R.I.P. photographer Tom Hanson. His shot of a bagpiper wearing a gas mask at the Quebec Summit protest is on the cover of my first book, Watchdogs and Gadflies: Activism from Marginal to Mainstream.
He died, at age 41, while playing hockey. Yikes.
Read the Globe and Mail obit here.
I am disgusted that the IOC is banning Right to Play from the Athlete’s Village at the Vancouver Games. Right to Play, a humanitarian organization that grew out of the
Olympics, works with kids in war-torn and poverty-stricken
countries, and many Olympic and professional athletes are involved.
Alas, I can’t say I am surprised by this heavy-handedness. Let’s face it, the Games are about making money, nothing more. And what’s freedom of speech when General Motors is an Olympic sponsor while Mitsubishi backs Right to Play.
It’s all just one more reminder that all this stuff about Olympic ideals is pure fiction, just marketing BS to cover the corruption, the cheating and the coziness with totalitarian governments. That’s not news to anyone, but that this censorship will take place in Canada is a disgrace.
So far 92 athletes, many of them high profile, have signed a letter criticizing the decision, according to this National Post story. Let’s hope all athletes use their outside voices to protest this censorship as vigorously as possible.
Set the PVR: TVO’s Big Ideas will feature Ron Deibert of Citizen Lab on Saturday and Sunday November 22 and 23 2008 4 pm (Repeats Saturday and Sunday at 5 am.)
“In this lecture entitled “Hacking Back: The Battle for Human Rights Online,”political science professor Ron Deibert looks at the issue of internet censorship and surveillance around the world and the tools being created (like “psiphon”) to empower global citizens to freely share and access information online. Deibert is director of The Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies.”
After getting all those sweet passes from Ronnie on the ice, I am keen to see and hear how he performs in a lecture hall.
Walter Robinson is the former executive director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and there’s a chapter in Watchdogs and Gadflies called “Walter Robinson and the Rise of Conservative Activism.” He’s now a columnist for the Ottawa Sun and his offering today is about how we can increase the voter turnout from the dismal 59.1 percent showing in our most recent election. His suggestions include ditching the first-past-the-post system in favour of some form of proportional representation (a change Robinson has been touting since before I started researching Watchdogs and Gadflies); reforming the voting process, including experimenting with electronic voting; and better journalism: “Pooping birds, innocent candidate gaffes or botched interviews in somebody’s second language are hardly the issues on which our nation will rise and fall.”
A report called Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s TOM-Skype platform from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab (run by my hockey buddy Ron Deibert) revealed that China regularly scans Internet chats for sensitive keywords (including those related to Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Communist Party) and stores the scanned conversations on insecure servers. The report’s author, Nart Villeneuve, “was able to view, download, and archive millions of private communications, ranging from business transactions to political correspondence, along with their identifying personal information.”
TOM-Skype is owned by TOM Online, a Chinese mobile firm, and Skype, which is owned by eBay. After the New York Times ran a story on the report, Skype issued an apology: “Last night, we learned that this practice was changed without our knowledge or consent and we are extremely concerned. We deeply apologise for the breach of privacy relating to chat messages on TOM’s servers in China and we are urgently addressing this situation with TOM.”
Congrats to Citizen Lab.
Okay, I don’t pretend to be an expert on US politics — just a fascinated observer — and electoral politics isn’t the purpose of this blog (Watchdogs and Gadflies was about political activists, the citizens working for change outside electoral politics). But sometimes I can’t help myself, especially when I see the media doing such a dreadful job. Andrew Sullivan has it right: “While the media demands that Obama respond to things he never said and never meant, McCain is not even asked to retract a bald-faced, massive, obvious, refutable lie. In the last month, McCain has become the biggest liar in the modern history of presidential politics. He makes Bill Clinton look like George Washington.”
