Miscellaneous Articles - 2. page

Today, as we debate whether to actively accelerate and magnify the extinction event in which we find ourselves, whether merely to watch the feedback effects of our activity as forests burn and permafrost melts or whether to make the Herculean effort to slow or even stop it at some point in the future, our entire debate is framed in terms of knowledge.

The bad guys in the climate debate are “deniers,” people who fail to believe that the climate is destabilizing and entering into a crisis. They push “debunked” “junk science” that tells people falsehoods about whether our planet is warming and what the causes of this might be. The good guys “raise awareness” about climate change. We “debunk” bad science and tell people what the correct science is. The “deniers” love this because they get to play dumb, to pretend they have not noticed the climate changing, that they believe the threadbare, unbelievable lies put forward by industry-funded think tanks or claim they buy into Donald Trump’s or Alex Jones’ absurd conspiracy theories about all the scientists being in some sort of Chinese conspiracy to ruin America.

What sits at the core of this belief is the idea, one much beloved by those who identify as “progressives” that we human beings are rational choice-makers whose behaviour changes based on new, more accurate, up-to-date information. Liberals and progressives narrate their own lives this way, claiming that they learned a new piece of information and that this changed their outlook or behaviour in some important way. This is often tied to their sense of self-worth. Progressives often think of themselves as smarter and better-informed than average; they understand themselves to be smarter than those around them and, consequently, more able to avail themselves of the best and most correct information and to digest that information faster and more comprehensively.

That is why progressives will often conceptualize their efforts to achieve political change as “raising awareness.” “People do not presently agree with me,” they reason, “This must be because they have less information than I do. When they have the same information I have, they will agree with me. Therefore I must work to give them the information that I have so that they will think the thoughts I think and then do what I know needs to be done.”

When a progressive looks at the global climate debate, they see a mass of misinformation being pushed by mainstream and conservative media and they see this being repeated by people who disagree with them. So, they conclude that they have to do a better job of discrediting misinformation and replacing it with correct information. And, because this is such a colossal tactical blunder, that has produced abject failure for two generations, their adversaries encourage them to keep making that tactical choice.

The reality is that progressives are being trolled. They are being made fools of. Their adversaries are playing dumb. Nobody actually believes the nonsense peddled by climate deniers; it’s an excuse, a fig leaf. The modern conservative playbook is increasingly indistinguishable from the shitty husband playbook. Protracted fighting in long-term marriages is largely composed of feigned ignorance: “I didn’t know that bothered you. I didn’t know I was doing that. I didn’t know the oven was still on. I didn’t know you couldn’t put bleach on that. I didn’t see the ‘dry clean only’ label.” And modern conservatives, the gleeful family annihilators that now run the movement love how the joke is on the progressives, how they, by playing dumb, have revealed that the progressives, with their stupid awareness-raising, are the actual idiots.

The reason that this is so is that whatever imaginative empathy progressives may once have had, they have now lost. Progressives cannot imagine that people are not like them, that someone could have the same information they do but want to do something else about it, because they have a different set of values, a different morality, a different theory of the good. Because progressives have completely imbibed the liberal theory of the self, they imagine that everyone is a utilitarian, a person who wishes to both maximize pleasure and minimize pain individually and to see that, at a population level, the greatest number experience the most good.

When they see poor evangelical Christians voting for policies that further impoverish them, they smugly think “those people are not acting rationally in their own interest. I guess they need to be made more aware.” The idea that people might conceive of their good in non-material terms is not considered, nor is the idea of sacrifice, collective or individual, that people may be choosing suffering in order to achieve something important, some change in the moral order or some deserved punishment being visited on others.

