The Forgotten Issues of Quebec’s Student Strike

The ongoing three-month strike by Quebec university students over tuition increases has sparked near-unanimous outrage from members of Canada’s mainstream commentariat — and not just over the violence, but over the very content of what students are demanding.

What do these spoiled rich kids have to protest against, the pundits wail, when already they pay the lowest tuition in Canada, and Canadian tuition in general is but a fraction of that in the United States? They are unrealistic. They feel entitled. In Andrew Coyne’s words: “The student leaders, at this point, are absolutely delusional in their sense of their importance to the universe.”

What is rarely included in this chorus of condemnation is an honest look at higher education elsewhere in the world. Dozens of countries offer free post-secondary education — not just in wealthy Northern Europe, but also in Cuba, Sri Lanka, and Botswana. In some cases, they share these benefits with international students as well as citizens, and even offer cost-of-living allowances. There is nothing in the Canadian experience that would make it impossible for us to gradually implement such practices. It is simply a matter of using tax dollars to spread the costs around — something we already do with K-12 education.

Some object that students are the ones who primarily benefit from their education, and therefore they should be the ones to pay. But this argument fails to acknowledge that society as a whole gains from a highly educated population.

However, if people decide that students should be made to sacrifice something for the benefit of a higher education, perhaps conditions could be placed on free tuition. For instance, graduates could have their student debts wiped clean in return for working a certain number of years in whatever jurisdiction offers them the deal. The number of years required could even be reduced if the student agrees to spend them working somewhere deemed especially important — such as remote rural communities or perhaps the developing world.

Another common objection to free tuition is that it is highly regressive. Most university students come from middle- and upper-class backgrounds, this argument runs. To divert society’s resources for their benefit, by reducing or eliminating tuition fees, only increases the problem of inequality.

In a way this is true, but we must realize that it becomes less true as the cost of education drops. Tuition fees are a barrier to higher education — especially for those with low incomes. They may not be the only barrier, or even the most important. Some evidence shows that parental influence and early formative experiences play a larger role in determining whether or not an individual will attend university. But while tuition fees may not be the whole problem, they are certainly a substantial part of it. Any comprehensive program to make post-secondary education more accessible for everyone — regardless of one’s finances — ought to include the phasing out of tuition fees.

Equality of opportunity is what it all comes down to. In the current war of words over the Quebec student strike — over the behaviour of that “self-serving, self-satisfied, self-dramatizing collection of idiots” (quoting the inexhaustible Andrew Coyne once again) — I hope that this basic principle does not get buried.

President Obama and Marriage Equality

First thing’s first. Barack Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage yesterday should be celebrated. On the heels of similar pronouncements by Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, this marks the first time that a sitting US President has taken such a bold stance in favour of marriage equality.

However, just as light can be considered both a wave and a particle in quantum mechanics, every announcement by an elected official exhibits a similar duality. Was Obama’s decision motivated primarily by principle or by politics?

I believe there were elements of both. On the surface, a stronger case can be made for principle. Although most recent polls show a slim majority or plurality of Americans in favour of legalized gay marriage, it is still an incredibly touchy subject. And with Mitt Romney, Obama’s soon-to-be-confirmed opponent in November’s Presidential election, railing against the evils of not just gay marriage but even civil unions, one would think that Obama could safely have continued speaking favourably of such watered down compromises in order to pacify the left — who after all have virtually nowhere else to go — without overly alienating the right. So the fact that Obama rejected this strategy suggests that he acted for reasons other than mere electoral advantage.

However, according to administration officials, Obama was already planning to come out in favour of gay marriage in a matter of months — i.e. closer to the election. Biden’s announcement simply forced his hand. If this is true, the Obama campaign must have seen some kind of political benefit in backing gay marriage — probably as a means of mobilizing the base and portraying the President as strong and decisive.