It’s true — most media reports on the ads (or the Bridge to Nowhere or earmarks or any one of a number of other controversies) present them as differences of opinion when the facts are readily available to prove who is lying. Isn’t that exactly how Joseph McCarthy got away with destroying so many American lives?
After disgracing their profession on WMDs and the reasons behind the Iraq war, you’d think at least some reporters would at least try to redeem themselves. Apparently not. The sad truth is the media aren'’t elitist, they’re incompetent.
The subtitle for That Good Night keeps changing. When my agent and I first pitched the book back in 2002, we couldn’t come up with a good title so we went with The Ethicists in full knowledge that it would change. Once I started focusing my research on end-of-life ethics, I came up with That Good Night, which in retrospect seemed pretty obvious, and this subtitle: “Ethics, Euthanasia and the End of Life.” Lots of Es. I liked it.
Recently, Penguin decided it made more sense to go with “Ethicists, Euthanasia and End-of-Life Care.” I liked the change from Ethics to Ethicists and understood that while it didn’t sound quite so elegant, End-of-Life Care made sense from sales perspective. But there were more changes to come.
I realize that subtitles can help sell a book. Given the number of people who asked me what a gadfly was after Watchdogs and Gadflies came out, I’m glad we went with “Activism from Marginal to Mainstream” as a subtitle. And while DRIVE is short, snappy and active, it doesn’t give a browser in a bookstore much sense of what it’s about, so we needed to add “A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile” — though even that created confusion: some people wondered what was so complicated and others expected a raucous road trip akin to the one in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Anyway, all this got me thinking about a great Ben Yogoda essay called “The Subtitle That Changed America” that appeared in the New York Times back in 2005. Yogada talks about various trends in subtitles, one of which is to make them really long — and that was before Robert Sullivan’s Cross Country: Fifteen Years and Ninety Thousand Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a Lot of Bad Motels, a Moving Van, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, My Wife, My Mother-in-Law, Two Kids, and Enough Coffee to Kill an Elephant came out. Yagoda concludes: “Elongated voguish subtitles are harmless enough, but I miss the time, not so long ago, when it was possible for a book to go out into the world with only a strong title followed by a few hundred pages of outstanding writing. That was certainly the tack taken by most mid-20th-century nonfiction classics: Hiroshima, All the President’s Men, The American Way of Death, The White Album, Elvis, Dispatches, Joe Gould’s Secret, The Executioner’s Song, Lillian Ross’s Picture, The Right Stuff, The Soul of a New Machine, The Kingdom and the Power, just about everything ever written by John McPhee, and a book that, were it published today, would tote a subtitle like ‘The True Story of How the Ivy League Elite Developed Strange Ideas About the World, Got America Into Vietnam, and Messed Up Foreign Policy for a Long Time.’ Back in 1972, David Halberstam called it The Best and the Brightest and then shut up.”
Oh well, I’m not Halberstam and, as of now, it looks as though Penguin wants to go with That Good Night: Ethicists and the Dilemmas of End-of-Life Care. Utilitarian, rather than elegant, but if it helps sell books…
As usual, Paul Wells has an amusing and original take on Stephane Dion’s carbon tax proposal. The comments are pretty funny too, though certainly less original.
One of the remarkable activists I wrote about in Watchdogs and Gadflies was Martha Kostuch so I was sad to see her obituary in the Globe and Mail this morning. Here’s what I wrote about her:
As activists navigate the dangers of coalitions, they also seek to wield more power with governments — and, increasingly, corporations — through tactics such as legal challenges. While not new, the courts have, especially since the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, become one of the most useful tools for people who want to change the world. Surprisingly, the best person to talk to about this subject is not a lawyer but a veterinarian in small-town Alberta. Rocky Mountain House is a two-and-a-half hour drive from either Calgary or Edmonton. Nestled on the edge of the Rockies, the town has a lovely setting, but is otherwise unremarkable. Just off a strip of fast-food joints and chain stores, a little way down a gravel road, is the Rocky Animal Hospital, a veterinary clinic in a house built in what may best be described as 1970s hippie aesthetic.
