Sunshine in Canada (A VERY POLITICAL POST)

WARNING: A VERY "POLITICAL" POST!

It's too soon to rejoice, and the Liberal Party has a history of failure to fulfill election promises. Nonetheless I feel cautiously optimistic. The Harper government's objective was never clearly defined but seems to have been to cut costs by reducing taxes and the size and influence of the national government. The Treasury Board tightly controlled the flow of money so funds allocated remained unspent. Military Service pensions and benefits were not delivered, nor were allocations to First Nations, enabling the government to boast that they had balanced the budget. If funds voted by their own government had been disbursed they would have had a deficit of several billion dollars. They governed with a unique combination of paranoid fear, austerity, and deceit.  They did terrible damage to Canada's international reputation and standing among the enlightened nations. For these reasons and others set out below I believe the Harper government was the worst for 100 years. It's good to be finished with them. 

In February of 2015 I compiled a list of reasons why I would never support the Harper government, and strongly believed that no enlightened intelligent person would. Here are my reasons:

Why I don't support the Harper conservatives (Compiled February 2015)

1. Ideology, not evidence, determines political decisions; strong anti-science bias

The Conservative Party of Canada is one of the most scientifically ignorant, politically inept sets of political leaders on earth. They are worse than ignorant. They are willfully obscurantist, hostile to science, blindly blundering about, rejecting evidence in favour of their narrow ideology. They have abdicated from international discussions of the most urgent policy issue confronting humanity, the critically urgent problem of climate change and what to do about it. 

2. Lack of vision

The Harper Conservatives have an extraordinarily narrow vision of Canada. Indeed they are without vision. Stephen Harper sees Canada as an ‘energy superpower’ but only considers petroleum fuel as the source of this energy. Moreover, the fuel is very ‘dirty’- bitumen or tar that requires costly, energy-intensive refining. Further, while he seeks to maximize consumption and combustion of oil, Harper has no time or patience with conservation of energy. He has even less time for sustainable energy, for solar, tidal and wind power. This directly contradicts traditional conservative philosophy.

3. Profligacy

Among the gifts left to Harper by the previous Liberal government, along with a large fiscal surplus, was a program of subsidies for enhancing energy efficiency by improved home insulation. Among the first act of the Harper Conservatives was to cancel this program.

4. Fiscal irresponsibility

Another immediate act was irresponsible tax cuts that eliminated the healthy surplus inherited from the previous government. These tax cuts were, of course, very popular with the most short-sighted portion of the electorate. These were truly acts of a visionless government, that called to my mind the biblical saying, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”  

5. Governs on ‘divide and rule’ principle

Nations run best on collaborative teamwork. The concept of collaboration is alien to the Harper government which functions on a ‘divide and rule’ principle, setting one ethnic or interest group against another. There are many examples of this obtuse behavior. One that is more harmful than most is Harper’s refusal to attend meetings of first ministers of the provinces and territories.

6. Partisan policy in Israel-Palestine dispute

For many years before the Harper government came into office, Canada had a high international reputation based on its record of impartiality and altruism, particularly in the Israel-Palestine dispute. The Harper government has destroyed this reputation. It has sided unequivocally with Israel, boasting that it is Israel’s best friend, needlessly making an enemy of Islam.

7. View populace solely as taxpayers

The Harper government sees the people of Canada first and foremost as taxpayers. Newborn babies, indigent single mothers, old people dying of cancer or dementia are not primarily taxpayers, although they have well defined needs for health and social care. Every Harper government action boasts of an accompanying reduced tax burden. You get what you pay for. I don’t mind paying more for better quality, for example of CBC radio and high quality postal services.

8. Hostile to women’s reproductive rights

The Harper government is unfriendly, to say the least, towards women’s reproductive rights. Some years ago they denied charitable status to the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Family Planning Canada, and several similar NGOs. They withheld approval for the so-called ‘abortion pill’ for over 2 years, longer than any other drug ever submitted for approval in Canada, longer than any other nation. 

9. Mean-spirited and vindictive

The Harper government is mean-spirited and vindictive, for instance targeting altruistic non-governmental organizations that promote concern for the environment. These are seen as enemies, presumably because they disapprove of government policies that are very destructive of environments. These have been subjected to costly and needless audits by Canada Revenue Agency.

10. Attacks on Parliamentary Budget Office and Elections Canada

The Harper government’s way of doing politics relies on hatred and contempt for political adversaries. These adversaries include the permanent civil service. Civil servants are regarded and portrayed not merely as enemies of the CPC, but enemies of Canada – a complete distortion of reality. They have adopted the same attitude to impartial agencies such as the Parliamentary Budget Office and Elections Canada.  The aim seems to be to emasculate or neutralize democratic infrastructure that threatens them by telling the unvarnished truth.

