This morning was beautiful, a sunny and crisp day. We’ve been hiking the Bruce Trail every weekend for a long time, and we were looking forward to a trip to Speyside and parts north, to sections we’d never seen before. We got the usual coffee while engaging in the usual playful banter, looked at the map, and decided which route to the trailhead was best. The trail is moving east on the sections we haven’t hiked yet, so I headed along Dundas Street in that direction. The road opens up immediately and the limit is eighty kilometres per hour. The trip would be fast. As I got to speed, an animal suddenly appeared just to the right and ahead of the car, and I struck it hard.

It happened so very quickly. From the instant I saw the animal until I realized we’d hit it, a second, or less, had passed, but in the strange chronology of the mind, it seemed to take much longer, and so very much happened. While Alex and I were chatting, his head down looking at the map, I suddenly saw a coyote at full gallop less than a metre away from the front end of the car, its path perfectly perpendicular to ours. I saw its yellow-brown fur, and the reticulated pattern on it, like a tiger’s, running down the length of its body. In a microsecond, I saw its eyes, intent on the safe side of the road ahead of it. I thought I could avoid it. My foot came off the gas and hovered for another tiny slice of the second above the break, and I jerked the car to the left, slightly. But there is no median on this high-speed road, and cars were coming toward us. It would do no good. I was going to strike this animal with the full force of my car, speeding at eighty kilometres an hour, and neither I nor the poor coyote would be able to stop it, and so I simply did the only thing possible, and continued along a straight path, and ran into the side of its beautiful, wild body.

I immediately slowed, looking in the rearview mirror. I could see a small piece of the car, but the coyote wasn’t there. I thought by some miracle I had only glanced it, and it had simply run off into the fields to the north. But I suddenly realized it was still under the car, and we were still moving, at maybe fifty kilometres per hour. Just at that instant, there was a loud thud, and, as I pulled onto the shoulder, there it was, about twenty metres behind.

I was stunned. Alex was overcome. A truck pulled off the road ahead of us, and a man got out, pulling on gloves. I rolled down the window, and glanced in the mirror. To my utter horror, the coyote’s head lifted off the road, wobbling. It was still alive. The man came to the window, and said he’d drag it off the road to avoid an accident. Perhaps he didn’t realize it wasn’t dead. For some reason, I said nothing, and got out of the car to see the poor thing lurch up, and hobble, in agony, onto the shoulder, limping as though one of its legs were crushed, or torn off. I felt sick, and Alex was leaning against the roof of the car, his face hidden.

Realizing that the animal was alive, the man told me to call the Humane Society. This I could do. I couldn’t help the coyote. I couldn’t even bring myself to approach it and look at the state it was in, and the immenseness of the suffering it was experiencing and which I caused. But I could call for help. I got back in the car and made the call.

Because of the proximity to Oakville, and the state of the various services in the two cities, it took three phone calls and an exasperating voicemail trap before I spoke to someone. When I hung up, I got out of the car, and watched from a distance while the man, and now two others, crowded around the wounded animal and did what they could.

“I can’t go over there,” Alex said.

“I know.” But I could go, and I had to. There was no helping it, but I should at least look at what had happened. And so I walked slowly toward it, expecting the worst. Nobody looked up as I approached. One of them had put a blanket over its body. It was curled up as though it was ready for a nap, but its head was up, and it was alert, looking at us with its yellow eyes. Its breathing was laboured; it was almost panting for breath. Blood spilled out of its mouth freely, and the foreleg that I could see, poking out from under the blanket, was soaked with it. There was a trail of bright red blood leading right up to where it lay, and I suddenly realized that I was standing in it.

A van appeared, and a woman in uniform got out. The first man was actually handling the coyote’s head, petting it, and she warned him not to touch it. It could, after all, be rabid. But it was not rabid. It was strong and healthy before the impact. The fur was thick at its ears, and its eyes, even now, were bright, alert, beautiful, and wild, even as it struggled to stay alive.

“It’s a good thing it’s winter,” the woman said. “No pups left alone.” So it was female. “Anyone know what happened?” An older man said that someone had hit it and driven off.

