Marginalia

Japanese Balloon Bomb - circa 1945.

I just found out about these things. The Japanese launched thousands of these balloons from Honshu against the Pacific coast of the United States and Canada in the final months of fighting during World War II. The idea was to use the existing air streams to carry them across the Pacific and have them trigger forest fires in the Northwest. They didn't really work, apparently they only killed six people in a single incident (a woman and five children in Oregon came across one while picnicking and accidentally set it off) and none triggered any forest fires. The Japanese abandoned the program in April 1945, 4 months before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Anyways, I find this kind of thing pretty fascinating - we tend to focus on the grand narratives of history, which is fine, but in doing so things like these slip through the cracks and be forgotten, which is a shame.

Max Bernier and the Constitutional Con.

   For most Canadians, the name Maxime Bernier doesn't mean whole lot. If prodded some might remember him as being that guy who dated that girl who was friends with the Hell's Angels and left important government documents at her apartment. After that bit of nastiness, he rightfully was stripped of his cabinet position and has been languishing on the back-benches ever since.

  Lately Bernier has been burnishing his reputation as something of a Canadian Libertarian and one of the more doctrinaire Conservatives (this, and the fact that he's openly disagreed with Harper on occasion has many observers touting him as a potential leadership rival should Harper fail for the third time to win a majority). I don't particularly care much for the Conservatives either in tone or ideology, but one comment made by Bernier recently particularly rankles.

    Bernier has been fancying himself something of a Constitutional purist of late - arguing that the Canadian government should do away with the complexities of 21st Century federalism and return to the true spirit of the BNA Act 1867. On his website he recently opined:

Clearly, our goal should be to bring back the balanced federalism envisioned by the Founders. It should be to restore our federal union, as Wilfrid Laurier and most people understood it back then.
This would be done by putting an end to all federal intrusion into areas of provincial jurisdiction. Instead of sending money to the provinces, Ottawa would cut its taxes and let them use the fiscal room that has been vacated. Such a transfer of tax points to the provinces would allow them too fully assume their responsibilities, without federal control.

     There are more than a few problems with this proposal - not the least of which is conflating Wilfrid Laurier with a Father of Confederation - something that would have been news to old Wilfie! But mainly my objections to this line of reasoning is that it is fundamentally misrepresents Canadian political history and is intellectually dishonest.

      For those who haven't been following the story so far - the constitution agreed upon by Sir John A MacDonald and The Gang in 1867 was a highly centralized one where the federal government would be responsible for all of the important levers of control - currency, trade, transportation, taxation, immigration, defense, and international relations. The provinces would deal with more local concerns, most notably in the areas of health, education and social welfare (that these traditionally fell under the purview of the Catholic Church should be noted - provincial control over these areas was central to getting Quebec to agree to Confederation). This makes sense from a 19th Century viewpoint - nation-building was the order of the day, without a strong federal union it was thought that the Americans, who had just finished fighting a bloody civil war, might turn their gaze northward.

     Of course it goes without saying that the world has changed greatly since 1867 - we're no longer worried (too much) about the Americans unleashing the full force of their military might upon us, and healthcare, education, and social welfare have become extraordinarily important portfolios.  Healthcare has become especially important - it being widely regarded as not only a governmental responsibility, but also a defining national value.  Of all the provincial responsibilities, healthcare has been federalized the most. And this makes sense - there is a dramatic disparity in affluence between the provinces - and a basic sense of fairness and decency would dictate that a Canadian should be able to access similar levels of healthcare regardless of the province in which they reside. Since not every province has the taxation base to adequately ensure similar levels of care, the federal government, through the Canada Health Act, sends transfer payments to the poorer provinces to make up the difference. In other words, the Canada Health Act can, and should be, seen as a unifying force in Canada.

