Requiem pour le projet de pays, Trudeau’s legacy

2014/04/10 Leave a comment

The deep kind of reflection that is needed by the PQ following their implosion Monday, from such independentistes like Gérard Bouchard, Louise Beaudoin, Jean Dorion etc:

Un « cul-de-sac ». Une « impasse ». Un tournant « inquiétant pour l’avenir ». Tel est le verdict formulé par le sociologue et historien Gérard Bouchard, qui multiplie les métaphores alarmistes pour décrire la situation dans laquelle le Parti québécois s’est lui-même empêtré. « Pour moi, qui ai toujours été un souverainiste et un péquiste, la première impression c’est que le PQ va devoir se reconstruire, et en profondeur, a-t-il confié au Devoir. Le problème, c’est de savoir comment. Il devient de plus en plus clair que son article premier, que cette option sur la souveraineté, a du plomb dans l’aile et pour un bout de temps. »

À moins d’un revirement majeur, avertit cet architecte des pratiques d’accommodements culturels et penseur de l’identité québécoise, le Parti québécois pourrait bien avoir joué son rôle historique, et être bientôt remplacé par la Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ).

Celui qui a dirigé avec le philosophe Charles Taylor la Commission sur les accommodements raisonnables (2007-2008) estime que l’article 1 du programme péquiste voue, à terme, ce parti à l’impasse. « Je ne vois pas comment ce parti pourrait abolir cet article, tout en demeurant le PQ. Comment pourrait-il se reconstituer et redevenir le parti qu’il était, c’est-à-dire un parti dominant, en tablant sur cette plateforme-là ? Donc, on semble dans un cul-de-sac. »

Quite a contrast to the denial of Drainville, Lisée, Peladeau.

Requiem pour le projet de pays | Le Devoir.

Good piece by Andrew Cohen, with appropriate nuance on the meaning of the Quebec election results:

The longer view, shared by Trudeau and others, was that time would change things. That Canada is a post-modern exemplar of accommodation and generosity, however imperfect and unfinished, and Quebecers would come to see it that way. That, with growing self-confidence, they would think less of “demands” and more of dividends.

But there should be no triumphalism in English Canada today. We should not think independence is dead and that we have finally put Quebec “in its place” — unless, as Trudeau used to say, its place is in Canada.

Instead, we should respect the decency, sensibility and practicality of Quebecers who may not love Canada and, psychologically, have already left it. At the same time, we should recognize that Quebec has come to terms with Canada, at least for now, and we will carry on, together, in our uneasy peace. This is the reality of our society.

Column: Pierre Trudeau was right about Quebec.

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How politics makes us stupid – Vox

2014/04/09 Leave a comment

Interesting research on how we make decisions based on our pre-conceptions and our group identity/ideology:

[Yale Law professor Dan] Kahan doesn’t find it strange that we react to threatening information by mobilizing our intellectual artillery to destroy it. He thinks it’s strange that we would expect rational people to do anything else. “Nothing any ordinary member of the public personally believes about the existence, causes, or likely consequences of global warming will affect the risk that climate changes poses to her, or to anyone or anything she cares about,” Kahan writes. “However, if she forms the wrong position on climate change relative to the one that people with whom she has a close affinity — and on whose high regard and support she depends on in myriad ways in her daily life — she could suffer extremely unpleasant consequences, from shunning to the loss of employment.”

Kahan’s research tells us we can’t trust our own reason. How do we reason our way out of that?

Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: “As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.” Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: “What we believe about the facts,” he writes, “tells us who we are.” And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love.

How politics makes us stupid – Vox.

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Quebec Election Editorial Endorsements

2014/04/07 Leave a comment

Starting with a somewhat tortured editorial by Le Devoir favouring the PQ:

Cette campagne fut difficile pour la première ministre Marois, qui a commis des erreurs dont elle devra tirer des leçons. La réaction des électeurs sur l’enjeu référendaire ne peut être ignorée, tout comme sur la charte sur la laïcité. Sur ce plan, elle a payé pour sa décision de défendre de façon absolutiste ce projet sans écouter ce que pensaient les Québécois, y compris les membres de son parti.

Il est bien possible, si le Parti québécois est réélu, qu’il soit à nouveau minoritaire. La première ministre devra accepter cette situation et gouverner avec les autres partis en recherchant les consensus. Il y a des erreurs à ne pas répéter. Elle nous a dit en campagne que si elle était déterminée, elle savait par ailleurs écouter. Prenons cela comme un engagement.

Le choix du Devoir

André Pratte’s editorial in La Presse favour of the Parti liberal de Québec, citing three reasons: pour un Québec prospère, pour un Québec stable and pour un Québec accueillant

Trois raisons de voter libéral : économie – référendum – Charte | André Pratte.

