The Ford Brothers Radio Show Does Not Belong On Public Airwaves

Recently resigned member of Toronto Mayor Ford's executive committee, Paul Ainslie (voted with Ford 80% during this council term) has written a letter to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council asking that the Ford brothers' radio show "The City" on Newstalk 1010 (CFRB) be taken off the air.  It's about time someone in authority made a stink about this.

Naturally defenders of Ford mostly on the right are howling about "free speech."  This is utter nonsense. Our section 2 Charter guarantee of freedom of speech is not at issue here.  The right of a private corporation to subsidize the political careers of ideologically friendly politicians by donations of the public's airwaves is the issue.

"Free Speech" does not entitle the Fords to their own weekly radio show.  I don't have a radio show, are my free speech rights being trampled?

A few months ago, the Globe and Mail had a good background article on this show, which I think was pretty revealing in terms of the station management's motives.  It starts out explaining that originally the show featured a centrist Councillor named Josh Matlow:

Newstalk 1010 hatched The City in the fall of 2011, with centrist councillor Josh Matlow as host because, according to the station’s program director Mike Bendixen, “a lot of our listeners were fed up with just hearing about all the screaming and yelling and nonsense that was happening at City Hall.” Six months later, after an overture by someone on the mayor’s staff, Mr. Bendixen handed the show over to the Fords.

So listener feedback is they're sick of all the screaming & fights, so the station brings on this middle of the road councillor, then someone from the Mayor asks them for the show, and they just give it to the most histrionic and vitriolic pair of politicians in the city?  What?

Right from the start the Fords made no pretense to doing a civic affairs program, like past mayors have done say on cable access TV or such.  This is not fielding constituent calls about potholes and road closures.  The show has been overtly political in support of the Fords' agenda and a megaphone with which to broadcast their views unfiltered.  The station does not even bother with having a host or moderator, giving full control to the Fords.

The usual excuse about free market entities just seeking to make a buck doesn't seem to apply either, as another bit reveals:

Ratings for the show are fine but not exceptional, especially for a time slot with notoriously low audiences. The City pulled a 3.7 share during the winter 2013 rating period: on average, 3.7 per cent of all radios on in the Toronto area were tuned to Newstalk 1010. But, said Mr. Bendixen, “I’m interested in keeping the show on the air as long as they’re interested in doing the show.”

So, ratings are no matter, station management wants the Fords on the air, no matter who listens.

Now, the law is not utterly toothless about this, apparently the CRTC won't allow officially campaigning politicians to have a radio show (at least without equal time to all opponents), but in Toronto, while candidates for office can register Jan 1, 2014, they are not officially "candidates" until they do:

Once the Fords file their paperwork to run, which they have vowed to do next January for the election in Oct. 2014, they will need to step away from the mic. But if they postpone their registration until the last possible moment, in September, there may be little that opponents can do.

Rob Ford has promised to file his paperwork immediately in January.  Doug on the other hand, is now "98% sure he won't run for council again."  How interesting, and why, if that would say, let the Mayor's older brother keep doing a show that amounts to two hours of free advertising for the Mayor every week, well, wouldn't that just be a fortuitious side effect of not registering in January.  And if Doug say, changes his mind in September, and files then, well...

This has to be stopped.  It's unethical and a violation of the principles of democracy which rely on a level playing field for the battle of political ideas.  Large corporations giving away the airwaves we the public entrust them with is not tolerable.

The show has other corrosive effects on Toronto's democracy, as it distorts the ability of the media to even put direct questions to the Fords.  Most politicians are eager for camera and microphone time that they're willing to endure some adversarial questioning, but the Fords don't have to make that trade off.  They (especially Rob) can dodge the media all week, and know they get two hours of completely unfiltered airtime to mouth off.  In fact, other media have journalists doing show recaps on what the Fords say, so even if you don't listen, you can get Ford's "side" of whatever story via your trusty stenographer.

It's the ultimate stop in the access journalism race to the bottom game that observers of US politics should be familiar with.  The Sun's Joe Warmington is infamous for softball interviews with the Mayor, but that doesn't even compete with just handing over the whole medium to the Mayor like CFRB does. 

Toronto, and hopefully the province needs to give these topics more thought.  Ford is exposing large flaws in our systems of accountability and democratic fairness.  Maybe Council needs a formal Parliament style "question period" so at least the city administration would have to face questions from opposing councillors, so that if the media can't get answers from the Mayor, someone can.  Ainslie's letter is a start, but a larger discussion about these topics must go on.