     What Bernier is proposing is to take the federal government out of the healthcare game altogether. I know he doesn't mention healthcare specifically in the quoted text, but make no mistake, that's what he's talking about. You'll notice that he characterizes transfer payments as a "federal intrusion" into provincial jurisdiction, and that he thinks we should become more "balanced". The implication is clear - that the modern way of doing things is fundamentally at odds with the intentions of the Fathers of Confederation (as an aside - I kind of hate this phrase). The reality is actually the opposite. If we actually want to honour the vision of Sir John A MacDonald, then we will keep these "federal intrusions" into provincial jurisdictions. As I noted earlier - these transfer payments are essentially in place to strengthen the ties between provinces. Contemporary Canada is far more decentralized than Sir John A would ever have wanted. By loosening the moorings of the defining national ethic (publicly funded healthcare), Bernier would effectively make Canada more far decentralized than it already is.

    Actually, one wonders what Maxime Bernier would think about MacDonald's fondness for disallowance and reservation. MacDonald's vision of a federal union was so strong that he often used this power to over-ride decisions made at the provincial level. Think about that - in the 19th Century, the premier of Ontario (for example) could be unilaterally over-ridden by the Prime Minister for no reason other than the fact that he felt like it. Somehow I doubt our libertarian MP would be comfortable with such authority. An authority, I might add, that still exists, it was never formally revoked.

     Bernier's proposal is not only historically blinkered, but it also is fundamentally dishonest. The actual, unavoidable, result of such a policy would be to bankrupt healthcare and usher in more private ownership of it. As it currently stands, healthcare costs account for roughly 30% of a given province's budget. That percentage is astronomically high - which is a big reason why one never hears of any provinces outside of Quebec (for different reasons altogether)  demanding the federal government take their hands off of healthcare - it's too important and too popular to play the jurisdiction game (incidentally, the jurisdictions are nowhere near as water-tight as the Berniers of the world would have you believe). Bernier knows this. He may be many things, but from what I can gather, a dummy he isn't.  But by framing the argument in such a manner, he's hoping to obscure the obvious outcome (end of public healthcare) with pseudo-intellectual historicism.  The reason why is obvious, it would be political suicide to come out and say "healthcare should be privately run". If he did that, he wouldn't win a seat east or west of Alberta :).

     In many ways it reminds me of Lord Durham's report of 1840 - if you recall, that report called for Upper and Lower Canada to be united into a single province with equal representation. What sounded like egalitarianism was really an attempt to render French Canadians irrelevant - it was widely assumed that the English Protestant minority in Montreal would always side with the English Protestant majority in Ontario and thus render the French majority impotent. (it didn't work out that way - mostly because Baldwin and Lafontaine were awesome, but that's definitely a post for another day)

     In a sense, I can understand why Bernier would want to position himself as such - Libertarianism has never been a strong current in Canadian politics, but it certainly has been for our neighbours to the south. The much discussed Tea Party movement (who look surprisingly like Ron Paul fans from 2008) are heavily influenced by libertarianism (and nativism, but that's a story for another day). Many of the Republican candidates favoured by the Tea Party - Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul, Joe Miller, Sharon Angle - have positioned themselves as something they call "Constitutional Conservatives". I suspect that Bernier is hoping to appeal to Canadians who view those politicians favourably.

While it might be tempting to think of a proposal from a Conservative that doesn't include adolescent pot shots at the Leader of the Opposition as refreshing, in reality this proposal from Bernier is nothing more than a dishonest appeal for radical free market capitalism and the dismantling of the modern healthcare system.

Baseball Follies

   Being a huge baseball nerd I generally make a stop over at Sports Illustrated to see what's up with the national pastime. This time of year most baseball writers are busy compiling their lists for who deserves to win the various awards; building their case for why one player deserves the MVP or the Cy Young over the other candidates. SI's Tom Verducci recently published his list and in it he made of the more pernicious arguments that frankly never made any sense to me. See if you can spot it:

    Verducci selects Toronto-born Joey Votto of the Cincinnati Reds for the NL MVP stating "Votto wins easily because he was the best player on any of the NL playoff teams." Later on he chooses Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners to win the AL Cy Young, arguing that "Hernandez will win this award fairly comfortably...He was exactly what it says on the award: the most outstanding pitcher in the league. Just ask any hitter."

