Because It's 2015

Today the new federal cabinet was sworn in. As promised, women make up 50 per cent of the cabinet positions. After viewing the appointments as well as the discussion around them, I reflected on the meaning of this moment. Trudeau's justification of ''because it's 2015'' really points out how simultaneously exciting and unremarkable the announcement was.

To start, it's easy to see why this is momentus. While the previous government was not known to be friendly toward women in politics, Canada has in fact had a pretty long history of women's absence from cabinet. 27 per cent of the Liberal MPs elected to Parliament were women - that's 50 of the 88 female MPs elected. This broke a few records, and the cabinet announcement is really an achievement that goes well beyond this. 

However, it's perhaps a bit more difficult to see this event as merely a requirement. The time for this has, to some degree, come and gone. Canada ranks poorly in terms of female representation in federal politics, below the 30 per cent threshold that is encouraged by the United Nations. The fact that it took until 2015 to have anywhere even close to this level of parity is, frankly, rather embarrassing. Trudeau's decision should be lauded, but it is nowhere near as progressive as some people are making it out to be.

It's worthwhile noting that there are existing quota systems in play in federal government. The most evident are regional differences, language, and affiliation. A good cabinet has largely been one that is meant to look good on paper, so the fact that so many people are bent out of shape about Trudeau's choices not being about merit are rather misguided. In fact, this truly reinforces the idea that quota systems are short-term solutions, because eventually we come to expect a certain diversity.

As such, I'd like to briefly outline the importance of affirmative action. There was barely an increase over 2011 in terms of women elected to the House of Commons. However, the media will have you believe that the 1 percentage point increase is a massive coup. This, as mentioned above, plays out both negatively and positively depending on people's values (to scare or encourage). But the idea should functionally be that a cabinet with parity should encourage more women to become engaged in the political system and, perhaps more importantly, it should convince the public that women are in fact capable of holding a portfolio and delivering like their male counterparts.

I'll leave you with an important notion: that diversity will lead to a greater degree of experience, a sharing of values, and hopefully better governance. Let's see what the next four years will hold.

Electoral Reform: It's Time

The election of the Liberals ten days ago should signify some changes to the way our electoral system works in Canada. In this post, I'm going to talk about the importance of democratic reform being a consultative decision, as well as what I believe to be the best solution - single transferable vote.

Having won roughly the same proportion of the popular vote as the Conservatives in 2011, the Liberals won a majority government with less than 40 per cent of Canadians' support. The Liberals, Greens, and NDP had all promised some form of electoral reform during the campaign, and now that we have a majority Liberal government, the pressure is on.

Trudeau recently mentioned that a solution will be created within eighteen months. It is my hope that the solution will be troven through thorough public consultation. I think it would be an excellent idea to form a commission, engaging civil society in order to establish what Canadians want.

However, my concern is less whether there will be reform; I'm truly concerned that, almost by default, electoral reform will consist of adopting proportional representation. Throughout the campaign, the visibility of proportional representation was very high, to the exclusion of alternatives.

To me the value of proportional representation is that for most voters it is the easiest to comprehend. It also ensures that no vote whatsoever is wasted and that results are parallel to the popular vote. However, I firmly believe that our system is based on value of local representation and this is why I am opposed to proportional representation. Members of Parliament are responsible to their constituents, not the electorate in general. Moreover, voters should be able to select who they are voting for directly, not selecting a party from the list having no idea for whom they are voting directly (this would be true both in closed party lists and open party lists).

This is why I believe that Canada should adopt single transferable vote. This system still uses ridings, albeit larger ones with a greater number of candidates. In this case you have a ballot where you can make a determinate amount of choices, ranked by number. A threshold is set whereby a certain number of candidates must meet this target to win. There will be multiple winners in a riding, reflecting the voting intention of the constituents.

A practical example of this would be looking at New Brunswick's results. The Liberals won all ten of the seats in the province. In this particular case, the Liberals won all these seats by taking at least 40 per cent of the vote. Despite having won more than 50 per cent of the vote on average in the province, they were awarded all the seats. In this particular setup, if we considered using all of New Brunswick as a riding and selecting ten winners, there is no way that the Liberals could have won all ten seats; they likely would have won six. This allows for other candidates to represent the 45 per cent of voters who didn't vote Liberal.

No system is going to be perfect, but I feel that single transferable vote best balances the need for local representation with the need for results that better fit with voter choices. The longer term implications for reform will mean that strategic voting will no longer be a looming problem. Voter intention and voter choice should theorectically be fully correlated. For more information view this explanation or this report.

