Politics – Page 52 – a sibilant intake of breath

Canada’s illegitimate origins

After the War of 1812, Britain, no longer in need of Indigenous allies, began to treat the Indian nations as subjects of the Crown. The colonial administrators paid lip service to the 1763 Royal Proclamation by continuing to acquire land for settlement through treaties with their native owners. But the purpose of making treaties was not to establish a continuing relationship of mutual help and the sharing of the country, but to pave the way for British settlers by isolating groups of Indians on tiny reserves, denying them the possibility of carrying out their traditional economy or the opportunity to participate in the new economy on the off-reserve lands they were considered to have “surrendered.” The policy behind this approach became clear when the United Colony of Canada passed the Gradual Civilization Act in 1857. Indians were now to be confined to reserves until sufficiently civilized to be “emancipated” from their Indian status and assimilated into mainstream society.

Russell, Peter. Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests. University of Toronto Press, 2017. p. 8

Lots of significant climate news

CPSA is keeping me busy, but there have been some interesting news stories in the last few days:

Overall, recent developments are worrisome. We know how short a window there is for action capable of hitting the Paris Agreement’s targets, and yet we continue to make contradictory policy choices.

UTAM’s first ESG report

As called for in President Gertler’s “Beyond Divestment” decision, the U of T Asset Managament Corporation (UTAM) recently released their first report on incorporating environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into the management of the school’s $9 billion portfolio (PDF).

I’m pretty tied up with the Canadian Political Science Association conference from tomorrow to Thursday, when I will be presenting a paper on pipeline resistance, but I will give it a close look afterward.

The original student group that primarily implemented the U of T divestment campaign has dissolved, but there are still efforts at subsidiary bodies like colleges and CUPE 3902 and there is at least some student interest in reviving a university-wide campaign.

Predicting popular responses

I had made a tactical error in allowing my personal views to cloud my political judgment. Even if I believed I was right on the merits, I was wrong about the politics. I should have known enough to warn my boss that the invasion [of Grenada in 1983] would be popular even as I advised him to speak out against it.

Would that have convinced him? Maybe not; maybe it was my passionate certainty that opposing the invasion was a political winner that made my case. Whatever the truth, I learned that day to separate what I thought was right from what I thought would work, a skill that would serve me well — at a price. Judging how the world will judge what you do — how a position will “play” — is an essential political skill. If you can’t predict what will work, you can’t survive in office. If you don’t keep your job, you can’t achieve what you think is right. The danger is when you stop caring about the difference between being right and being employed, or fail to notice that you don’t know what the difference is anymore.

Stephanopoulos, George. All Too Human: A Political Education. Little, Brown and Company; Boston. 1999. p. 18-19

CPSA prep

By next Tuesday I need to submit my paper on the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines for this year’s Canadian Political Science Association conference.

The proposed topic is media coverage and what it reveals about networks of fossil fuel opposition in Canada and the U.S. and the framings they are using.

Originally, it was meant to be an input to my old PhD project (about pipelines). The upcoming deadline, loss of that motivation, and the disappointing functionality of the Factiva and Canadian Newsstand news databases all have me rethinking the scope and focus of the paper.

The conference itself is May 30th to June 2nd. I am still waiting to hear back on TA position and internship applications, and still contemplating what to do about my present lack of a PhD supervisor.

Democracy and fossil fuels

The rise of mass democracy is often attributed to the emergence of new forms of political consciousness. The autonomy enjoyed by coal miners lends itself to this kind of explanation. There is no need, however, to detour into questions of shared culture or collective consciousness to understand the new forms of agency that miners helped assemble. The detour would be misleading, for it would imply that there was some shortage in earlier periods or other places of people demanding a less precarious life.

What was missing was not consciousness, not a repertoire of demands, but an effective way of forcing the powerful to listen to those demands. The flow and concentration of energy made it possible to connect the demands of miners to those of others, and to give their arguments a technical force that could not easily be ignored. Strikes became effective, not because of mining’s isolation, but on the contrary because of the flows of carbon that connected chambers between the ground to every factory, office, home or means of transportation that depended on steam or electrical power.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso; London. 2013. p. 21

Two responses:

First, it’s unfamiliar to think of fossil fuels as a positive force for social welfare.

Second, perhaps the familiar climate activist strategy of building a social movement is insufficient and we need to think about what means (if any) can align power with the objective of a stable climate.

Animal transport and the ethics of meat

In a perceptive tweet Ziya Tong argued: “In the 21st century you’ll find cameras *everywhere* except: where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes”.

I have long been of the view that if people were forced to look at where our meat, eggs, and dairy come from, few would still be willing to eat them.

That lines up with a recent episode of The Current, in which Anita Krajnc’s acquittal for giving water to pigs heading to a slaughterhouse was used to open a broader conversation about animal transport in the meat industry, including high mortality among “spent hens” used to make nuggets and chicken soup.

My vegetarianism has softened since the long period when I was pretty strict about it starting in 2005, though not for any morally-informed reason. Rather, I think it has just been a result of the way meat-eating (among so many other unsustainable and potentially unethical behaviours) is normalized in our society.

At a minimum, I will try to be more mindful again going forward. Talk of “spent hens” and the conditions of pig, cattle, and horse transport has kept me vegetarian since the broadcast.

Establishing a Responsibility to Repair

The concept of Right to Repair is meant to help consumers and tinkerers keep their vehicles, electronics, and other equipment going, despite the preferences of manufacturers that they buy something new or at least pay the original builder for any repairs.

In a more sustainable world, we can imagine a Responsibility to Repair, where any manufacturer of a product intended to be durable – from a phone or laptop to a car or house – would be expected to support repairs by providing blueprints and source code, by making spare parts available, and by designing products in the first place so that failures can be repaired (a) by individual users (b) by third-party repair centres and (c) by the company itself.

This is the opposite of the Apple philosophy of keeping everything secret, building machines that cannot be taken apart, and throwing away anything broken to replace it with something new.

In a Responsibility to Repair world, governments could keep track of all devices which consumers report as broken and impossible to fix, and then press companies to comply with regard to those items. Companies that refuse could face sactions from fines to losing the right to advertise to losing the right to make products in certain categories.

It would be the end of planned obsolescence, and the start of a much more sustainable form of consumerism. Even for companies that close down, this approach would create multiple benefits, since their design specifications and software would be openly available and their products would be designed with public repair in mind from the beginning. If one big jurisdiction like the EU were to establish laws of this kind, the benefits would be felt around the world.

France’s 2017 election

What a relief! The last thing the world needs now is the EU falling apart, or another victory for an anti-immigration propagandist.

The largest problems we face now call for us to think beyond national units, about the interests and choices of humanity as a whole. Splitting into small combative tribes is a deeply maladaptive response to the pressures we’re feeling.

Canada and climate ethics

On Friday, I presented my paper “Canadian Climate Change Policy from a Climate Ethics Perspective” at the Centre for Ethics’s graduate conference: Imagining 150: The Ethics of Canada’s Sesquicentennial.

The paper was well received and the conference overall was worthwhile and a welcome variation on the standard political science gathering.