     Did you spot it? The MVP is dependent on how the player's team performed overall, whereas the CY Young isn't. Perhaps I should mention that Hernandez' Mariners finished with the worst record in the American League 61-101 (.377 winning percentage). This has never made much sense to me - why  is the one award, for all intents and purposes, limited to those players who happen to play on a winning team while the other is open to all teams? Only twice in recent history has the MVP gone to a player from a losing team: Andre Dawson of the Chicago Cubs in 1987 and Alex Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers in 2003. Pitchers from losing teams win all the time, in 2008 Cleveland's Cliff Lee won, and they finished 8th in the American League - 7.5 games out of the wild card.

    In practical terms what happens every year is the baseball writers (those who vote for the major awards) basically take a look at the 4 playoff bound teams in each league and pick the best player of that lot. And I can't, for the life of me, figure out why. The impact one positional player has on a team's record frankly isn't that much - the image of the Herculean slugger metaphorically lifting the entire team on his back and willing them into the promised land just isn't very accurate. And yet, every year we're subjected to the same process of selection.

     It's one of the reasons why Toronto's Jose Bautista likely won't receive a single 1st place vote - Toronto simply wasn't competitive enough. If he played for Tampa Bay or Minnesota, his obvious short-comings would be rationalized away and he'd be a likely favourite to win the MVP. I'm not suggesting that Bautista is the legitimate MVP, he isn't. I'm only saying that he wouldn't have been dismissed quite so readily if he played on a winning team.

     Everything else about this sport is scientifically analyzed to the minutest detail, that the most prestigious award in the sport isn't, is not only confusing, it's absurd.


p.s. Go Doc Halladay!

The Seventh Defenceman Paradox

   If you open up tomorrow's newspaper to the sports section you will find a short list of all NHL transactions that happened today. Beside Montreal you'll see "Alex Henry (D) assigned to HAM (AHL)."  If you are the extremely curious sort, you might go to the internet and look up Mr. Henry. There you'll discover a player who has played all of 2 NHL games in the last 5 seasons, and scored all of 6 goals in the last 3 years in the AHL. He is, by all measures, a journeyman defenceman and career minor-leaguer. In other words, exactly the sort of name you'd expect to see on the transaction wire during the final days of training camp. If you are a Montreal Canadiens fan however, Alex Henry is currently the single most debated player on the roster - his demotion means that he is no longer Montreal's 7th defenceman for the upcoming season.

    I have this pet theory that the single most discussed/lionized/loathed player on any hockey team is the 7th defenceman. That the reaction he elicits is completely and utterly out-sized compared to the relatively insignificant contributions he makes during a game. In general, NHL teams use 3 pairings of defencemen during a game. However, they will usually keep one extra defenceman on the roster in case of injury or the flu or what have you. This is a guy who often does little more than watch most games from on high sitting in the press box enjoying free hot dogs and soda and looking dapper in a suit. In other words, he is somebody that no one should worry all to much about. And yet, as Alex Henry, and his predecessors Marc Andre Bergeron and Patrice Brisebois can attest, no other player (save the goalie) will engender as much vocal debate. The difference between the 6th and 7th defenceman is quite literally the difference between winning the Stanley Cup or missing the playoffs entirely, or so they'd have you believe.

     As many of you know, I'm a fairly huge Montreal Canadiens fan. I firmly believe that making his son, born and bred in the GTA, a Habs fan was my father's cruelest joke. Regardless, here I am - having hit that magical age where my default Christmas present is something with a CH logo on it. And I'm totally okay with that. One of the great/terrible things about the internet is how easy it is to find information about happenings in places other than where you live - and then find a community of people just like you who also care deeply/irrationally about these happenings. Until a few years ago I was blissfully unaware of this, but now I'm all too cognizant of the fact that I can go online and find literally hundreds of websites populated with thousands of people opining at great length about the state of the Montreal Canadiens. I now know why people read the gossip pages - these websites, and their patrons, are like crack - I want to stop, but I can't. They're the internet equivalent of a trainwreck...you simply cannot turn your head away. You know how they say "fan" is short for "fanatic"? Well these guys (and they're almost ALL guys) seem to go out of their way to prove that idiom. No seriously, I once saw a guy who went through every goal scored against Montreal to see where the respective goalie's weak spots were - how long would that take?