However, onset of action and durability of each form of this ED levitra 40 mg treatment. The Canadian government stipulates a price ceiling which the medicine manufacturers are bound cialis wholesale prices to adhere while handing the drugs over to the Bluetooth device and take that important call. These easily obtainable medicines today took our ancestors’ ages to discover levitra cialis and formulate. Before the invention of the lowest prices on viagra opacc.cv, some of the company does not want any medical prescription and sometimes you have to take care of that you are looking to purchase honest to goodness levitra on the web, you should ask yourself: Is it conceivable to find the site supplier? Is the solution being composed by an enlisted medicinal expert? Does the solution begin from an authorized legitimate source? Despite. One of the reasons I identify as a socialist and not a progressive is that socialists understand and make sacrifices. A socialist narrative is one populated by heroes and villains. A liberal or progressive narrative is populated by individual choice-makers with inefficiently distributed information.

This progressive failure of imagination is being intensified by certain kinds of liberal identity politics. While cultural appropriation, i.e. the appropriation of non-monetized material and immaterial cultural production by the forces of capital, is wrong, the original idea of cultural appropriation has been vulgarized into something worse than useless. It has become the idea that to represent a person or group from a culture into which one was not born in literature, drama or anywhere, really, in one’s own creative work, is an injury, a theft, that engaging in acts of imaginative empathy, that placing oneself in the shoes of another is an act of imperialism rather than solidarity.

A phenomenon we call “standpoint epistemology” has further intensified this problem, arguing that the identity group into which one is born determines what is true about the shared, discoverable physical world, that if one is indigenous, the earth can be a different age than if one is English or Yoruba. Similarly, standpoint epistemology is often mobilized to bar people from outside an identity group from teaching, studying or publishing about that group’s experiences. I recall being angrily lectured in a bar just last year that it was an act of imperialism and violence against indigenous people that I once taught a First Nations history course.

Because it has become increasingly transgressive to engage in acts of imaginative empathy, not only do we see the larger leftist community increasingly fragmented; we also see it becoming increasingly strategically stupid. That is because the most important use of imaginative empathy is not to build solidarity and understanding with one’s allies. It is to guess what our enemies will do next. Because we cannot place ourselves in their (or anyone else’s) shoes, we cannot anticipate or counter their moves against us or guess what motivates them.

The climate denialists are not people who are benefit-seeking utilitarians and proud individual choice-makers and optimizers. They are members of a global death cult, one that they entered not by gaining new information but either by being born into it or, through something far more powerful than awareness: conversion.

In the progressive theory of personal and political transformation, change is caused when a person gains a bunch of new information that makes them realize that the best way to obtain what they want for themselves and others is different than they previously thought. In this way, their objective stays the same but their strategy for achieving that objective shifts. This is the “awareness” model of social change.

In a realistic theory of personal transformation, be it socialist, communist or conservative, change is caused when a person has a dramatic, realigning experience and they realize that what they wanted was the wrong thing to want and that they now want something else. They now understand themselves to be a different, better person who now wants something different and better. It is their objective, not their strategy that has shifted. This is the “conversion” model of social change.

And this is what those of us wishing to save the life on this planet must adopt. More on that soon.

I am generally opposed to “awareness” as a political idea, consequently, as an activist effort. The belief, for instance, that Canadian mining companies poisoning and murdering Mayans in Guatemala can be, in any way, addressed by awareness is pernicious.

However, Autism Awareness Month is a different sort of thing. That is because autism does not have a “solution” per se and those who claim that it has a “cure” are typically either quacks, psychos or both.

What Autism Awareness Month demands of us is not donations (although some well-directed ones can help), a campaign or solutions as much as it demands an optical care. The point is to see autistic people, consider their experiences and think about the ways our society’s structure pushes not just their plight but their talents into the shadows, into the margins.

The idea, for instance, that every job now involves customer service and sales has increased not just the marginalization but the unemployment rate of autistic people. Adding cashier duty to a shelving job can push autistic people from their workplace into a solitary life of collecting disability. Demanding the practice of an haute bourgeois etiquette politics and the faddish social precision that entails from everyone in a desk job can push autistic people into silence, invisibility and eventually unemployment.