Canada Could Have a Government Shut Down

(Update 1 (19:00 17 Oct) Below)

I won't lay odds on it, but this is entirely possible:

• Liberals/NDP/coalition wins the 2015 Federal Election
• Currently the Senate is 60 Conservative out of 105, plus 6 vacancies Harper could fill any time.  The Conservatives will have a safe majority in the Senate for at least several years barring resignations/deaths.
• Government passes a budget ("supply" of funds for the government to run) in the House of Commons
• Senate blocks it or pushes unacceptable amendments that the Government cannot accept
• Government funding runs out without new supply bill passed

In fact, something like this happened in Australia.  The outcome was something known as the Australian "constitutional crisis" because the Governor-General dismissed the sitting Prime Minister despite the latter maintaining confidence of the House.  The GG justified this on the basis that the PM was unable to maintain supply - even though the blockage of supply was in the opposition controlled Senate, he claimed that was sufficient cause for him to intervene and replace the PM.

How likely is this here?  Somewhat less likely since our Senate is mostly appointed minus a couple western Senators who won provincially administered elections and may not be bold enough to do this.  It would also seriously run the risk of Canadians demanding the body's abolition, but as we just saw in the US, right wing political movements are capable of amazing miscalculations of public response to extreme measures.

I don't think this will happen, but I wouldn't put it past them either.

Update 1:

A kind reader challenged me, arguing that in the event a new budget is not passed, the Government just keeps spending at the existing levels in the last budget.  This person even provided this helpful link to a Parliamentary guide book to the budget process.  The section on "borrowing authority" is important because it shows how Canada does not have anything comparably stupid to the US self-destruct button named "debt ceiling."  On the subject of supply as I read it:

• Footnote 105 states that "The Financial Administration Act states that no payment shall be made out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund without the authority of Parliament"
• The section on "interim supply" shows that just to debate and figure out the budget, Parliament has to pass a short term mini-supply bill to give itself time to figure out what the real budget will be

Then there's this useful Huffington Post piece (despite it arguing the exact opposite of my thesis), says:

Alison--But elections or coalition negotiations take time -- often months. What happens if government needs money during such a period and there is no Parliament? Why isn't the threat of service shutdown as severe in Canada?

Jane--I wasn't sure about this at first either, so I asked scholar Mark Jarvis, who told me that Canada fortunately has a back-up decision-maker in the Governor General, who can approve a Special Warrant that allows money to flow to the government without Parliament's approval.

Under law, this can only happen when three conditions are met: First, Parliament is dissolved (not prorogued). Second, a Minister indicates that the expenditure is urgent for the public good. And third, the President of the Treasury Board reports there is no money remaining for government to use. In this situation, the GG gives access to money from the Consolidated Revenue Fund. When a new Parliament is formed, it retroactively reviews any Special Warrant and approves them.

In the scenario I am describing where the Senate is holding up supply, this above scenario would not apply.  The above was designed for our responsible government system, where a government has fallen on the budget, and thus must contend an election, leaving the existing cabinet operating under curtailed powers to act in care-taker mode only until a new government is formed.  If the Senate is holding up supply, Parliament is not dissolved.

In fact, all this makes it more likely a Canadian GG would be tempted to follow the Australian model and deem a failure in supply in the Senate to be a government-dismissal moment.  In that event, I suppose we wouldn't have a US style government shut down, but an Australian style run-away Royal appointee.  It still seems to me that a shutdown remains possible, if the GG opts not to intervene.

The 0.01% Oppose Renewable Energy Because You Can't Suck Rents From It

It doesn't get much more naked than this (AP):

A political group founded by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch wants Georgia's utility regulators to reject a plan requiring Southern Co. to buy more solar energy, but an Associated Press review ahead of a vote on the issue finds that it has used misleading figures to build its case.

Misleading figures?  Quel surprise.  Read the piece, the story is particularly egregious in terms of bald and bold lying to the public, claiming a 1% increase in solar energy purchased would increase residential electricity prices 40%. The Kochs are just an extreme case of the general composition of the mega-elite wealthy: Pure rentiers.  They get wealthy by extracting rent via monopolistic power over scarce resources needed by everyone else.  That's really what rents are in simplified economese.  I have stuff you need, and I will extort far more than the normal market value for my goods.  You will pay because you have to.  Every disaster story usually finds some villian charging $100 for bottled water or $5K for generators.  That's pretty much what the Kochs, and the billionaire class do to get and stay wealthy at a larger scale.