     Guess what has them aflame of late? The demotion of Alex Henry. Who will now be the 7th Defenceman? Was he a better option than Ryan O'Byrne? Or even Alexandre Picard (the projected 6th and 7th Defencemen)? Who had the better training camp? Which player has more career potential? And what about their respective salary cap hits? This position will be discussed  for the length of the season. Pro Henry, Pro Picard and Pro O'Byrne camps will form, almost organically, and both sides will listen attentively to every utterance by the head coach in hopes of divining what he, and by extension, the team, thinks about their chosen 7th defenceman. Back to back loses are easily explained by the 6th defenceman. If the 7th defenceman was in his place they'd certainly have won.

     Lest you think this is isolated to Montreal, whose fans are, to be frank, completely insane,  Toronto has often been just as enraptured with the 7th defenceman. This year's debate has been somewhat muted as most have been discussing the merits of Nazem Kadri, but right behind that topic of conversation is the future of Jeff Finger, Brett Lebda, and Matt Lashoff. A few years back you couldn't say the name "Aki Berg" in this town without enraging all men within earshot.

     What accounts for this obsession? I think in part it's because holding the position requires no evidence. It's simply enough to say "if player X was in the lineup instead of Player Y, then things would have been different" and it's almost impossible to refute. You see the same thing in football with the backup Quarterback - when the team loses, the outcome surely would've been different if the QB was different (which of course doesn't account for the fact that the opposing defence would change their strategy to counteract the different QB, but I digress). I also think that fans are nowhere near as savvy at judging talent as they think they are. You never hear about 1st or 2nd pairing defencemen because, well, they're good, and talent is far harder for the layman to recognize than deficiencies (at least at the Defence position - one that is notoriously difficult to judge).

Whatever the reason, you can be certain of one thing - the effect the spare defenceman has on your team of choice will be completely blown out of proportion by those who claim to be their biggest fans.

Man, I missed hockey :)

Trudeau, The October Crisis, Campus Marxists, and Social History

     This October 5th marks the 40th anniversary of the kidnapping of British trade commissioner James Cross by the FLQ, which set off a series of events now cumulatively known as the October Crisis, surely one of the strangest autumns in Canadian history*. By now the details of the October Crisis are well-trod territory - confronted with a home-grown terrorist organization not only threatening to destroy the nation, but also forcing it to listen to their fevered, adolescent ramblings in the form of a "manifesto", Prime Minister Trudeau told the nation that bleeding hearts should go on and bleed and to just watch him (seriously, that interview is still one of that all-time greats. Hollywood couldn't have written it better). When the smoke cleared the War Measures Act was invoked, thousands of (mostly) French Canadians had been incarcerated, Minister Pierre Laporte was found dead in a trunk of a car, and the perpetrators were exiled to Cuba where they could continue to play-act the role of romantic freedom fighters to their little hearts' content.

     The implications that month had on the Separatist movement are well known and well covered, the actions of the Chenier cell signalled the ignoble end to the use of violence as a means to achieve political goals in Canada - we're far too genteel for all of that nastiness it would seem. Seeking a legitimate outlet for their grievances, those dreaming of independence turned to the Parti Quebecois, led by the eloquent and charismatic Rene Levesque. Six years later his Parti Quebecois would win the provincial election and by the end of his first term in office, Levesque would force Canada to witness its first referendum on secession.

    I don't want to really talk about all that though. Instead the upcoming anniversary reminded of a conversation I had in undergrad with some strident Marxists in the Sid Smith foyer. I was going to U of T when Trudeau passed away in 2000 and naturally his role in shaping Canada was being discussed at great length. Leaving my Intro to Art History class one evening I was nabbed by two Marxists who asked me what I thought of Trudeau. I gave what I thought was the standard answer: The Charter of Rights, Multiculturalism, Official Languages, Bilingualism etc etc. They nodded and then asked me what I thought about the October Crisis. Again I thought for a second and told them that it could be seen as an important step in Canada's growth into a proper nation. The Marxists, obviously waiting for this moment, bombarded me with information about the mass arrests during the Crisis. Their feeling was that it was all part of an organized plot to rid Quebec of leftists and the trade union movement. This piqued my interest and eventually I got them to admit that maybe the reason so many leftists and trade unionists were arrested was because significant numbers of them were also seperatists. I let them continue for a while and even bought one of their newspapers (seriously, The Worker's Vanguard is easily the funniest thing in print since the Weekly World News went online only. Do yourself a favour - go to a university campus nearby and buy one. You won't be disappointed), and went on my way. Ah, undergrad.