11. Hypocrisy and empty gestures

Examples of this include Harper’s very public ‘apology’ for the atrocities committed during the residential schools fiasco. It was an empty gesture because nothing whatever was done to follow up and make amends for the parlous plight of First Nations people: no move to ameliorate the plight of people on reservations where living conditions are deplorable, outright refusal to establish an inquiry into the root causes of conditions that have led to over 1200 missing and murdered women and girls. 

   

12. Use of omnibus bills rather than parliamentary debate

The Harper government repeatedly bypasses democratic debate by using ‘omnibus budget bills’ as a way to change laws without submitting these laws to formal parliamentary debate.

13. Lemming-like rush towards extinction (opposite of sustainability)

The actions of the Harper government take all life in Canada towards extinction. I wouldn't mind in the least if the Harper government became extinct. But it makes me angry to think of them carrying bright children with them to extinction, children who manifestly could run Canada and the world a great deal better than they have.  In the interests of life in Canada and life on earth, we must get rid of this bunch of scientific ignoramuses who have been mismanaging our lovely part of the habitable world for far too long. 

14. Narrow, ideologically based economic policy

Economic policies are very narrow, based on resource extraction rather than sustainable diversification. In early 2015 we see the adverse consequences as oil prices collapse.

Economic policies are ideologically based, as in dismantling of National Wheat Board, which ensured stability of income for farmers. Taxation relies on 'boutique' tax cuts for targeted segments of the population.

15. Mediaeval approach to crime and punishment

Crime must be punished. That's far more important than preventing crime. More and bigger prisons, harsh sentences, are the solution. If they could get away with it, they would restore the death penalty.

16. Miserable mean-spirited management of refugee resettlement (because they are Muslim?)

 Refugees are viewed as potential or even actual terrorists. If possible, keep them all out "None is too many" which was the prewar government policy towards Jews fleeing the Nazi regime in Germany, is the covert policy of the Harper conservatives. 

A few additional reasons to reject Harper and all he stands for: 

Our flag: Not even $50K for 50^th anniversary paid for from Museums’ budget, versus $400K for War of 1812 when Canada didn’t even exist                                                                                              

False and misleading erection of phantom ‘terrorist’ enemies – stoking fires of ‘national paranoia’

Delay, delay, delay help for distressed Muslims (e.g. Syrian refugees, Al Jazeera journalist)

During the election campaign, Harper and his crony Jason Kenney added a further reason. A woman, just one of two women in the past decade, wanted to wear her niqab (face veil) during her citizenship ceremony.  Harper declared that he would prevent this, if necessary by special legislation. If an ordinary Canadian had made such a statement, couched in language that was an implicit incitement to violence, there would be a strong case for prosecution under legislation against racist hate speech. That the prime minister of Canada should say such a thing, not once as a slip of the tongue but repeatedly, in my view disqualifies him from holding any public office.  

Why and what we write

We write because we have something to say, something to sing, a poem, a story, an item of news, a mathematical formula with predictive power, a theory of how the universe works, that we want to share with others. We feel an irresistible compulsion to share our thoughts, our ideas, with other people. 

By 'we' I mean all humans, everyone, but especially those of us who believe we have something worthwhile, important, beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, that we are impelled to share with others. 'Others' vary in number from our nearest and dearest to all of humankind. 

We began doing this before writing was invented. Balladeers, story-tellers, wandering minstrels, tribal elders and sooth-sayers were talking to the rest of their tribe or clan millennia ago, singing songs, telling stories, relaying the history of their people. Homer, the blind poet, sang the story of the siege of Troy which probably mixed a historical record of real events that happened to real people with the magic and myths of interventions by the gods.  The Iliad, Homer's tale of the siege of Troy, of Achilles, Agamemnon, Helen and Paris, Priam, Hector, Odysseus, the rest of the heroic band of Greeks and Trojans and the Olympian gods and goddesses, dates back, we believe, to long before those who told the tale had written records. It was passed on orally, perhaps for centuries before it was written down, and preserved in perpetuity as one of the greatest of all timeless classics. 

I discovered that I had worthwhile things to say to my professional peers and students aspiring to join our ranks, possessed the ability to express these in language others enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing them down. I could summarize and condense complex concepts into simple generalizable principles. In 1977 I started work as editor in chief of a massive comprehensive reference textbook of public health and preventive medicine. When it was published in 1980, that book had 1926 pages, plus 25 pages of 'front matter' - title page, table of contents, preface, list of contributors and their affiliations. The book attracted praise from many quarters. The praise I appreciated most was for the introductory chapter in which I pulled it all together, summarized the complex and occasionally confusing 'big picture' in an overview devoid of technical jargon, 6 pages a grade school child could understand, about the scope, aims, methods and scientific basis of public health. Here is a sample:


"The ways to preserve and improve health are discussed at length in later chapters. In summary, the methods are to keep the environment safe, to enhance immunity to infections, to behave healthfully, to eat wisely and well, to have well-born children, and to care prudently for the sick." 