“No,” I said, “I’m the one who hit it.”

She got on the phone to the police, and described where we were. Someone wondered why the police were called. The older man suggested it needed to be shot.

For some reason, I thought this woman from the Humane Society would have everything she needed in her van, and would be able to euthanize it immediately. She explained that she would never touch a wild animal so severely injured, and neither would any veterinarian. The only alternative was to shoot it.

“You should all leave,” she said. “You don’t want to be around when it’s shot.”

I simply looked down at it for a second, panting blood, its injuries dramatic. If it wasn’t euthanized, it would simply die in an hour, or two, all the while in some kind of agony I don’t want to imagine. I suppose I looked distraught, because the older man took my arm warmly and gave it a squeeze. “Don’t worry,” he said, “there’s nothing you can do on these roads. And it won’t be much longer.”

And so, as they drifted away, I simply thanked the ones who had stopped, and I thanked the woman from the van, and I went back to the car.

Alex was still upset, his hands mostly covering his face. “Should I take us home?” I asked.

“No, we should go hiking.”

And so we did.

In Speyside, the trail is beautiful and tight, and crowded with fragrant cedars growing from fissures in the ancient rock of the escarpment, split from centuries of ice and rain. It snowed last night. The trail was undisturbed. Snow capped the rocks, and coated each needle on every evergreen. It was quiet, except for the occasional call of a crow, and the crack of wood in the distance.

Nobody had passed the trail here before us — the snow was pristine. The only tracks were those of coyotes, following the natural depression the trail made, moving ahead of us in what appeared to be a gallop; two animals, traveling side by side and marking the snow on our beloved Bruce Trail, hunting rabbits, or simply running freely through the forest. We followed for a while, and once, we missed the marked path and had to double back.

I loved the impression of those tracks. Here, they galloped, and here, they slowed, walking close together. They traveled along the path for what seemed like a long way. I could follow them all day. But soon, the tracks left the main trail and headed off into the trees, and disappeared from sight.

Louis About me, Alex, Bruce Trail, Hiking Coyote, Suffering

When asked by The Globe and Mail if he accepted evolutionary theory, Conservative Minister of State for Science and Technology Gary Goodyear offered a curious response.

I’m not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate.

Around the country, scientists were shocked that the federal Minister for Science interpreted a question about his acceptance of evolutionary theory as an attack on his religion. Some likened his response to a refusal to answer whether or not he thought the earth was flat due to his religious beliefs.¹ Others were more blunt, wondering how the chiropractor-cum-cabinet minister could possibly retain the science portfolio if he rejected one of the world’s most well-established scientific theories.

The issue is particularly troubling given the Conservatives’ gutting of research-based science funding in their January budget. With a focus on the commercialization of discoveries to “bring them to the marketplace” quickly, important areas of scientific study remain woefully underfunded.² Whereas in the United States the Obama administration has pledged $10 billion USD to fund basic research, the Conservatives have forced research agencies in Canada, including those responsible for studying stem cells and climate change, to cut spending by $148 million. It is not difficult to see Conservative ideology at work here. Add to that the unrestrained hostility that Mr. Goodyear and his staff have for lobbyists acting on behalf of the scientific research community — witness his boorish behaviour of loudly accusing them of lying whilst an aide screamed at them to “shut up” mere moments into a scheduled meeting — and it is no wonder that scientists in Canada see no alternative in such a climate but to ironically move Stateside to what is now a more hospitable environment for scientific research.³

A history of holes

Goodyear is not the first Conservative cabinet minister to display pride in a preschool ignorance of evolutionary theory, or outright hostility to it. Stockwell Day, the Conservative Trade Minister and former leader of the party while it was incarnated as the Reform Party, is known for his creationist views, which, together with a suitable compendium of gaffes, likely cost him the 2000 election.