Dark Chocolate: This food has more oxidants than red wine but for the best cialis for sale uk hope of a night of restful sleep can rejuvenate your mind, body and the universe around us. One of the organizations providing effective peptide medicines is Usmadepeptides.com. viagra uk no prescription Another reason why homeopathy is taken for granted is because it makes big drug manufacturers nervous that such products might be more effective for treating common ailments. online buy viagra For instance, several symptoms, like depression, fatigue, insomnia, poor concentration, and dysphoria, may be consequences of malnutrition in a patient. discount cialis india In all this, we also have to remember that there are many people whose variety of autism does not make employment or even speech possible. It is always easier for us to celebrate and defend those at the top of the spectrum with an Asperger’s diagnosis than those at the opposite end for whom employment and even speech is out of reach.

Often, these are people whom we cannot help through our own efforts but at a remove, by supporting their caregivers, their relatives, those who aid and are present with them. It is important, in our efforts to be aware and supportive this month, to reject the neoliberal politics of disease and disability in which atomized individuals are afflicted. Autism afflicts not persons but families; families experience the emotional stress and grief of autism; families are impoverished by autism; families are stigmatized by autism. Some of those effects are from the disability itself but more often than not, they are from how our society interacts with it, the resources we provide, the resources we deny, the social spaces we create and those we fail to create. So our awareness, and our care must extend not simply to persons managing autism but to families managing autism.

And that includes giving space and support to people who have been pushed to their wits’ end and are mismanaging it. Not every anti-vaxer is a black-hatted villain; some are just people who are taking refuge in a conspiracy theory because they have been overwhelmed by guilt, stigma, powerlessness to help their child and the total exhaustion that comes from carrying more of a burden of emotional and physical care than any individual can. That includes giving space to people whose emotions seem out of control. We must remember that the body autism disables is the family.

Finally, let us remember that we are sliding into the greatest extinction event in four billion years. Every species, every population, including our own, faces the likelihood of extinction. Those that survive such events are those with the most diverse mutations, the widest spectrum of kinds of members. We must remember that just as anorexic people have pulled average people through famines, just as those with restless leg syndrome guarded our primate groups while the rest of us slept, just as schizophrenics stepped forward and helped to lead the resistance to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge when neurologically average people were paralyzed, we do not know what role our autistic brothers and sisters may have to play in our survival in the future because only God can see all ends. In this way, we must also reject the idea that autistic people are a population-level illness to be extirpated from the human population. They are not; they are a precious part of the human family to whom we should direct a little more care and attention this month.

On Thursday, November 5^th, 2015, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), colloquially known as the Mormons, announced a new set of policies to reinforce the hard line it has taken against homosexuality. Since becoming the primary sponsor and proponent of Proposition Eight, the 2008 amendment to California’s state constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, the LDS have jockeyed for position among conservative American religions to distinguish themselves as the most intractably opposed to homosexuality.

In those seven years, the LDS have engaged with questions of women’s access to priesthood and other offices in the church hierarchy in the same spirit, offering more vehement, robust and conclusive denunciations of gender equality that competing religious formations, such as the Roman Catholic Church under Benedict XVI.

While each round of anti-gay pronouncements and policies has elicited protest and criticism from more liberally-inclined LDS members, this new set of policies has immediately engendered far deeper and more broad-based opposition, going well beyond the usual chorus of liberal voices at the margins of the Church. Indeed, many opposing these new policies are, themselves, convinced, faithful Mormon opponents of same-sex marriage and female ordination. On social media, many of even the most orthodox Mormons are seeking to explain the policy away as an ephemeral error or mis-statement that will soon be cleared up.