The Montreal Gazette predictably endorses the Liberals:

A PQ government would continue to play the politics of division that it has pushed while in office, and in this campaign, by proceeding with its discriminatory values charter and repressive language legislation. And, if granted a majority, it would surely try to pick fights with Ottawa to manufacture “winning conditions” for another referendum. All this would be to the further detriment of a sagging provincial economy and fragile social fabric.

That reviving this economy would be the principal focus of a Liberal government, a government also dedicated to harmonious interculturalism and the playing of a constructive role in the Canadian federation, makes the election of a majority Liberal government the optimal outcome of Monday’s election.

Editorial: The Couillard Liberals deserve to govern

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We’re Not No. 1! We’re Not No. 1! – Porter’s Social Competitiveness Report

2014/04/05 2 Comments

Interesting, and a reminder that GDP, while important, is one indicator among many. I remember Porter’s earlier work which was very influential in the 80s and 90s. Canada scored 7th, the highest among G7 countries:

The Social Progress Index is a brainchild of Michael E. Porter, the eminent Harvard business professor who earlier helped develop the Global Competitiveness Report. Porter is a Republican whose work, until now, has focused on economic metrics.

“This is kind of a journey for me,” Porter told me. He said that he became increasingly aware that social factors support economic growth: tax policy and regulations affect economic prospects, but so do schooling, health and a society’s inclusiveness.

So Porter and a team of experts spent two years developing this index, based on a vast amount of data reflecting suicide, property rights, school attendance, attitudes toward immigrants and minorities, opportunity for women, religious freedom, nutrition, electrification and much more.

We’re Not No. 1! We’re Not No. 1! – NYTimes.com.

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Paul Wells: ‘Each of us writes the story of Canada every day’ – Macleans.ca

2014/04/04 Leave a comment

Nice acceptance speech by Paul Wells upon winning the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for best political book, The Longer I’m Prime Minister:

We need, in other words, to be ourselves. Each of us. Confidently and without apology. This is what Stephen Harper has been doing all along, and years later he was worth writing a book about.

I worry, though, about too many people who seek to serve him. A few years ago the National Post interviewed young political staffers in Ottawa and asked them where they like to get a coffee. Without exception, every young Conservative staffer said, “Tim Horton’s.” I get the allusion, of course. This is a Tim Horton’s government, it cares about the little guy, yadda yadda. But you know, there are a lot of places to get coffee. You can make it at home. You can go to McDonald’s. You can brew up a pot in the office. You’re not actually required to lobotomize yourself as soon as you turn off the Queensway and head to the Hill for the first time. And again and again, this government has wound up in trouble when some staffer blindly followed the branding instead of using the brain he presumably believes God gave him.

And the funny thing is, if Stephen Harper was 25 and working on the Hill today, he sure as hell would not have cheerfully told the National Post he takes his coffee where the boss told him he should.

Paul Wells: ‘Each of us writes the story of Canada every day’ – Macleans.ca.

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Donald Savoie: Why Canada’s public service is declining and why it matters

2014/04/04 Leave a comment

Good short interview with Donald Savoie:

Show me a weak country and I will show you a country with a weak public service. Every country needs a referee and the referee has to be the public service. No country can operate without a referee. You take the public service out of Canadian society and you will have chaos. We all need to recognize the public service is going through an extremely difficult period. There are three fundamental phases to the public service. The first one was when they put the infrastructure in place in the early days, canals, roads, railways. The second was post-world-war Keynesian economics – the government decided it could do everything in every sector. It grew by leaps and bounds, young university graduates flocked to it. It was the happy phase. We are now into the third phase, saying ‘oh, we overshot.’ We got government into things that government ought not to have been into. So how do we fix things?

Donald Savoie: Why Canada’s public service is declining and why it matters – The Globe and Mail.

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“Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”

2014/04/01 Leave a comment

An interesting column from Errol Morris on evidence, using the logic of Martin Rees with respect to the existence or not of extraterrestrial life (“absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”) to the question during the Bush Administration on whether or not weapons of mass destruction existed or not.

Part of the evidence vs anecdote challenge. Public service evidence on macro-trends can conflict with anecdotes from the political level, but the political level could also argue that the absence of evidence in our studies and research did not mean it did not exist. But still, better to operate with as sound evidence as possible:

What do I take from this? To me, progress hinges on our ability to discriminate knowledge from belief, fact from fantasy, on the basis of evidence. It’s not the known unknown from the known known, or the unknown unknown from the known unknown, that is crucial to progress. It’s what evidence do you have for X, Y or Z? What is the justification for your beliefs? When confronted with such a question, Rumsfeld was never, ever able to come up with an answer.