Most importantly, there is a significant lack of awareness about single transferable vote in Canada. I propose the creation of a non-profit organisation to lobby for its adoption and to educate voters about its benefits. I hope to find other people who are equally interested in this particular reform.

Concert Diplomacy and the Conflict in Syria

I first wrote about the ongoing conflict in Syria in July 2013. The torrent has been raging now for nearly five years and shows little sign of slowing. In the time since writing, the context has changed - most notably with Western powers now coming to face the fact that Bashar Al-Assad will likely be part of the solution to the crisis, if only for the time being.

The news that the United States and Russia may work together to back the authoritarian regime has caused its share of controversy, but this concert diplomacy is taking place in the context of what has repeatedly been called the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War. As the sheer magnitude of the volume of refugees is becoming clearer, more and more in Europe are erecting baracades to keep assylum-seekers out. The question of how to deal with this influx was one of the major election issues during this fall's General Federal Election in Canada.

The political pressure of the refugee crisis is meeting up with the failure of the West to contain or eradicate ISIS. These two phenomena, though largely unrelated at the onset, have coalesced into a diplomatic nightmare that has required cooperation from the likes of France, the United States, Iran, and Russia. There has been much made of the United States working collaboratively with Russia in order to achieve peace in the region. Moreover, the idea of supporting a dictator who has been directly implicated in killing his own citizens has been viewed with, at the very least, scepticism.

Leaving aside the ethical questions of this quandry, it's worthwhile considering the practical consideration that the United States will be finding itself in another version of a situation from which it has failed to properly itself. The American withdrawl from Iraq is viewed as the principal cause for the rapid spread of ISIS - not to mention that Washington has redoubled its commitment in Afghanistan.

As someone who opposes foreign state intervention as a general rule (and as someone who believes in sovereignty), I view attempts to impose a solution with great disdain. However, as someone who also believes in the right to national self-determination, I have strong feelings that Assad is not a legitimate representation of power in Syria. The proposed solution, thus, fails both criteria: it imposes a decision from outside the country by backing a leader that does not represent Syrians. Even if the longer-term solution is to depose Assad, it's ethically flawed.

Unfortunately, there aren't many reasonable alternatives. Intervening unofficially by supporting various rebels has proven to only exacerbate tensions. Intermittent participation in the region is arbitrary and generates new power vacuums and radical political movements like ISIS. The development of a reasonable settlement will require various stakeholders to be able to negotiate together in good faith. However, as we've seen with other conflicts in the Middle East, this is not easily attainable. There are so many divergent groups - all with differing visions of a united Syria.

Instead of focusing on how to restructure Syria, we should be taking a harm reduction perspective, helping to resettle as many refugees as possible. If we are all truly moved by the image of the young Syrian boy who washed onto a beach in Turkey, we should be organising in a way that can make a serious difference. The international community does not have a legal obligation to fight Assad; it has a moral obligation to ease the suffering of ordinary Syrians, those who have uprooted themselves and made arduous journeys that meet never-ending obstacles. Making a difference is possible and actually quite feasible, but it's going to take a collective will to act.

Our Forty-Second Parliament

Most of you are probably aware of the degree to which I was surprised with the election results. I was stunned to see the electoral map painted red, particularly the early results in Atlantic Canada. So the story goes that people took strategic voting to the extreme, but I see many fundamental shifts that underlay the sweeping changes we saw on Monday. The next four years are going to be interesting, and we have to make sure that we navigate the fine line between holding the new government accountable and allowing them to establish themselves.

I'll start out by saying that I have very mixed feeling about the result. I'm so relieved that we are now living in a country where, not only is Harper not our prime minister, but where he has abdicated his role as the leader of a unified Conservative party. Conversely, the tide that elected a majority Liberal government is unsettling. I had been prepared for a minority government and spent the entirety of the 78-day campaign conceptualising this. A majority changes not only my expectations for the future, but also those of most in my social circles. Especially when this majority is a mirror of its predecessor, winning less than 40 per cent of the popular vote. This means that not only do the Liberals have complete control in the legislature; they will be directing us until the fall of 2019.

That said, I firmly believe that mixed feelings are probably a good thing. I'm trying to be open-minded. I've seen a fair amount of anger from supporters of everyone (including some Liberals) about the election result, and while I'm surprised, I'd prefer to consider myself cautiously optimistic about this government. My perspective at present is very much let's not judge until the government starts doing things. And I'm not saying this as a partisan.

However, the question of the NDP is one that will take some time to unravel. I've heard a lot about strategic voting as the cause for the collapse of the NDP. This is likely true in the sense that the NDP didn't make many gains, but it fails to explain why many veteran NDP members of parliament like Paul Dewar, Megan Leslie, and Andrew Cash were all defeated in rather impressive upsets.

