Close…
I was off by a day. Actually, the government fell Friday. The PM resigned the government to the Governor-General and a federal election’s been called for May 2nd.
The government falls today
So apparently the government is due to fall today. It’s a minority government, and the opposition parties have the power to defeat the budget, which in Westminster parliaments is a vote of non-confidence that compels the incumbent government to resign and the Crown to call an election. Supposedly, we will all go to the polls in early May. Despite the fact that the economy’s moving reasonably well and the line’s been held on unemployment, the government doesn’t seem way out in front and there’s every chance that we’ll have yet another minority government. The opposition parties are playing up the “contempt of Parliament” angle since the governing Tories have stonewalled discussions of the costs and funding of some of their pet projects in committee and have been officially called on it. If it stands and isn’t killed on procedural grounds, the Harper government will be the first in the Commonwealth formally cited for contempt, and that could be damning in the election.
Poll on various attitudes
In The Globe and Mail today there’s a poll that reveals some interesting things about the current state of attitudes across the country. Most notable to me was the “trust in occupations” poll. At the top, scientists are trusted by 74% of the people. The numbers decline from there through university profs (57%), journalists (32%), pollsters (28%), priests (21%), union leaders (16%), and politicians (10%). At the very bottom? Bloggers. 8%. So I guess you better not take my word for any of this. Besides, do you even trust the pollsters I’m quoting?
There are some encouraging things coming out of the poll. One is the trust in science. 69% of us are “bothered” that “hard scientific evidence isn’t shaping public policy to the degree that it should be”. This dovetails with the trust previously noted in scientists in this country. Relatedly, 64% of us don’t believe that the talk of greenhouse gases causing global climate change is just hype. Only 23% of Canadians worry that science is going too far and hurting society; 56% of us don’t agree with that statement.
60% of Canadians believe that “intellectualism and rational debate” should drive contemporary politics (as opposed to “populism and common sense”, at 28%), though only 17% of us are satisfied that they actually do.
At times of personal crisis, 71% of us prefer consulting psychiatrists, etc., as opposed to 14% who would consult a priest, rabbi, or other religious leader.
Another part of the poll addresses something that has concerned me for a while. Not much is made of the potential for creationism/intelligent design to be taught in our public schools. I can’t find any legal references to this in Canada one way or the other. The poll, contrast with another, may suggest why this hasn’t been an issue. Asked about their opinions on the origins of mankind, respondents replied as follows:
| Origin of mankind | Canadian respondents (EKOS, March 2011) |
US respondents (Gallop, December 2010) |
| Humans were created by God in the last 10,000 years |
14% |
40% |
| Humans evolved over time, but through divine guidance |
19% |
38% |
| Humans evolved through natural selection |
58% |
16% |
| Don’t know/no response |
8% |
6% |
…This might explain why cries of “teach the controversy” strike me as such a southern phenomenon. I think it bodes well for the future of science education in this land.
On finances, we’re more interested in investing in health, education, and jobs (59%), than in either keeping taxes as low as possible (23%) or keeping the deficit as low as possible (18%). Speaking purely personally, the deficit troubles me; someone has to pay for that someday. But I agree, it’s important to keep the people and the economy healthy. You can’t ever pay down the deficit, much less the debt, without those fundamentals in place. We did it before, from 1997-2008, and we’ll do it again. Perhaps in keeping with my thoughts, 68% of us do not want the government spending money on the F-35 fighter jets right now, because we’re in deficit territory. Only 27% of us think it’s a good idea. Given that PM Harper has a majority government, he might want to take that into consideration, since an election looks to be in the offing.
D.C.: District of Canada?
I don’t know why, but yes, I woke up at 2 or 3 this morning apparently concerned with the fact that Canada’s federal capital, Ottawa, is actually just another city in Ontario. That doesn’t seem quite fair, does it?
Several of our sister federal democracies have special regions for their national capitals. Right off the top of my head I can think of the United States (the District of Columbia), Australia (Australian Capital Territory), Mexico (Mexican Federal District), and Brazil (Brazilian Federal District). I know there are others (a cursory glance at Wikipedia just now confirms it). But amazingly, despite the fact that we’re one of the oldest extant federations in the world now, Canada isn’t one of them.