The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 4) – NYTimes.com.

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How Kijiji’s data threw off Ottawa’s math on skills shortages – The Globe and Mail

2014/03/28 1 Comment

Interesting story on the difficulties of getting accurate information, and the weaknesses of some of the social media sites like Kijiji and double counting. Bad data can lead to faulty conclusions:

Kevin McQuillan, deputy provost and professor of sociology at the University of Calgary, has written a paper challenging claims of a Canadian labour shortage and says the move to online job postings continues to give statisticians headaches.

“We are struggling to deal not only with changes in the labour market, but changes in how people hire,” he said. “We haven’t really gotten on top of this new way of hiring that’s done in online postings, [where] the same notice of a job appearing on multiple sites, or social media. So counting that can be difficult.”

How Kijiji’s data threw off Ottawa’s math on skills shortages – The Globe and Mail.

And a follow-up piece with the Government’s reaction to the story:

Mr. Kenney said critics should recognize the challenge of producing reliable labour data in a world of online job boards.

“Here’s the bottom line, everyone who is dealing with this debate should have a little bit of humility and admit that none of us know exactly what is going on in the labour market of today.”

Economist Don Drummond said better information can be produced at a cost of about $39-million a year. He was part of an advisory panel in 2009 that made dozens of recommendations to improve labour-market data, yet few suggestions were implemented.

The former TD chief economist would like to see one entity, such as Mr. Kenney’s department Employment and Social Development Canada or Statscan, “pick up the baton” and take responsibility for more detailed and current labour market data at the national and provincial level.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tories-defend-use-of-kijiji-data-in-face-of-opposition-ridicule/article17690737/

Better for the government to spend some money for better data than, as it did in the change from the Census to the National Household Survey, spend more for poorer quality data (couldn’t resist!).

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Jonathan Kay: Scotland shows Quebec what an intelligent and mature independence movement looks like

2014/03/26 Leave a comment

Good piece contrasting the approach by the Scottish nationalist and the PQ:

Quebec’s modern sovereigntist movement has been around, in its modern form, since the 1960s. Yet to this day, its leaders (including Parti Québécois Premier Pauline Marois) are fantastically vague about what sort of “independent” country they want. Extraordinary claims — Quebec will keep the dollar, and, oh, yes, have a seat on the Bank of Canada — are casually made and then forgotten. The question of how the most per-capita indebted province in Canada will pay its way (including its share of the Canadian federal debt) while forsaking the $16-billion that the rest of the country sends its way every year is entirely ignored.

In Scotland, by contrast, such meat-and-potatoes questions about what will happen in a newly independent nation are the meat and potatoes of this year’s campaign — and are explored in great detail in a lengthy text published by the Scottish government entitled Scotland’s Future — Your Guide to an Independent Scotland. As Jonathan Freedland writes in the March 20 edition of The New York Review of Books, the 649-page document “is short on the rhetoric of self-determination, long on the quotidian details of self-government. In a ‘Q & A’ section, the third question — after ‘Why should Scotland be independent?’ and ‘Can Scotland afford to be independent?’— is ‘What will happen to my pension?’ There are few rousing calls to Scottish pride or the spirit of Bannockburn, their place taken by information on postal services and the administration of drivers’ licenses.”

Jonathan Kay: Scotland shows Quebec what an intelligent and mature independence movement looks like | National Post.

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Margaret MacMillan: How today is like the period before the First World War

2014/03/24 Leave a comment

Good interview with Margaret MacMillan with some interesting reflections:

Do you not see any developments in modern diplomacy that keep countries away from the precipice?

We have better international institutions and more of them. And we do have the capacity now to talk quickly to each other. But what we don’t have are the experienced diplomats who used to really know a country. There’s been a tendency in most countries to downplay the role of the diplomatic corps and to say, ‘do we really need diplomats?’ You’ve got it in the Harper government: ‘Do we really need all these people? They just hang out and go to cocktail parties.’

By the same token, diplomats did not prevent the First World War.

No, they didn’t. But they did actually deal with quite a few crises before World War One. You could argue that they had shown their value. I think good diplomatic services are very very useful. It’s also worrying to me what’s happening to newspapers. The media generally are closing down their overseas bureaux because they’re too expensive. What that means is we’re getting huge amounts of information but we’re not really getting the analysis and expertise that we all need.

We mistake being able to get lots of information from everywhere very quickly with actually getting knowledge.

Margaret MacMillan: How today is like the period before the First World War – The Globe and Mail.

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