In response to their respective creationist kerfuffles, Mr. Day and Mr. Goodyear and other government spokespeople have rightly said that MPs, including cabinet ministers, are entitled to their beliefs. They have said the government is not in the business of promulgating either creation “science” or any other viewpoint. Those would be comforting words but for the fact that Mr. Day lamented that creationism was not taught in public schools, and that Mr. Goodyear controls funding for an area of science he is openly hostile to, in a Ministry he has demonstrated is controlled by ideology over need. They would be comforting words but for the fact that Day, Goodyear, and their apologists shrilly cry foul when their views are challenged by the media, because somehow their religious beliefs are sacrosanct and untouchable, even when they themselves present them to the public, or offer them up in some unpalatable concoction of public policy and private piety.

Furthermore, when a creationist openly ridicules evolutionary theory and its scientists on the floor of the House of Commons, the public venue entrusted to him by his riding constituents so that he may represent their most fundamental needs, he has made two fatal errors: he has abrogated his political responsibilities, and he has polluted his public office with his private religious beliefs contrary to the stated aims of even this Conservative government. On April 2, 2009, James Lunney, another chiropractor and now Conservative MP for the British Columbia riding of Nanaimo-Alberni, addressed Parliament.⁴ Evolutionary scientists are arrogant anti-scientists, he said. He claimed that all the millions of Canadians who believed in a creator were being ridiculed in the debate surrounding Mr. Goodyear’s curious response to a question about evolutionary theory. Lastly, and ghoulishly if not laughably, he said that, since Charles Darwin could not be conjured from the grave, today’s evolutionary scientists could not disprove that the father of evolutionary theory would not today abandon it if presented with the “discoveries” of the likes of creationist and Seventh-Day Adventist Robert V. Gentry⁵ — discoveries dismissed as amateur pseudoscience after peer review.⁶

A concession, of sorts

In the end, Mr. Goodyear was forced to affirm a “belief” in evolution, some suggesting that those in the upper echelons made him do it to avoid yet more Conservative controversy. Unfortunately, his espousal had nothing to do with evolutionary theory, and only underscored the Science Minister’s appalling ignorance of science. “We are evolving every year, every decade,” he said. “That’s a fact, whether it is to the intensity of the sun, whether it is to, as a chiropractor, walking on cement versus anything else, whether it is running shoes or high heels, of course we are evolving to our environment.”⁷

Yet again, Canada seems destined to belatedly follow the United States in areas of public policy and cultural myopia. We can only look forward to the day when we also follow their political lead, and discover energizing politics, youthful ideas, a devotion to reason, and dynamic leaders once again.

1. Anne McIlroy, Minister won’t confirm belief in evolution, The Globe and Mail, March 17, 2009. [↩]
2. Carolyn Abraham, Researchers fear ‘stagnation’ under Tories, The Globe and Mail, March 2, 2009. [↩]
3. Ibid. [↩]
4. Aaron Wherry, James Lunney v. Evolution, Macleans.ca, April 2, 2009. [↩]
5. Darrell Bellaart, Darwin would think again, Lunney tells House of Commons, Nanaimo Daily News, April 4, 2009. [↩]
6. Polonium Halo FAQs at The TalkOrigins Archive. [↩]
7. Anne McIlroy, Goodyear continues to deflect questions on evolution beliefs, The Globe and Mail, March 18, 2009. [↩]

Louis Politics, Shameful Acts Conservatism, Creationism, Fundamentalism, Politics, Religion

“Ordinary people” don’t care about the arts, and artists are elitist snobs who whine at extravagant taxpayer-funded galas about government subsidies not rising quickly enough. And with that denigrating assessment, Prime Minister Stephen Harper defended his government’s forty-five million dollar pre-election gutting of arts funding in Canada.

I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up — I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people.

– Stephen Harper, September 23, 2008

When the head of a government starts invoking “ordinary people” just before an election in an attempt to appeal to the broadest base of voters possible, particularly in relation to an issue they collectively know very little about, there is no doubt that the ideological engine is shifting into high gear. Harper strenuously denied the funding cuts were ideologically motivated¹ even as his Finance Minister acknowledged that politics certainly played a role.

