home in Brisbane.
The lesson, says Ruth McPhail, associate professor in the business school at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, is that LGBT expats need to understand the social climate of a possible posting – even more than the legal climate. “I would have thought that the first thing you do is check the law,” she says. “Apparently not.”
While quite a few countries can be welcoming, LGBT expats have an extra burden of vigilance to pack along with their passports and kitchenware. The findings are the result of years of research and in-depth interviews with 20 LGBT expats and described in a report, co-authored with Kate Hutchings at Griffith University and Yvonne McNulty of the Singapore Institute of Management University. “Lesbian and gay expatriation: opportunities, barriers and challenges for global mobility” was published online in 2014 in the International Journal of Human Resource Management.
For instance, says co-author Ms. McNulty, although India now has laws that make it illegal to discriminate against gays, many gay expats avoid the country. The social norms are far different from the legal system, she explains.
As Stephen Harper’s Conservatives inflict their limbic system politics on voters who are somehow unable to see themselves as pawns in the hands of a gang of nativist demagogues, it seems to me there are two increasingly likely outcomes at the end of this miserable, hate-filled journey:
One, the anyone-but-Harper vote rapidly de-camps from the collapsing NDP and coalesces around Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, producing a minority government.
Two, the Liberals merely swap out a bunch of seats with the NDP while the Conservatives nail down their base and drain enough support from Team Mulcair to win a second majority, or at least a third minority.
My guess: what’s behind door number two.
Imagine.
Concerns over the manipulation of human embryos are nothing new. Rosario Isasi, a legal scholar at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, points to two key waves of legislation over the years: one sparked by concerns about the derivation of embryonic stem cells, which was largely deemed acceptable; the other about reproductive cloning, which was largely prohibited for safety reasons.
The current regulatory mosaic is their legacy. Tetsuya Ishii, a bioethicist at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, spent nearly a year analysing relevant legislation and guidelines in 39 countries, and found that 29 have rules that could be interpreted as restricting genome editing for clinical use (M. Araki and T. Ishii Reprod. Biol. Endocrinol. 12, 108; 2014). But the 'bans' in several of these countries — including Japan, China and India — are not legally binding. “The truth is, we have guidelines but some people never follow them,” said Qi Zhou, a developmental biologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Zoology in Beijing, at a meeting hosted by the US National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC last week. Ishii considers the rules in nine other countries — among them Russia and Argentina — to be “ambiguous”. The United States, he notes, prohibits federal funding for research involving human embryos, and would probably require regulatory approval for human gene editing, but does not officially ban the use of the technique in the clinic. In countries where clinical use is banned, such as France and Australia, research is usually allowed as long as it meets certain restrictions and does not attempt to generate a live birth (see 'CRISPR embryos and the law').
Many researchers long for international guidelines that, even if not enforceable, could guide national lawmakers. Developing such a framework is one of the aims of ongoing discussions; the US National Academy, for example, plans to hold an international summit in December and then produce recommendations for responsible use of the technique in 2016.
But the research has already begun, and more is coming. Scientists in China announced in April that they had used CRISPR to alter the genomes of human embryos, albeit ones incapable of producing a live baby (P. Liang et al. Protein Cell 6, 363–372; 2015). Xiao-Jiang Li, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has used the technique in monkeys, says he has heard rumours that several other Chinese laboratories are already doing such experiments. And in September, developmental biologist Kathy Niakan of the Francis Crick Institute in London applied to the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for permission to use the technique to study errors in embryo development that can contribute to infertility and miscarriage. No one so far has declared an interest in producing live babies with edited genomes, and initial experiments would suggest that it is not yet safe. But some suspect that it is only a matter of time.
On Sept. 28, Turkish newspapers reported that a Greek school was reopened after four decades on the Aegean island of Gokceada, known as Imbros in Greek. In reality, however, the school was reopened after 51 years. Moreover, the closure of Gokceada’s Greek schools in 1964 was not because they ran out of students, as the reports said, but because the Turkish state had shut them down.
Half a century ago, the schools had about 450 students. Today, the number is 14 — three students in primary, five in secondary and six in high school. Barring those in primary school, only one student was born on the island. The others are the children of Greek families, natives of the island who had immigrated to Greece and are now drawn back by the revival of schools.
Greek-language education on Gokceada resumed after a 49-year hiatus in 2013 when a primary school was reopened. The secondary and high school sections were expected to follow suit last year, but delays in renovation work deferred their inauguration to 2015.
For Turkey’s dwindling Greek minority, the reopened school represents both a reminder of a painful past and a hope for the future. As Laki Vingas, a community leader personally involved in the efforts, told Al-Monitor, “For a community whose history abounds with suffering, scars, lost values, closed schools, banishments and confiscated lands, this school lays the foundation of a [new] vision and dream for the future.”
For Vingas, who heads the Imbros Education and Culture Association, the low number of students today is not important. It’s the future that matters.
I know, I know. The moment you even mention the word “alien,” a number of people will immediately start grumbling and shaking their heads. But let’s consider this rationally. Scientifically speaking, we must consider all possibilities. In the words of Conan Doyle, once you eliminate the impossible then whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Additionally, by Occam’s razor, the simplest possible explanation is the most likely – specifically, the explanation which requires the fewest assumptions of unknown phenomena. In this case, all of the proposed explanations require at least one such assumption. Various ideas have been put forward, but none are without their problems. The Bad Astronomer has a pretty good discussion on this, which I’d advise you to have a look over if you’re interested.
So given that an alien civilisation is actually not much more significant an assumption than an unprecedentedly massive barrage of comets or a coincidental and mysteriously dust free collision, the idea is actually being given some serious consideration in a hypothesis paper recently submitted to the Astrophysical Journal. Also, I should stoically point out that no Oort cloud has ever actually been observed, meaning that both Oort clouds and alien civilisations have exactly the same amount of direct evidence proving their existence. I suspect that statement will earn me no friends, but it’s worth remembering.
In the words of Tabetha Boyajian, lead author from the detection paper, “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.” This paper, which I won’t elaborate on right now, discusses a number of possibilities for astroengineered megastructures, and the prospects we may have for finding these things in transit studies designed to look for planets. Which is rather interesting because, frankly, why shouldn’t we at least consider the possibility?
[F]rom a SETI perspective, one should focus one’s resources on the best targets. Looking for astronomical anomalies is a reasonable way to focus one’s search. There is no inconsistency between assuming purely natural explanations for all phenomena, and targeting SETI efforts at the most astrophysically inexplicable phenomena.
I found Tabby’s star to be inexplicable, so I contacted Andrew Siemion at the Berkeley SETI Research Center. I told him we had a very strange star, and how does one go about doing a radio SETI search?
Andrew was initially skeptical, but he quickly agreed that this is a great target. He, Tabby, some of the PlanetHunters, and I put in a Green Bank Telescope proposal to do a classical, radio-SETI search (à la Contact), and I went to work on my paper.
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