Perhaps a better explanation lay in the fact that the NDP has changed direction significantly under Mulcair compared to under Layton. Layton's progressive vision of Canada was inspiring to Canadians and, in particular, Québec. Mulcair failed to build on this; instead focusing on jobs and the economy. I'd have to atribute this shift not only to ideological changes within party leadership, but to the fact that the NDP were leading in polls and were seeking to be viewed more seriously. It's no surprise to me that this led Trudeau to run on a platform of positivity this time around.

Having largely avoided taking policy positions, there are many pseudo-commitments made by the Liberals that I intend to watch carefully. Chief among these are the review of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the omnibus Bill C-51. In both instances the Liberals failed to adopt real policy positions during the campaign, opting instead to review them after forming a government. Progressives hope that we see the Liberals undo the damage socially and economically that will be caused by these two pieces of legislation. More importantly, for the future of our democracy, I sincerely hope that the Liberals will in fact commit to reforms to our electoral system. The massive majority mandate that Trudeau received may allow him to escape dealing with this issue for the time being.

At any rate, I'm happy we have a more progressive parliament, one that better exemplifies the values of Canadians. I wish Trudeau luck.

Symbols: Memory and Identity

It's been some time now since the shooting in South Carolina that led to heated discussion about the Confederate flag and its place in the public realm. Whatever your perspective, the question disappeared overnight from our radar with the supreme court decision on same-sex marriage. I thought it might be time to reflect on the Confederate flag and the role that symbols play in collective memory and the construction of identity.

The image of the Confederate flag, as we have seen, has proven to be polarising. To many, it is a visual representation of the evils of slavery; to others, it is a symbol of the heritage of the American South. Accordingly, the Confederate flag evokes rather polarising attitudes. With the focus recently on the question of whether or not it should be banned, I think the point has been largely missed. Most symbols are not ubiquitously good or bad - this is inherent because they are complex. As shocking as this may come to people, symbols have different meanings to different audiences. While I am offended by the values behind the Confederate flag, I'm still undecided on what I feel about banning it.

Again - this stuff is complex. Moreover, why are we stopping here? Why aren't we outraged that Thomas Jefferson is on American currency or that the American flag has a history or violence, hate, and oppresion along with it. Why do we valorise corporate symbols that are synonymous with corruption or oppression? There are plenty of other examples of symbols that have failed to inspire a collective action to irradicate them. Before we go any further, let's consider that symbols can be images (like a flag for example), but people, groups, and institutions can also act as symbols.

There are three cases I'd like to briefly outline below that illustrate the complex nature of symbols.

It's difficult to discuss symbols without delving into Nazism. In the years following the Second World War, there was a massive undertaking in both East and West Germany to remove the references to Hilter. One of the most interesting ways in which this occured was by changing the names of streets and public squares. Virtually every population centre in Germany and Austria had something named after Hitler. In East Germany, many of these squares were renamed in the honour of Stalin; in West Germany the emphasis was on the new class of liberals. Absent from the renamings on both sides are the thousands of streets and squares throughtout the country that bear reference to Germany's brutal colonial past in Africa (something which Germany shares with most European nations).  

More recently, the remains of King Richard III were found under a parking lot in Leicester in the fall of 2012. Despite the fact that Richard III is often regarded as a despot, a majestic funeral was held in his honour. The fact that he was royalty trumped his actions - meaning that the symbolism of the British crown ultimately the significant factor.

Lastly, the Catholic Church's involvement in Indian Residential Schools makes up a major part of the complex story of the Church in Canadian history. The Church represents both life and death quite literally in the early history of our nation. Despite the harm caused by the Church, an apology has yet to be offered. Symbols associated with catholocism are, therefore, likely to be viewed with some major differences.

As an historian, I am deeply concerned about pushing the undesirable elements from our past into a dark corner. From my perspective, I'm really concerned with the idea that we are policing people's values. Symbols are among the more powerful manifestations of an idea. Banning a symbol gives it great power. Instead, let's unpack symbols and discuss what they mean (all of their complex meanings).

FHRITP

There has been an absolute flurry of activity around FHRITP. A TFC fan, Shawn Simoes, was interpellated by a CityTV reporter on Sunday, confronted as to whether or not he was going to try to yell the viral phrase into her microphone. Hydro One released a statement that Simoes is no longer employed with the public enterprise. While this move was certainly justified, I don't feel like we're going far enough in dealing with sexism, in particular with street harassment.