We are a Conservative government, and the ministers who sit on the Treasury Board have that hat on as well. This is not a bureaucratic process; the decision is made by the ministers who sit on the Treasury Board, and they have views on certain programs.²

– Jim Flaherty, September 24, 2008

Coupled with the strongly ideological Bill C-10 introduced in February 2008 apparently at the behest of ultra right-wing creationist and Evangelical Christian Charles McVety, deemed “censorship” legislation by the arts community and which would have denied federal funding to film and television productions the government deemed offensive, it’s difficult to imagine how any move the Conservatives might make against the arts could not be seen as materializing out of the right-wing canon. And indeed, an analysis conducted by The Globe and Mail of the Conservative budget in relation to arts funding found that cuts made to arts and culture programs appeared to be almost certainly ideologically motivated.

The Department of Canadian Heritage is the body that receives federal funding for arts and culture. Divided into two “Strategic Outcome” arms, the first, known as SO1, is the mainstay for directly funding Canadian arts and culture, such as film, television, visual, and other arts. The second, SO2, funds initiatives related to sports, official languages, “citizen participation”, even ESL studies. Both are called beneficiaries of “arts funding” by the Conservatives.³

The Globe found that SO1 funding was falling, while SO2 funding was increasing. In fact, all the relevant funding cuts only affected SO1. The government could thereby claim that, although some arts funding was being cut, money was actually being invested back into other “arts” programs, failing to mention the strongly polarized programs making up SO1 and SO2. Moreover, the Conservatives were claiming that arts funding introduced by the previous Liberal government was their own, due to an anomaly in finance reporting after Parliament was dissolved ahead of the 2006 election.⁴

Perhaps sensing the public would not be ignorant of these facts forever, and surprised at the strong and well-organized backlash from the arts community and local governments alike, Harper next announced tax credits for families with children in arts programs. In a breathtaking example of political cynicism combined with naked hypocrisy, Harper introduced the new funding in words barely believable after his tirade less than a week earlier against “whining elitist artists” and their “expensive galas”.

For some children, participating in art, dance and drama classes will be a fun and enjoyable activity. For others, it could be the beginning of much more — a lifelong interest or career.

– Stephen Harper, September 29, 2008

The cynicism of this move did not satisfy those affected by the cuts and the potential censorship legislation, especially in Quebec, where arts and culture strongly identify the distinct society that Quebecers enjoy. It’s interesting to wonder if there would be any way that Jean-Claude Lauzon’s 1992 film Léolo — featuring pre-teen masturbation, food eroticism, scatology, incest, and other wonders — would have ever seen the light of day, had the censorship legislation been in place. Internationally acclaimed, the film made Time magazine’s list of the one hundred best films of all time, but in the world of the Conservatives, this surely would have been deemed objectionable and pornographic stuff during one of the closed-door meetings that would have determined funding for such projects.

But panic ensued, and, in a further example of cynical electioneering, the Conservatives reversed themselves and vowed to scrap Bill C-10. However, the damage had been done. The Conservatives are seen to be ideologically opposed to arts funding, unless they are allowed to call sports, ESL classes, and other unrelated activities “art”. They have ignored the fact that actual arts and culture contribute 7% to this country’s GDP, translating to more than $84 billion of economic gain annually.⁵ They are avowed ideologues, where funding policy is determined not by economic considerations, but by how well-aligned the beneficiaries of those policies are with the Conservative agenda.

Artists, filmmakers, musicians, poets and writers, beware.

1. James Bradshaw, Harper plays populist tune on arts cuts, The Globe And Mail, September 11, 2008. [↩]
2. James Cowan and Marianne White, Finance minister defends Tory cuts to arts funding, September 25, 2008. [↩]
3. James Bradshaw, Study reveals erosion in arts funding, The Globe And Mail, September 19, 2008. [↩]
4. Ibid. [↩]
5. Culture sector helps drive economy, CBC.ca, August 26, 2008. [↩]

Louis Politics, Shameful Acts Arts funding, Conservatism, Election 2008, Ideology, Politics, Stephen Harper

In its rush toward populism and away from discourse, the federal Conservative government in Canada has revealed its vision. Some of that vision was contained in its election platforms of 2006 and 2008, but much of it has been spooled out over the course of the life of the minority government led by Stephen Harper since January 2006.