   For some reason that conversation has stuck with me. Not only because those Marxists were entertaining as hell, but also, upon further reflection I think my off-hand remark about the October Crisis has merit. The development of Canada from a British nation to a North American one is something I find endlessly fascinating. Students of Canadian history (or anyone who took Grade 10 history really) should be familiar with the touchstones: Statute of Westminster, Waiting a week to declare war on Hitler, Expo 67, Immigration reform, Patriation of the Constitution, Free Trade Agreement. By the time America was invading Iraq, Canada had reached the point where they not only turned down overtures from the United States but also England - something that would've been unimaginable 40 years earlier. I think the October Crisis has its place in this discussion.

     I think in a very real sense that the October Crisis can be seen in the same light as Expo 67 - both served to help Canada mature - in two different ways I think. First, I think a nation can be united in celebration as well as in conflict. The October Crisis was a homegrown crisis that had linked Canadians across the country in ways that few earlier events had. My French Canadian father was in the Navy during the crisis, and he was prevented from taking shore leave in Vancouver due to concerns about anti-French violence. This certainly wasn't an issue that was isolated to Quebec and maybe Toronto. I think the advent of television has a lot to do with this. Peruse the CBC archives and I think you'll grant me the comparison between this footage and the images from Vietnam our American neighbours saw on the nightly news. Television came along, and shortly thereafter Canadians were presented with the image of armed soldiers in the streets of Montreal. This was happening at home, in Canada, not halfway across the world. I would argue that this had as much a role in shrinking the size of Canada and lessening the impact of regionalism (or provincialism) as the more widely accepted (and decidedly happier) events of this era - Expo '67 and the Summit Series '72 did. After October 1970 it became much harder for a Canadian to think of themselves only as a British Columbian, or an Ontarian, or a Nova Scotian.

   Second, that October was Canada's experience with the decolonization movement that swept the globe in the 1960s. Not to suggest that the French experience in Canada is on par with Algeria or Mozambique, perhaps the Basque situation would be the best comparison, but the armed insurrection against colonial overlords was certainly part of the cultural zeitgeist. That Canada had its own such event connected it to the rest of the world, in a way that more formal international events (like the Pearson Solution to the Suez Crisis) never could. Acts of violence have a way of connecting the world - I'm thinking specifically of the international response to the September 11th attacks, that formal agreements never can. I think that the October Crisis brought Canada into the contemporary community of nations and made it a little more difficult to think of Canada as that British colony in America.

     Anyways, back to my original point - I think my offhand comment to those two Marxists was probably truer than I realized when I said it (I think at the time I was probably making a connection with "just watch me" and the bravado of Churchill or Kennedy). But I think that for Canada to become its own nation and not a British or an American one, it needed to see itself, and be seen, as an independent entity. The October Crisis was one of the key events that allowed that to happen.
 
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*actually now that I think of it - there's been a couple of strange autumns in Canadian history. The referendum in October 1995, King-Byng Affair in Oct 1925, Proroguement 2008, the Khaki Election of 1917. Not sure what that says about Canada - but surely it's something poetic.

Welcome to Everyday Arcanist

ar·can·ist

noun

a person professing special secret knowledge concerning ceramics, esp. concerning the making of porcelain.

 

Back in high school I remember looking up the word arcane to see if I was using it correctly. Turns out I was, but directly underneath the definition of arcane, I found the definition above. It always struck me as completely, wonderfully, absurd that there exists in the English language a word to describe somebody who knows an exceptional amount about making porcelain, but refuses to tell anybody about it.

Everyday Arcanist will be the place where I park all those random thoughts that may or may not be of interest to anyone other than myself. I expect the majority of my posts to revolve around one of my three major interests - sports, history, and Canadian politics.

I hope you find something to enjoy.