Last fall I remember a viral video campaign about a woman who walked the streets of New York filming the men who approached her. You may also remember the Twitter trend #YesAllWomen from a few years ago. These all highlight the prevalence of women being victimised because men think it's acceptable to harass, intimidate, or otherwise insert themselves into situations with women. Sunday was merely the most recent example.

Interestingly, there has been another trend lately of employers having to fire staff who get embroiled in scandal. Consider the importance of behaviour online. Most social media has at least some component that is public, meaning that contributions (photos, posts, etc) can be viewed by anyone. Take, for example, Matt Bowman, a Toronto firefighter who was fired last November after he tweeted racist and sexist remarks. In this particular case, it was easy to tell that Bowman was a member of the city's fire department based on a cursary glance at his profile. This phenomenon is not limited to the public sector: Justine Sacco, a PR executive, was fired after making racist comments on Twitter.

Organisations will continue to be less and less tolerant of their employee's indiscretions. Pressure from the public is always instrumental in calling out these behaviours and then demanded action from the employer. Bad public relations from the mishandling of a scandal can cost companies their annual advertising budget or more.

Despite the fact that offensive behaviour in public or online can cause a wave of shame against those presuming to do wrong, it can also result in the victims being targeting. In the case of the FHRITP, it's evident that some people feel that Simoe losing his job has turned him into a victim. Others decry the feminisation of public space or the disappearance of free speech. Still more, people claim that the humour is not understood, that it's just a prank, or that we are taking things too seriously. Whatever the case, there are plenty of apologists.

Regardless, Simoe can probably now understand what it's like to be harrassed and victimised (not to insinuate that this is just) and hopefully he will have learned a valuable lesson. Surely this episode had to have been embarrassing for him, not to mention devastating for his career. I really hope, however, that instead of letting him take the fall, that we use this as an opportunity to reflect on what values actually lead people to saying FHRITP. The manifestations of sexism evolve and we will be finding ourselves “outraged” about another misogynist phenomenon in no time. Let's connect the dots instead of gathering to watch someone crash and burn.

Contextualising the NDP Victory in Alberta

Yesterday I awoke to a flurry of activity on the radio and social media - the Alberta NDP pulled off a spectacular and historic win. Not only did they win a majority government, but they unseated the Progressive Conservatives who have been ruling the province for 43 years. The NDP managed what would have only been unthinkable sixty days ago and the prospects for Alberta and for Canada have changed dramatically.

While it is important to note that the result has been characterised as less a PC loss than an NDP win, I think too much has been made of this argument. Yes, the election was largely a referendum on Jim Prentice, but have we already forgotten that in the previous Alberta election in 2012 that it was the Wild Rose Party that many projected would form a majority government? The truth is that the PCs have been managing to hold it together despite the fact that there was a growing popular sentiment that it was time for a change - though admittedly unsure of where that would go. The 2012 election illustrates that there was a desire to change, but that Albertans would not abandon the PCs without reason (there was too much risk, evidently). The line that the PCs lost this election is important to take into consideration, but it neglects the fact the the NDP and Rachel Notley made an impact on voters and spoke to their desires instead of their fears.

Despite the fact that the crowd at party headquarters reacted negatively when Notley announced that she was looking forward to working with Harper, I have few worries that Edmonton and Ottawa will fail to work in concert. Moreover, I think this plays into the hands of conservatives who attempt to make out the NDP as the antidote to a healthy economy. The NDP will not destroy Alberta's economy (not that the economy was not in serious trouble under PC management). There will be some concrete changes if the NDP follows through with leading platform thrusts like increasing the minimum wage and introducing new income tax brackets. While business leaders will claim that these changes will hurt Alberta industry, it's only a mechanism to ensure that people can benefit more evenly from the province's prosperity.

Given that this is a federal election year, the NDP win will no doubt influence the outcome in October. There impact has already been felt in Ottawa with the federal NDP claiming that the election has shown that Alberta voters can elect a leftist party. Moreover, Justice Minister Peter Mackay commented that caucus was like a “morgue” on Wednesday morning (also commenting that the province was now becoming Albertistan). With Orange Crush cans turning up across the country, there is no doubt that the NDP win is being felt.

However, there is the matter of the NDP tabling a budget in Alberta, something that must happen before summer. This means that Notley will have to demonstrate her capacity to actually run the province, not merely win the election. This includes selecting first priorities, working out the economics of the budget, and nominating a cabinet from a group of novices. This will be a true test: the party managing the day-to-day affairs of Canada's most successful economy in terms of GDP per capita.

Ultimately, I'm not holding my breath. There is a long stretch between now and October. While there aren't many certainties, it would be a safe bet to say that Canadians will be eagerly watching Alberta for the next few months.