In fact, if Obama can be accused of cynicism and political gaming at all, it is not for the announcement he made yesterday, but for his failure to do so earlier. The President almost certainly supported gay marriage all along, as he admitted while running for Illinois state Senate in 1996 – back when it was far more of a liability. The fact that, in the intervening years, he stuffed his true beliefs back in the closet (so to speak) reflects a concern that they might have jeopardized his ever-escalating political ambitions.

But different times and different campaign strategies have changed all that. Politics and principle have finally converged to compel the President to make the right choice. This does not mean that legalized gay weddings will immediately sprout up in all fifty states. But the cultural shift is undeniable. Obama has done something without precedent, and it falls on officials in all three branches of government and at federal and state levels, as well as on individual Americans, to act. Will they one day look back upon their behaviour with shame, like those who resisted women’s suffrage and desegregation? Or will they join with the current of history and stand up for equality?

Obama has made his decision. Romney has made his. Let’s see how these next few months play out.

Another National Post Letter

This one is about the Harper government’s crackdown on the charitable sector despite its important contribution to our democracy. Please see today’s National Post — or click here — for my letter.

A Multi-Partisan Approach to Environmental Protection

I am a strong believer in the Green Party. It plays an essential role. Environmentalists cannot afford to patiently wait around for traditional parties to see the light and pass the necessary laws to avert catastrophe.

That being said, Canadians have been slow to embrace the Green Party, and that slowness has been magnified by an unfair and unrepresentative electoral system. The Greens’ single-member delegation in the House of Commons — a triumph in its own right — is too small a basket for environmentalists to consolidate all our eggs. And in the face of the slowly unfolding plans of Stephen Harper’s majority government to eviscerate environmental regulations in Canada (the “streamlining” of the assessment process that I’ve written about before was just a start), we need to try something new.

Green leader Elizabeth May, with the help of any other MPs concerned about the environment, needs to create a multi-partisan Environmental Caucus in the House of Commons — somewhat akin to the (misleadingly named) Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism, or the various congressional caucuses in the US and all-party parliamentary groups in the UK. It would be considerably less “official” and more “activist” than the House’s Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. Open to MPs from all parties, this informal caucus could potentially present the most formidable and unified challenge to Harper’s radically anti-environmental agenda. If joined by a handful of green-leaning Conservatives, it could even sow the seeds of division within the governing party. (Please allow my indulgence in fantasy. It’s all I’ve got!)

Might this strategy result in the appropriation of my beloved Green Party’s values and the stealing of its political thunder? It’s possible — especially if the strategy is successful. But environmentalists’ allegiance is to the planet, not to any party, and at the moment this represents our best path forward. We cannot wait another three years to boot the bastards out. The environment needs parliamentary protection against a short-sighted and power-hungry executive right now.

Stephane Dion’s Shiny New Voting System

Did I read that right? Did Stephane Dion — former head of the Liberal Party, almost Prime Minister of Canada — just come out in favour of proportional representation? Better late than never!

Well, that’s not entirely fair. Dion has shown a willingness to consider electoral reform in the past, as he did by backing the resolution in favour of alternative voting at his party’s most recent convention (not proportional representation but still not bad). Earlier on as party leader, on the occasion of his non-competition agreement with the Green Party’s Elizabeth May in 2007, he promised to explore different electoral options if he became Prime Minister.

But now, in the National Post and, in more detail, in a publication of the Quebec think tank The Federal Idea, Dion is supporting a specific alternative much more forcefully than ever before. One that, on the spectrum between proportionality and plurality/majority, clearly leans heavily towards the former.

So what exactly does Dion propose? What he calls the proportional-preferential-personalized vote, or P3. It would achieve proportionality by enlarging ridings across the country to elect between three and five MPs each. The seats would be distributed to parties roughly in proportion to their respective shares of the vote in each one of these ridings. Sadly, the resulting proportionality would only be partial because of the relatively small size of the multi-member districts. There is a well-known correlation in proportional voting systems between district magnitude and proportionality (although, interestingly, the opposite is true in non-proportional systems). Dion prefers this “moderate” proportionality to the “pure” stuff we see in Israel and the Netherlands (a somewhat confused distinction, but I’ll let it slide).