Whether I'm writing about tangible things or abstract concepts it's important that I, the writer, and all my readers, give the same meaning to every word in the text. There is no place for Humpty-Dumpty in my kind of writing. Remember what Humpty-Dumpty said to Alice: "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." That's not to say I reject ambiguity always and forever. Even in the Dictionary of Epidemiology - a dictionary, forsooth - my editorial team and I felt obliged to leave a little wiggle room, a little uncertainty, or two alternative meanings, for an occasional technical term. We also had to recognize that the same technical word or phrase could occasionally mean something entirely different in two (or more) unrelated scientific domains in which its use had evolved independently. But that's a rather arcane discussion for another time and place, not for this post on this blog.   

In this post I'm discussing my own writing, and it would be easy to get carried away, to run on for far longer than the most patient reader would wish. Time to quit while I'm ahead.

Why I write

George Orwell's essay Why I Write was published in an obscure, short-lived English literary magazine in 1947. It was reprinted in (I think) an Australian literary magazine a year or so later, and that's where I must have read it. It made me think for the first time about why I had this odd compulsion to arrange my thoughts in what seemed to be an orderly manner, and set them down on paper.  I remember trying to set down my reasons why I wrote. I wish I still had the two or three badly typed pages I managed to produce as my answer when I was in my early 20s, but like nearly everything I wrote in those days, it hasn't survived. 

Orwell spent a few pages describing how he wrote, and on what topics - fact, political polemics, infrequently fiction, though later works, his two most famous, most timeless books, Animal Farm and 1984, are classified as fiction. He seems to have found it difficult to address the question in the title of his essay, because he flits around it like a bee buzzing from flower to flower and his reasons are sometimes buried almost shamefacedly in paragraphs about something else. At one point in the essay he tries to compile a list of reasons: egoism; aesthetic enthusiasm; to store facts for posterity; political purpose. But he gets distracted, and this essay, which could have been a valuable contribution to literary scholarship, is in the end a rather frustrating, rather inchoate, rather annoying and disappointing mess. I suppose that's one reason I tried to write my own essay on the matter in 1948 or thereabouts. Other collections of essays that I formerly possessed, by E M Forster, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, half a dozen other 'public intellectuals' of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, are long gone, not part of my shrunken downsized library, so I can't check; but I don't recall any other writers or thinkers who addressed the question, and stated their reasons for writing.

My reasons then included desire to clarify complex concepts and ideas, to explain, perhaps to simplify these concepts and ideas by expressing them in my own words, and not insignificantly, the pleasure I got from writing. These reasons are implicit, sometimes explicit, in much of my professional writing. Among my books, I've edited a massive reference textbook of public health and preventive medicine, compiled and edited technical dictionaries of epidemiology and of public health, and co-edited an encyclopedia of public health and a 'Companion' to Medicine in the 'Companion' series published by Oxford University Press. I wrote large parts of all these books, even the encyclopedia, to which I contributed more than my fair share. Working on all of these and other books and articles, and writing editorials for journals I edited, gave me immense pleasure, partly because of collegial relationships with other editors and authors, but mainly because it was such a pleasure to do all that writing. I've always been chuffed to get feedback from readers who say it's a pleasure to read what I've written, more enjoyable than many other textbooks and works of reference because I wrote with a lively style that kept readers awake.

Until recently I've always been able to find exactly the right word, the appropriate phrase, the rounding off paragraph to sum it all up. Alas, as I enter my 90th year I find all this no longer falls trippingly off my tongue, it's no longer there at the surface of my mind, waiting to be plucked and used to the best purpose. Now I must often search, sometimes in vain, for the needed words and phrases. These, no doubt, are signs of declining intellectual vitality that I must accept and make the best of, smiling bravely through unshed tears as I lament the ravages of time.  No, correction: I don't lament them at all, I acknowledge and accept them, thankful to be here still after all these years and insightful enough to recognize my limitations.

And I can add another reason to my list of reasons Why I write: It's the perfect therapy.

What would you do?

A devoted couple in their early to middle 80s confronted a crisis of accumulating health problems.  I'd known that elderly couple almost all my life. He was my favourite cousin, about 5 years younger than I; and I'd known her for more than 70 years. They'd had a marvellous life. Thanks to lucky real estate deals and other sensible investments they were very wealthy. They could afford to pay for all the domestic help and personal nursing care they needed. In their early to middle 80s, they were as in love as they had been when they married more than 60 years ago. They looked back on full lives that had been enormously pleasurable. One of the highlights of their lives had been a three-year yachting cruise around the world, during which their daughter had paired off with a man from Chile, a nephew of the dictator Augusto Pinochet. One of their sons had fallen for a French girl, married her, and settled in France. Their other son wasn't quite so fortunate: he'd been caught with marijuana in Greece, and despite high-priced legal counsel with good arguments, he'd spent several months in the slammer in Corfu. That was one of the few clouds on their horizon,apart from the fact that two of their three children settled far away on other sides of the world after they married.