In particular the Kochs soak rents from fossil fuel resources.  Hence, they must oppose any move to renewable energy.  Why?  Because they care what price Georgia consumers pay for electricity. Haha, no.  Because the Sun can't be monopolized.  Wind and geothermal can somewhat be, in that particular places are better than others for wind and geothermal power, but there's far too many such places and the power of rentiers would be seriously diluted trying to dominate all the windy places of the planet.  The other problem is that renewables scale down quite well. A home can have solar panels, a wind turbine or a geothermal sump.  It can't have a coal or natural gas powered turbine.

This also explains why the rich are much more amenable to nuclear power than renewables.  Uranium is scarce and no one short of Monty Burns level wealth can own a nuclear power plant.  If they have to ditch fossil fuels, they'd much rather go nuclear than renewable.

Do drug dealers like it when their clients go to rehab?  No. That's why the Koch's and the rest of the billionaire class are either opposed or non-committal on renewable energy and the climate change crisis generally.  They got rich from the current system.  A renewable energy system will democracize energy in historically unprecedented ways. No matter what they won't be as rich as they are today.  We're going to have to do this over their active resistance and should expect little to no help from them, no matter how bad climate change gets in terms of extreme weather disasters.  The Inequality Crisis and the Climate Crisis are inextricably linked and both must be overcome simultaneously.

Rape Apologia Disguised as Men's Rights

This is outside my usual turf, but the more I think about this, the more angry it makes me:

The “Don’t be that girl” poster reads: “Just because you regret a one night stand, doesn’t mean it wasn’t consensual. Lying about sexual assault = a crime.”

Late Tuesday night a group called Mens Rights Edmonton, a local anti-feminism group, claimed responsibility for the posters.

 Several points occur to me:

• Falsely accusing a man of rape is of course a serious crime.  Every woman knows this, just like everyone in general knows accusing anyone of a crime maliciously is a crime.  What is the point of an "information" campaign to tell everyone something that's blatantly obvious?  It isn't to inform women of this valuable information they don't know, instead it is to paint a false equivalance between the horrifically common problem of rape, and the exceedly rare problem of false accusations of rape. That's just a shitty thing to try and do.
• No sane woman anywhere thinks that "I regret my one night stand therefore it is rape."  That's simply ludicrous.  Yes, maybe some "crazy" women think this way, but "crazy" people don't respond well to sincere information campaigns and we don't waste policy time trying to think of every permutation of thought a non-rational person might conceive of, absent evidence of a real problem occuring regularly.
• I'm sure somewhere, sometime there have been instances of false accusations of rape.  I'm also sure the motive for such accusations are much more weighty and substantive than "I regret a one-night stand."  The plot of To Kill A Mockingbird considers one plausible instance, that of a white woman who took interest in a black man, a thing of great shame in her racist community so at her father's urging, made it an accusation of rape to hide her (and his) shame.  The point being no one does such a thing without a lot more on the line than "I wish I hadn't slept with that guy."  Luckily we have made significant strides in liberalizing attitudes toward casual sex, so the shame-incentive for women to even consider a false accusation of rape are generally negligible.  There's plenty of informal sexism calling women "sluts" and so forth for having sex with men, but we don't stone them or brand scarlet letters on them.
• On the other hand, "one-night stands" are a quite likely place for rapes to happen.  Women pass out drunk, or get drugged, or change their mind at his apartment and he ignores their withdrawn consent and continues anyway.  Idiots like this too-typical "men's rights" group often treat sex like some entitlement, she accepted free drinks, got in the cab with you, therefore she's given irrevocable consent to whatever happens next, as she "knew what was up when she came home with me" (or some such rationalization).  I'd say women who accuse casual sex partners of rape are far more likely to be telling the truth than making it up out of guilt for breaking Victorian ethics.  The evidence around rape is that it is hugely underreported to Police far more than any sign that it is over-reported.  The women who report rape are quite likely legitimately very angry and aggrieved...because they've been raped!  They have no other incentive to get some guy they only met once thrown in jail for years.
• "Men's rights" groups are universally in my experience, a sickening lot of blatant misogynists.  I think there is room for some male activism on the subject of divorce and custody arrangements but they just can't help themselves in revealing their blatant misogyny and by trivializing rape.

I didn't used to call myself a "feminist."  I have definite ideological differences with mainstream feminists and feminism as I know of it,  but those tend to be around their views on nature versus nurture and how best to achieve meaningful equality as a practical and policy matter.

But disgusting displays like this are enough for me to throw in with the feminists.  If I have to pick sides in this, I'm glad to be a feminist and not whatever these men call themselves.  Rape is a real, pervasive problem that has major physical and psychological harmful effects on nearly all its victims.  False rape is a very rare thing that would even more rarely actually result in a conviction, given the obvious problems of proving such a charge to the satisfaction of a jury in a his-word-against-hers scenario.  Yes, if a man actually went to prison for such, he of course is a victim worthy of serious attention and sympathy, but in no way does this problem remotely compare to that of rape.