P3 would also be preferential. In selecting their parties, voters would not simply choose their favourite and leave it at that. If they wanted, they could rank their second and third and fourth choices as well. The smallest parties — those that do not have a large enough share of votes to win seats — would be eliminated and their second-choice votes distributed to other parties. This procedure would continue on to progressively larger parties — redistributing third- and fourth- and fifth-choice votes if necessary — until the only parties left are those with enough support to win seats.

Finally, although voters would primarily be choosing parties, P3 would also be personalized in the sense that they would have the option of selecting a favourite candidate running for their first-choice party. Seats would be distributed to individual candidates on the basis of these selections.

(The faint of heart are advised to please skip the next paragraph.)

To my ear, Dion’s proposal sounds a lot like open-list proportional representation — just with smaller-than-usual electoral districts and a slight preferential element (slight because the vast majority of ballots’ second and third preferences would likely not come into play). I see no reason to prefer P3 to any of the other proportional systems commonly recommended for Canada, such as mixed-member proportional representation (MMP) or the single transferable vote (STV). All three should be just as good at achieving local representation, but MMP surpasses P3 in terms of proportionality and STV surpasses it in terms of preferential and personalized features. In fact, with the institution of the alternative vote for constituency elections, MMP could surpass P3 by all three of its signature criteria. And a simple threshold, something included in most MMP systems, could help it elude concerns about instability due to the proliferation of smaller parties.

Nevertheless, what Dion proposes is in almost every way far superior to the first-past-the-post system Canada is currently stuck with. It is, on balance, a reasonable proposal from a reasonable person. On those few occasions when Dion still makes his way into the news, I cannot help but wonder what could have possessed the Liberals to give him up as their leader. He is green, he is thoughtful, and he is committed to democratic reform. I would take him any day over his right-wing predecessors Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, or his warmongering heir Michael Ignatieff.

Oliver’s Twist: So Long Federal Environmental Oversight

Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver — yes, the one who labelled environmentalists foreign-backed radicals — announced a major overhaul today in how environmental assessments will be conducted in Canada. Not surprisingly, the government is limiting the ability of environmental groups to take part in public hearings, shortening the length of reviews, and generally streamlining the process. Put another way, public and regulatory oversight of resource development is being slashed.

What I find most interesting, however, is that Oliver seems to be trying to take the federal government out of the environmental assessment game. With the exception of “major economic projects” and other matters judged to be of national importance, the feds will now be leaving assessments to the provinces in hopes of avoiding any costly duplication of efforts. And so we find ourselves in the midst of the classic debate: which level of government — federal or provincial — is better at protecting the environment? Some argue that the provinces are the appropriate venue, because they are closer to the people most intimately affected by environmental problems, while others counter that provinces are also closer to those who stand to profit from resource exploitation.

In my opinion, both sides miss the point. Whether the feds or the provinces have more power on the environment is not nearly as important as how they interact with each other. In the introduction to an environmental policy anthology she co-edited, UBC political scientist Kathryn Harrison distinguishes three different approaches: unilateralism, rationalization, and collaboration.

Under unilateralism, both levels of government put environmental protections in place on their own and without regard for the other, resulting in inevitable duplications. A more cooperative approach is rationalization, under which the two levels divvy up responsibilities, so that some environmental questions are treated as federal jurisdiction and others as provincial. Most cooperative of all, collaboration involves the feds and the provinces getting together to agree upon and draw up the rules jointly.

What we see with Minister Oliver’s announcement today is not a decentralization of environmental policy — or at least not just that — but a shift in Canada’s environmental assessments from unilateralism to rationalization. Of course, everyone loves a little cooperation, but we might as well ask what we are losing in the process.