Canada’s current government is focused mostly on raising the spectre of criminal activity, despite the fact that the government’s own statistics show the national crime rate to have been falling steadily in virtually every area since 2004.¹ Of all the pages detailing policy in its 2008 platform, a full 29% mention crime, violence, punishment, penalties, prison, criminal conduct, or tough laws. The government is also fixated on military engagement and the open encouragement of nationalism.

[Addendum, April 21, 2009: Statistics Canada reports that serious crime was at a thirty-year low before the Conservative anti-crime campaign began.²]

Its actions in these and other areas before the 2006 election and subsequently have demonstrated the Party, and Mr. Harper in particular, to be concerned with populism. As a result, they have shown a remarkable disdain for parliamentary democracy, the traditions of a free media, intellectualism, and for anything that does not on its surface appeal to the basest political appetites of Canadians.

It’s simple to examine this government’s three short years of life to peel away the populist policy promulgations, and begin to reveal that long sought-after hidden Conservative agenda. In a morass of breaches lesser and greater, a few particularly egregious offences stand out. And so, in a series of articles, in neither chronological order nor in any sequence of terribleness, I present the Conservative government’s Shameful Acts.

But let’s begin before it even all got started.

1. Breaking Canada’s election laws

Apparently in order to circumvent national campaign spending limits during the 2006 federal election, the Conservative party engaged in an “in and out” scheme. The Party’s national headquarters transferred money to local ridings, which immediately sent the money back using pre-signed bank transfers, claiming it had been spent on campaign advertising. However, the “local” ads were identical to national campaign ads, with only the addition of local candidate information at the end. The result was not only spending beyond the legislated limits by more than a million dollars, but a loss of almost one million dollars to taxpayers, since sixty percent of the costs of the ads were claimed as refundable expenses by local candidates.³

During routine audits, Elections Canada, the independent body overseeing the election process, uncovered the discrepancies, and in April 2008, the RCMP raided the Party’s national headquarters to seize documents related to the scheme. During its investigation, Elections Canada discovered that local Conservative candidates did not know which ads the payments were for,⁴ presumably because the bank transfers were pre-signed by the national Party.

In other words, local candidates were sent money by the Party to fund their campaigns. The candidates immediately returned the money to pay for their campaign advertising, which they had no part in creating, and which they apparently never saw or approved. The local campaigns then collectively claimed that Canadian taxpayers owed them a million dollars in refunds to be processed by Elections Canada. In other strata of society, this kind of willful flouting of financing rules is known as “money laundering”. The euphemistic “violations of the Elections Act” of which they were accused would, if it were any other piece of legislation and any other component of society, be called “breaking the law”.

There is much more shameful behaviour in this story after the Conservatives came to power, including: the Conservatives’ refusal to cooperate with a House investigation into the matter; representatives being told by the Party not to show up after being summoned by the investigative Committee; the Party’s refusal to express confidence in Elections Canada by voting against a symbolic motion put forward by the Bloc Québécois to do so; and Conservative campaign chair Doug Finley’s bizarre crashing of the Committee, apparently in some Orwellian attempt to intimidate Conservative witnesses.⁵ After refusing to leave, he was forced out by security personnel.

The entire “in and out” episode has been described by critics as “disdain for democracy”, and by some Conservatives as a betrayal of the Party’s vision.

1. CBCNews.ca, Snapshot: Crime in Canada 2007, July 17, 2008. [↩]
2. The Canadian Press, Crime rate hit 30-year low in 2007, The Toronto Star, April 21, 2009. [↩]
3. Richard Brennan, Furor over campaign funds heats up, The Toronto Star, October 27, 2007. [↩]
4. Scandalpedia.ca, The In and Out Scam. [↩]
5. Peter Zimonjic, Conservative candidates felt betrayed, Northern News, August 2008. [↩]

Louis Politics, Shameful Acts Canada, Conservatism, Government, Parliament, Stephen Harper

Andrea Fitzpatrick lost her job last August and foundered for a while, as she struggled with her sense of self-worth. She had identified herself with her career, whatever it had happened to be. Corporate advance, money, and social status were the things that defined her. Unsurprisingly, they were not the things that made her happy, something she only truly discovered after being fired.