Stop Applying Marketing-Think To Government, It's Disgusting.

CBC, with some analysis on Harper's expected cabinet shuffle provides this quote from former Mulroney Chief of Staff David McLaughlin:

"There's a staleness about some of the ministry and some of the cabinet and how they're communicating with Canadians; the look and feel of it. So there's a chance to really show some new faces and say: 'There's still life in this government yet. We're looking ahead, look at this new blood.'"

I hate this kind of soulless marketing when applied to government.  This is how we, a free people govern ourselves in a system that took centuries of struggle to get to the point where the common person has some real say. It's insipid that we allow these consultants to talk about our government like they're marketing a product without hissing at them and throwing rotting fruit (metaphorically of course, throwing actual fruit is illegal).

The epitome of this was Bush's Chief of Staff explaining that the push for the Iraq war began in September 2002 instead of August because "you don't launch a new product in August."

I know politicians, especially the shadier ones like the current government will still do this sort of crass commercialization of politics but it should be a shameful thing done in secret, not something their allies brag openly about. 

Yeah, the government is allowing big oil to destroy the biosphere, wasting billions on a lemon of a fighter jet and makes the Lannisters look like ethical paragons whenever they're caught doing anything improper, but here, we stuck a "New and Improved!" sticker on the label and came up with a new jingle!  All's well!




We should be talking about a policy shuffle first, and if doing that requires some personnel to move around, fine.  That we still fixate on the personalities first is a sign how far the rot goes.

A Skeptical Look at Turks And Caicos Joining Canada

I'm sorry, I can't get enthusiastic about Canada having its own tropical paradise without wondering what the financial angle is.  The biggest alarm bells for me come from Turks and Caicos being notoriously corrupt (to the point that the UK Government took away home rule in 2009), with a higher banking secrecy rating (90) than Switzerland (78) and the Caymans (77) and "absolutely no taxes."  Well, ok, it seems they have a tax on hotel rooms and a "stamp duty" (which if I read correctly is mostly to cover transfers of money from the island back to the UK).

This increasingly looks like a scheme to set up a tax haven within Canada.  Forget racing to the bottom against Alberta, Canadian provinces would be plummeting toward the bottom well behind a micro-province with next to no taxes, a massive influx of the wealthy setting up residences there (for the attractive climate of course), and absurd levels of banking and financial secrecy.

A couple findings from that last:

• Turks and Caicos does not adequately curtail banking secrecy
• Turks and Caicos Islands does not maintain company ownership details in official records
• Turks and Caicos Islands does not require that ownership of companies is put on public record
• Turks and Caicos Islands does allow harmful legal vehicles (nb. reference to trusts)

Any of the people pushing this idea could have massive investiments there, and there would be no way to know. 

Yes, it's true if the place became a province (or territory) it would be subject to Canadian income tax.  It would also receive equalization, and though the population is small, given that their GDP per capita is about one-quarter that of Canada, it wouldn't be a trivial amount, in order to bring the island government's ability to offer comparable services up to Canadian standards. The key thing about Canada's financial laws is that they are mostly provincial, a power the provinces have zealously guarded, in particular over this government's proposal to set up a federal regulator for stock markets. 

Sure, ordinary Canadians would benefit from having the ability to fly domestic to a place that would run on the Canadian dollar for vacations. That's not really much of a benefit for the one or maybe two (and often less than one) annual trips to warm locales that the typical Canadian takes. We'd be subsidizing a libertarian paradise for our 1% to park their wealth, run their businesses (via teleconference) and shirk their duties to the commons.  It would likely become even less of a benefit as I expect prices to visit (and especially to buy real estate) on the islands would soar and there wouldn't really be much employment in the jobs most of us have. 

Conservative politicians have been pushing this idea since Borden in 1917 (and one NDPer in '74) and it's not hard to see why it appeals to them.   The UK seems willing to give up the islands, probably because the "Tax Haven Capital of the World" is already in London and they have plenty of other warm-weather overseas territories for their 1% to winter in (also notorious tax havens).  Canada's conservatives and business elite are just jealous of this arrangement, but that's no reason we should be beguiled by the mirage of beautiful beaches and warm ocean waters. 