As I read the two Gandhi quotes on the wall of the clinic’s lobby, Martha Kostuch came out, shook my hand and lead me upstairs to her home. A small 52-year-old woman, she has long sandy hair with bangs, wire-rim glasses, freckles and pale blue eyes. After growing up on a farm in Minnesota, she became a vet and moved to Alberta in 1975 to be close to the mountains and the forests. Immediately, Kostuch, who had never been environmentally active, saw things she hadn’t seen in Minnesota cattle herds: widespread postpartum uterine infections, long calving intervals and an unusually high number of miscarriages and stillbirths. She became convinced that sour gas emissions were the culprit. Government and industry brushed off her concerns so, in 1977, she went public by speaking at meetings and conferences. She didn’t know enough to call the media, but they soon called her.
Meanwhile, Kostuch joined a fight against a huge resort development planned for the Kootenay Plains, about 80 miles west of Rocky Mountain House. Environmentalism was far from a widespread movement at the time — even Greenpeace was just six years old — so the group, called the Alberta League for Environmentally Responsible Tourism (ALERT), learned from scratch, developing an action plan and paddling eight canoes from Rocky Mountain House to the legislature in Edmonton to deliver a petition. The media lapped it up; one reporter joined Kostuch in her canoe and thirty-five more waited on the banks of the river in the provincial capital.
More importantly, ALERT took advantage of a sympathetic lawyer and donations from supporters to fight the $40-million dollar project in court. It was not a common tactic at that time, but it worked. And Kostuch would use it again — and become something of a legend in environmental law circles in the process. Most famously, Kostoch and a group called Friends of the Oldman River Society, with the help of the Sierra Legal Defence Fund, shepherded the Oldman River Dam environmental assessment case to victory in the Supreme Court of Canada in 1992. In a second case over the Oldman River Dam, she tried to prosecute the Alberta government for destroying fish habitats without approval. That case rose through the system until she was denied leave to appeal by the Supreme Court. In a third case, Kostuch and the Friends of the West Country battled to stop Sunpine Forest Products from building a logging road and two bridges without a proper environmental assessment. Again with the help of the Sierra Legal, Kostuch won in both Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal. But she is awaiting leave to appeal from the Supreme Court because she was unhappy with some parts of the decision. She’s now something of a lay expert on environmental law. “I’ve had many calls — today, for example — from people asking for advice or help or direction,” she said. “I’m not a lawyer, but a lot of lawyers call me for advice since I’ve had a lot of experience.”
Kostuch, who spends thirty to forty hours a week working as a vet and the same amount of time on activism, excused herself for a few minutes to go downstairs. Returning several minutes later, she told me she’d just put a dog to sleep while the family watched; we talked about why it’s important for kids to learn about death. It doesn’t seem much of a jump when we start talking about tactics. Kostuch has developed a process for creating strategic plans and she uses it to help advocacy groups as well as for the workshops she gives in schools. Anything goes during brainstorming, but when they get to the planning stage, Kostuch insists all violence — including property damage — must be weeded out. But that doesn’t mean she shies away from conflict. “I think non-violent civil disobedience has a role to play. It has been an important tool for change throughout history,” said Kostuch, who has read a lot by and about Gandhi. “Look at the civil rights movement, which I grew up during, in the United States. Look at the women’s movement. Look at what happened in India. Look at what happened in South Africa. Most people now would not dispute that those were valid reasons for using civil disobedience.” Kostuch began to talk more quickly and passionately than when I first arrived. She looks so much like the prototypical earth mother that if someone hit the mute button, I thought to myself, he’d dismiss her as a flake. But she is tough-minded and smart. “Would I ever consider civil disobedience myself?” she continued. “Yes, I would, but only if I were prepared to accept the consequences. Would I advocate others doing it? No, because that is an offence. Would I tell them not to do it? No, that’s their choice, as long as they understand the consequences. But I will advocate against violence of any kind.”