Now things were going wrong.  He had become forgetful and unable to care for himself as dementia held him in its increasingly relentless and clammy grip. She'd fallen victim to mesothelioma, an intractable malignancy caused by exposure many years earlier to trace amounts of asbestos, the amount that might be shed by a fraying insulated oven mitt or a barbecue apron. Mesothelioma can't be treated. The malignancy hits the lining of the lungs, sometimes the lining of the gut; but it can't be cut out, can't be treated with radiation or chemotherapy.  Their daughter's marriage had broken down so she had come home from Chile to live near her parents in Queensland in a prosperous suburb of Brisbane. As the mesothelioma advanced and her vitality wilted away, and her husband became increasingly dependent, forgetful and childlike, she and I exchanged several emails. She didn't confide her intentions to me, but I can vividly imagine the thoughts she must have had as she considered their options. I was saddened but not surprised when my brother phoned me with the news that they had taken their lives. They used exhaust fumes from their car engine, so the cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning. My brother, a devout Christian and a retired physician, expressed disapproval of their decision - her decision I suppose - to end their lives together in this way. He'd have preferred the option of palliative care for her, and longterm care for him - care in uncomprehending solitude without his loving wife beside him, because her prognosis was for a rather brief and painful terminal illness, whereas he might have lived for 10 more years. Years ago Wendy and I talked about several scenarios for the end of our lives. One scenario resembled the reality of the fate that befell my cousin and his wife, and they took - or she took - the same decision we'd have opted for in those circumstances. I wholeheartedly support their decision to die together. I picture them in their car, locked together in a final loving embrace: they were an amorous couple who had no inhibitions about expressing their love for each other when in the company of another loving couple like Wendy and me.

They had enough free will and autonomy to decide their own fate, just as Wendy and I would have when we were still together side by side, and I retain, should circumstances arise to justify it. They and I would strongly support physician assisted suicide. Our Supreme Court has decreed that this ought to be the law of the land. It will be, if the next government of Canada is sensibly chosen in the imminent elections. If circumstances arise in my life to make continuing existence unbearable, it would be comforting to know that this option would be available. I wonder how readers of this blog would decide should they face a situation like that of my cousin David and his wife Judy.  Would they opt for Judy's action? Or would they be in favour of my brother Peter's solution? It's an important question that merits debate by all thoughtful people in a society where the fate that overtook my cousin David and his wife Judy occurs increasingly often. In any event, David and Judy live on with a fondly affectionate place in my memories. (The photo shows Judy, Wendy and David at Gordonbrook sheep and cattle station in northern New South Wales, near Grafton, in 1987).

Judy, Wendy and David,
Gordonbrook, near Grafton, NSW, 1987

Values

For many years I discussed values with groups of medical students, occasionally with others such as nursing students, two or three mind-blowing times with combined groups of medical and nursing students. Naturally those discussions focused on health-related values - cleanliness, personal hygiene, fastidious food-handling, consideration of the needs of others where tobacco smoking, noisy behaviour, socially disruptive conduct were concerned. We also talked about fundamental values associated with family formation, cohesiveness and dissolution, which have obvious implications for health. I reported to students my own experience of growing up in a broken home, reared by a divorced mother in an era when divorce was rare and stigmatizing, in contrast to the present time in which separation and divorce are commonplace and socially acceptable. We talked too about Canadian values, respect for human rights and dignity, tolerance, acceptance of social and cultural diversity.  I passionately believe in all the rights embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the UN Charter) and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  When I was younger and stronger I would have been prepared to fight to defend these rights. I've supported Amnesty International financially for more than 40 years and rely on this organization and others like it to fight for me now.

I was appalled and disgusted with the blatantly cynical conduct of prime minister Harper, whose fondness for divisive political tactics has reached a new low in exploiting the worst of xenophobic - Islamophobic - impulses with regard to wearing the niqab. A woman - just one woman - wants to wear a niqab when she takes the oath of Canadian citizenship. She will, of course, have removed the niqab and duly identified herself to requisite officials before the citizenship ceremony. I believe she has the same rights as all other Canadians to dress in a manner she finds culturally comfortable during this rite of passage. To deny her this right is to deny everything Canada stands for. It would be the ultimate denial of Canadian values.  It is typical of Stephen Harper - a divide and rule leader - that he would inflame this and make this one woman's wish into an election issue that over-rides all other issues in importance. It speaks volumes about the emotion-driven thought processes of many people than opinion polls reveal the influence this otherwise irrelevant episode seems to be having on voting intentions. I weep for Canada if this becomes the deciding issue in the election.