The greatest strength of unilateralism is frankly that it tends to produce the best results. If either a federal or a provincial government happens to be a bit weak on the environment at any given time (something that all jurisdictions can be, depending on who is in office), the planet will at least have the regulations of the other to fall back on. Unilateralism offers up some friendly jurisdictional competition to ensure that the best policies rise to the top (a conservative principle if ever I’ve heard one!). It provides a guarantee that whichever level of government is most committed to the environment is the one that will carry the day.

But what about those costly duplications? Everything in government has a cost. The question is whether we are getting good value for our money. Politics, as is often observed, is about choice. So what do we prioritize? Sustainable resource development, healthy ecosystems, and the best possible environmental assessments? Or corporate tax cuts, prisons, and F-35s? The Conservative government has made its position clear.

I wonder where most Canadians stand.

On Israel and Apartheid

Message on a wall at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Last month, university students and activists around the world marked Israeli Apartheid Week, an annual series of lectures and protests designed to bring attention to the plight of Palestinians. As usual, the condemnations were heavy and hyperbolic. Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, obscuring the purpose of the events, used the opportunity to urge “all Canadians to reject anti-Semitism and all forms of racism, discrimination and intolerance.” In 2010, Ontario legislator Peter Shurman commented, “The use of the phrase ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ is about as close to hate speech as one can get without being arrested, and I’m not certain it doesn’t actually cross over that line.”

To equate the mere mention of the phrase “Israeli apartheid” with anti-semitism is just as absurd as charging Islamophobia whenever someone rightly accuses the Saudi Arabian government of gender apartheid. Surely it should be possible to discuss issues surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on their merits rather than just scoring points with debate stopping allegations.

Israel’s more rational defenders tend to point out that contrary to how South African blacks were treated under apartheid, Israel’s Arab citizens are allowed to vote, run for office, and participate in the judiciary. But this red herring neglects the most appropriate target of the apartheid analogy, the Occupied Territories. Despite being forced to live under Israeli sovereignty for more than four decades, the Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have no citizenship rights whatsoever. They are ruled by Israel without the benefit of being able to elect their rulers. And in a striking throwback to the original spirit of apartheid (which literally means “apartness” or “separateness” in Afrikaans), Palestinians are barred from the notorious “Israeli-only” roads, reserved for settlers, that criss-cross the West Bank.

In Israel proper, even though the apartheid analogy begins to break down somewhat, the system still might be termed “apartheid lite” on account of what is widely regarded as the second-class citizenship of Israeli Arabs. Yes, they do have de jure political equality, but they are subject to endless racial profiling and chronic municipal underfunding. The semi-governmental Jewish National Fund bars Israeli Arabs from leasing or buying its landholdings. And while Jews like me, even those who have no connection to the country, have the right to travel to Israel and immediately claim citizenship under its Law of Return, Palestinian refugees — many of whom were born in what is now Israel before being expelled in 1948, many of whom still have the keys and deeds to their houses — have for decades been denied their own right of return.

All this being said, the term “Israeli apartheid” may now have outlived its usefulness. The analogy remains essentially apt. In fact, many veterans of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, such as Desmond Tutu, have noted the similarities. Sadly, however, it is not enough to be right. Israel’s apologists seem to be winning the public opinion war (at least in Canada), and reliance on the “apartheid” label may be doing the Palestinian solidarity movement more harm than good. Due perhaps to the habitual insularity and PR myopia of the activist left, Palestinian supporters have allowed their foes to disingenuously define anyone who applies the word “apartheid” to Israel as an irrational extremist.

So in the interests of effectively engaging those who currently sit on the fence, the time has probably come to think up some new rhetoric. Or better yet, to forgo flashy rhetoric altogether and just let the facts — which are damning enough on their own — speak for themselves.

Update 11/05/2012: This post has been reprinted here on rabble.ca.