Surprisingly, court challenges have proven almost as controversial as direct action. Canadian conservatives, sounding as though they want the legal system to be their own gated community, now complain bitterly when activists seek satisfaction in the courts. F. L. (Ted) Morton, a University of Calgary political-science professor and co-author of The Charter Revolution and the Court Party, believes that since 1982, when Canada adopted the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, there has been a dramatic change in the way the country is governed. “Cheered on by its academic supporters,” he argued, “the Supreme Court has consistently sacrificed claims of individual liberty on the altar of group equality.” Morton accused the judiciary of getting too cozy with what he calls the Court Party, defined as “the now familiar coalition of interest groups that regularly appear in our courtrooms using Charter litigation to pursue policy demands that elected governments have rejected: feminists, civil libertarians, gay rights activists, aboriginals, francophones outside Quebec, anglophones inside Quebec, environmentalists, immigration advocacy groups, prisoners’ rights groups, visible minority groups, and so on.” The University of Toronto’s Gregory Hein was so intrigued by Morton’s argument, he investigated. His study, Interest Group Litigation and Canadian Democracy, looked at court challenges from 1988 to 1998 and confirmed that activists — including social conservative groups that, curiously, didn’t make Morton’s enemies list — were frequently turning to the courts. But it also showed they weren’t alone. Professional organizations, unions and companies were doing the same; in fact, corporate interests launched a whopping 38 percent of the court challenges.
For her part, Kostuch makes no apologies. The Oldman River Dam case reaffirmed that the federal government shares jurisdiction for environmental protection in Canada and that the feds had an obligation to do an assessment because of that jurisdiction. “It was a turning point in a number of ways,” she said. “It was one of the first environmental cases to go to that level and with all the attention it got, a lot of others have followed and are now using the legal system as a tool.” On the other hand, by the time the case was finished, the Oldman River had a dam. “We lost but we won. We knew going into the fight that we had very little chance of stopping it, but we felt we had a moral obligation to try because if we didn’t, we would be condoning the destruction caused by the dam. The bigger win has been for the environment of Canada.”
While I sat on a stool on the other side of her kitchen counter, she boiled water in a kettle to make chicken soup from a package for John, her 31-year-old adopted native son. (Despite four of her own children, she adopted another two and took three more under her wing when they lost their mothers. “I collect kids,” she admitted.) “I believe the reason we have laws is so that people will obey them — including the government, including the corporations,” she said. “Our legal system is one of the best in the world so why should we be reluctant to use it? And why should we be criticized when we do use it? I’m often criticized because I go to the courts. Well, forgive me for using the legal system that exists for precisely that reason.”
Despite her success in the courts, Kostuch sees the legal route as just one option for activists. Most successful campaigns, she figures, combine lobbying politicians, generating media coverage and holding demonstrations because each action reinforces the other. “You don’t use a screwdriver when you need a hammer,” she says, “but if you need both a screwdriver and a hammer, you use them both. And often an array of tools, used together, works the best.”
Tom Brokaw will host a special edition of Meet the Press tomorrow, but after that watching TV on Sunday mornings won’t be the same after the death of Tim Russert. Even as a Canadian, I’ve found MTP essential (and excellent) viewing since the primaries started.
My thought as I watched the coverage last night: given that the US may elect a black man as president for the first time — something I never thought possible in my lifetime — it’s truly a shame that Russert won’t be around to see it, let alone cover it.
I’m a newbie blogger and so far I’ve tried to stick to topics related to my new book (car culture, urban planning and sprawl, the impact of high gas prices, for example), except for occasionally straying into music. But sometimes I won’t be able to contain myself and I will be writing about hockey, politics and other matters.
Tonight, I read this post on Inkless Wells and it reminded me why Paul Wells might just be the best blogger out there: trenchant, funny and often right. That’s a rare combination, isn’t it?