It’s an interesting story. On the one hand, it was heartening that someone had discovered happiness to come from something other than the superficial banalities of one’s life. On the other hand, it was sad that there are many people, perhaps most, who must actually learn this lesson.

A belief in fulfillment

And so I am not shocked that, like me, god believers are saddened by the hollowness of so many lives lived in emptiness, fulfilled by nothing and driven by the most amoral of motivations. I am not surprised at the satisfaction believers have in their lives, filled as they are with a pursuit that, no matter what unrecognizable form it may ultimately take, at the very least seeks meaning for themselves and everyone. I am not surprised by the confidence of their beliefs, by the resistance their faith has to that which disputes it.

Of course, I know they are terribly misguided for that faith, and the details of their belief are their ultimate undoing, and no reconciliation is possible between dogmatic positions and a truly happy existence. But I say that out of a need to clarify. It doesn’t really matter, this time.

It indicates that a life of true fulfillment comes from everything that seems not to define the majority of us. In the West, most have forgotten so simple a truth utterly. It may be cliché to bring up the fact that material pursuits have replaced our sense of satisfaction with ourselves and each other, but often truth is to be discovered anew in aphorisms like that.

It’s one reason for the divide and the ultimate conflict between those with faith and the secular world they inhabit. On a larger scale, it hints at more troubling issues: the conflict between Islam and the West, as an example, and the failure of either to find areas of common values and goals.

A flow of lives

But I must recede once again to the microcosm of a single life. Unlike James Randi, who is nearing the end of his journey, I can’t look back at a remarkable life to reminisce on scores of remarkable experiences. I’m far too ordinary.

There are issues to deal with, and things that seem like setbacks, but its very simplicity makes my life deeply fulfilling. Alex and I have a circadian beat to our lives that offers happiness I could scarcely imagine when I was in my twenties, clambouring for money and sex and superficial relationships and fun, and other trivialities. There is the expanse of Bronte Creek Park near my home, small though it might seem to some, that holds a portion of my consciousness in its fields and woods and paths. There are the hundreds of books in my library, holding hundreds of thousands of pages, that fill up the corners of my barely satiable curiosity. And there is the incidental interaction with people, acquaintances and strangers, offering the opportunity to imagine the details of another life, and, if I can, if only in the smallest of ways to make that other path slightly more navigable.

I like my work and I’m considered fairly successful, but it’s simply a lucky tool that allows me to live a life away from it. There are so many better things, more important things. The breathtaking breadth of human history in front of me at this very moment, for example, or living inside the cream-coloured pages of my library. I’m staggered when I think about the billions of lives that have shaped what humanity is right now; or the trillions upon trillions of beings that have directed the course of life on the planet.

Something in me goes very quiet when the sun sets beneath the purple clouds over the peaks of houses behind us. I feel as though I’m sharing the lives of the finches that wake me up each morning as they build a nest beneath the trough under my bedroom window, which they and their ancestors have done for as long as I’ve lived here. We’ve been here many years, but we’re still apart from virtually all the neighbours. Sometimes when we come home in the car, one of their kids waves at us, though we are silent strangers to them and their parents, and it makes me smile. Alex has a swimming friend that he picks up every Sunday morning. She usually bakes him cake on Saturday night, and he comes home full. Despite our shyness, and what must seem like stand-offishness, the neighbours directly beside us invite us for an hour or two of drink and conversation every Christmas and every summer, and have always been immeasurably kind to us.

There’s so much loveliness, so much fulfillment in life that I’m surprised when I hear stories of lessons learned, like Ms. Fitzpatrick’s. What deep pleasure there is to be found in the world’s accessible corners. What meaning there is in the most straightforward of relationships. How gorgeous things are. How important we all, each of us, are, to one another, to the flow of lives beginning in the incomprehensibly distant past and that builds our story for the sake of our existence alone. How completely beautiful, unknowable, and livable it all is.

Louis About me, Believers Believers, Bronte Creek Park, Happiness, Selfishness, Strangers, Vocation