The Resource Trap Explained

Canada is suffering from the Resource Trap, or Resource Curse. We don't have it acutely yet, to the point of sterotypical corrupt petro-states, but we are suffering numerous symptoms from the list:

• Dutch Disease. Yes, Mulcair was right. Oil sales have driven up our dollar and made our manufacturing and service exports less competitive.  This isn't difficult to understand and while you can try to argue the overall effects of oil are net positive (e.g. Alberta buys equipment from Ontario), there's no denying the basic case that manufacturing (concentrated in Ontario and Quebec) have been hurt.
• Revenue Volatility. Alberta has gone through serious cases of this several times. Now with Newfoundland and Saskatchewan increasingly reliant on oil sales for their provincial budgets, I think we can call this a national problem.
• Lack of diversification.  Not only are we failing to diversify, we are concentrating ever more of our labour market on extractive industry.  Every article extolling all the people moving out West for work is really about this.  Some of them come from industries that are already in long term decline or outright dead, like various depleted fisheries, but many also come from the manufacturing sector (see Dutch Disease above).
• Corruption. This one hasn't shown up yet in terms of oil execs doling out sacks of cash to buy off government officials, but if you look you can see our political system restructuring itself to serve the needs of the country's most powerful economic class.  The Federal Government gutted environmental laws to ensure various oil projects would get rapid approvals, and withdrew from Kyoto.  Climate change is just ignored.  Even the Alberta PCs with decades of uninterrupted majority rule were gunshy about raising royalties more than nominally despite credible analysis from all sectors not owned by big oil that this could and should be done.  They were right to fear it, Big Oil nearly put the Wildrose into power in protest over it.  Approval of the Keystone XL pipeline federally was basically a non-issue.  Not even Mulcair is openly opposing it and Trudeau has spoken out in favour.  Oil pipelines spill all the time and the companies are handled with kid gloves, huge ponds of horrific toxic sludge accrue in the north, and there's no plan to do anything about them.  Eventually, a flood will take them into the MacKenzie river.  Problem solved!

Why does this happen?

The basic problem of an abundance of natural resources is that in order to exploit them as a free-market economy, you're bascially expected to sell/rent permits to private owners to extract the resource and sell it for profit (Norway is a noteworthy exception, but sadly not really a model followed by Canada).  You are, by definition, setting up a class of rentiers who draw wealth from the land by virtue of a legalism issued by the state entitling them to that wealth.  These people are not like sterotypical gold prospectors panning rivers from a 19th century gold rush, they will already be rich and powerful since it takes a lot of money to get a modern resource extraction operation running.

Rentiers are not really entrepeneurs.  They are in the business of extracting rents, foremost.  Competition is not that important (except in obtaining more sources of rent in the form of extraction permits to resource rich land).  You're not really going to be able to drive your competition out of business - after all they have guaranteed revenue streams too, from their resource leases.  You can fight for market share, but that's a lot of work. Better ROI on spending your time finding more of the resource in areas not yet exploited.  I really suspect the big oil companies do not actively collude on gas prices, they simply all choose not to compete very hard because competing is a lot of work and effort and it isn't their focus.  We'll buy the product anyway, so why bother?

This is, you might say, the default direction of a resource system.  Avoiding this takes a lot of work and thought in how you design the incentives and how the money is used.  We really didn't engage in such an exercise.  Pierre Trudeau tried to do a few things on this score, but they were undone and they didn't become self-sustaining. 

It becomes a curse when it becomes your society's dominant industry, a sort of "resource industrial complex" that automatically has power and influence over the political system just by dint of its impact on the economy and government revenues. It begins to take over.

Of course rentiers never just sit back and let their influence over the state accrue naturally, they aggressively seek to expand it through all means legal and not so legal.  After all, at some level you understand that your primary source of wealth is not "innovation" or some such nice market concept, but a piece of paper issued by the state which empowers you, and you alone, to profit from this stuff that nature left in the ground (oil, diamonds, whatever).  If government is the source of your wealth, then the easiest place to make yourself wealthier is by influencing government to let you keep more of it.  Decreasing royalties, tax breaks on capital expenditure (which you would have made anyway), and straight up tax cuts all work.  So does gutting labour and environmental standards, which drive up your costs for extracting the stuff.  Annoying!

Canada has gone several steps down this path. At some point, perhaps we've already done it, you cross a kind of Event Horizon where the logic of the system carries you the rest of the way whether you want to or not.   Any hope we have of stopping this rests on not just electing a new government in 2015, but ensuring that government is empowered and emboldened to take us off this path.  I'm afraid neither major opposition party looks likely to do that as they stand (I'd give the NDP better odds, but far from a lock).  This is where ideology matters much more than partisanship.  Broad awareness of our poor strategy in going all-in on oil is key.  Without a change, we may as well join OPEC.