Ottawa was chosen by Queen Victoria to be the capital of the United Provinces of Canada back in 1857, and the construction of the Parliament Buildings was begun there. This wasn’t modern Canada yet; this was the union of what became Ontario and Quebec, forged in 1840. By the time we were getting around to creating the Dominion of Canada, the modern version of the country to which the various British North American colonies eventually adhered, the buildings were just about ready. Ottawa served as the UPC capital for about one year; in 1867, the British North America Act brought the Dominion of Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and a now re-separated Ontario and Quebec) into being, and Ottawa became the federal capital.
But the City of Ottawa was, and remains, a creature of the Province of Ontario. Ontario can divide it, rename it, merge it with other Ontarian municipalities (which, in fact, it did, in 2001), or even abolish it altogether, without a word of permission from any other province or the federal government. In most other countries like ours, no province or state has that kind of sway over the capital city of the nation.
The federal government has this nice little fiction going about the “National Capital Region”. This is comprised of Ottawa, in Ontario, and Gatineau, across the Ottawa River in Quebec (which is, itself, a municipal creation of the Province of Quebec, and nothing more). It has some niceties that are observed by those cities and their respective provinces, but nothing with the force of constitutionality about them. Not one square inch of territory has been ceded to federal control by either province.
It’s a tempest in a teapot, I admit. There’s no real will in the country to take land from Ontario and/or Quebec and create a separate capital district, and, realistically, no real reason to. Nevertheless I wish it had been done at the time of Confederation. It would seem natural now, instead of a chore that no one’s likely to ever lift a finger to undertake. It just strikes me as the right thing to do, technically, but it probably never will be.
Don’t buy for me, Argentina
I’ve just read reports that Canada’s military spending is the highest it’s been since WWII… up 54% over what we were spending at 9/11. We’re now the 13th largest military spender in the world, and the 6th largest in NATO. To put that into some kind of perspective, we’re only the 36th most populous nation on Earth, under such others as France, Britain, and even Argentina.
To put an even finer point on it, as of today, our national debt matches the highest it’s ever been, which was in 1997 before we started paying the debt down. The roughtly 1/4, 1/3 of the debt we’d retired by 2008? All gone. We’re back where we started. Some time today, our national debt will be the highest it’s ever been. $563 billion. About 35 million people. You do the math.
Now, admittedly, the latter item comes from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, as self-interested a group of well-heeled, right-wing greedheads as you’re ever going to meet. These are the kind of people who pay the Fraser Institute to publish “studies” that say things like the government of Canada could be run less expensively if we outsourced it to Muammar Gaddafi or something. So while I’m immediately on the defensive when it comes to the source of this news, at the same time, I don’t have a really solid reason to doubt its veracity. Trust the Ebenezer Scrooge Admiration Society to know how many pennies are, or aren’t, in the pig.
But why are we spending this money? Why now? We’ve been stuck in Afghanistan since October, 2001, longer than we were in the Second World War (with its previously matchless military spending). We’re still a member of military alliance whose raison d’etre disppeared twenty years ago. We’re surrounded by the ocean, border only one other country (who, let’s face it, we could hold off for about fifteen minutes militarily if push came to shove even if we spent every red cent on the military), and we have good relations with just about every other country on Earth. Even the ones with the only real capacity to endanger us, Russia and China, are friends and trading partners with no inclination to do so; in fact, it would be injurious to their own interests. For God’s sake, why, in the middle of the biggest recession since the Depression, when there’s been less real existential threat to Canada, North America, or the Western World than at any other time in my life or before, are we blowing money out our ass on the military, above and beyond what suited us when we were in the Cold War? This makes no sense at all.
Meanwhile, along with citizenship, every Canadian kid born this today also automatically inherits a tab of $16,000 drawing his/her first breath. Talk about original sin.
I never used this blog.
I set up Maple Moonbat years ago, and I kind of just let it sit there. The idea was that I wanted to see what a WordPress blog was like (I’m a longtime Blogger user and still am). But you know, I have this, it’s set up… I ought to use it for something. I’ll try to figure out what the difference should be between City in the Trees and Maple Moonbat here. I’m kind of inclined to think the former should be about stuff I’m doing and this one, stuff I’m thinking. Political stuff. There’s already tons of that at CitT, but you gotta start somewhere.
Maple Moonbat 