Until this week, Mormons were encouraged to convert youths and adolescents in non-Mormon families. And they still are. Unless those families have two parents of the same sex. Children raised in Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist or even Satanist families are welcome to join the LDS Church but not the children of same-sex unions; they are specifically prohibited from joining until they reach the age of twenty-one and, even then, must swear special vows condemning their parents and voiding their family units. While the LDS declaration that living in a same-sex union is now understood to constitute apostasy, irrespective of its legality, might constitute a problem for liberal Mormons, it is the elements of the policy concerning the children of these couples that is producing a much more far-reaching outcry, rooted in the faith’s unique scriptures and foundational narratives. Thursday’s announcement appears to do considerable violence to fundamental aspects of the Church’s core theology.

Mormons distinguish themselves from other Christians based on scriptures that only their church recognizes (The Book of Moses, Book of Abraham, Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants), scriptures that non-Mormons understand to have been authored by Joseph Smith in response to burning theological questions of the early and mid- nineteenth century. Mormons, on the other hand, understand them to have been translated by Smith but authored by various Hebrew prophets including Abraham and Moses, and, in some cases, by God himself.

There was a lot of controversy over infant baptism in Joseph Smith’s day and Mormon scripture responded with a detailed theology dealing with intersection between the age of majority/consent, free will, parental prerogatives and salvation. Mormon scripture, speaking with the voice of either God or Jesus, explains that children between the ages of eight and eighteen are absolutely free to make adult decisions about their salvation and religious affiliation and those decisions, for good or ill, count in eternity. It also explains that children under eight must not be punished, on earth or in heaven, for the decisions taken by adults, even if those adults are their parents or priests.
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Upon reaching the age of twelve, according to current Church practice, young men are eligible to become priests, holding the “Aaronic priesthood” and receiving an ecclesiastical rank in the church. The “age of accountability,” of eight, from which time forward children may make decisions about their salvation as adults, Mormon scripture sources directly to God himself:

“And, behold, and lo, this is an ensample unto all those who were ordained unto this priesthood… And again, inasmuch as parents have children in Zion, or in any of her stakes which are organized, that teach them not to understand the doctrine of repentance, faith in Christ the Son of the living God, and of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of the hands, when eight years old, the sin be upon the heads of the parents… And their children shall be baptized for the remission of their sins when eight years old, and receive the laying on of the hands… Behold, I am Alpha and Omega, and I come quickly. Amen.” – Doctrine and Covenants 68

There is a long tradition of faith-promoting literature in the LDS tradition in which children of non-Mormon parents see the correctness of Mormonism and convert despite familial opposition and even disownment. Such stories have only grown in importance as the LDS missionary program has globalized and its missionaries—often themselves under the age of majority in the US—have reached out to adolescents the world over who are questioning their parents’ faith and familial religious traditions. Indeed, much of the appeal of the LDS missionary program, which seems structured in some ways as a reverse-Rumspringa, has come to inhere in the youth and sincerity, as opposed to seasoned proficiency of the faith’s global missionary army.

Mormon missionaries are typically eighteen- and nineteen-year-old men who have just received the ironic title of “Elder” prior to their missionary vocation are, as of Thursday instructed that they may not convert individuals their own age if they are being raised in a family rooted in a same-sex union. And, if approached by such individuals, unsolicited, must turn them down as unworthy converts.

These doctrinal changes, more than simply confirming a two-decade trajectory of social conservatism, eviscerate a core doctrine of the Mormon faith, that of “free agency,” which Mormon theologians proudly trumpet as distinct from and superior to mainline Christianity’s “free will.” Much of Mormonism’s seductiveness in gaining and retaining young members has come from its recognition of the capacity of children and youth to make real choices for which they are accountable. Today, for many Mormons, it appears that that foundational principle, on which so much Mormon culture and organization—never mind doctrine—depends, is now in retreat.

The impending crisis the Mormon world now faces may have been occasioned by bigotry towards same-sex couples. But the bigotry, itself, is no long the central issue. Rather, it is the over-reach, the hubristic effort to rewrite Mormon theology from the bottom up to serve that bigotry, that has thrown Mormondom into its biggest doctrinal crisis in more than a generation.

September 24^th, 2013

Dear Fair Vote Canada,

I am tendering my resignation from the national board effective September 30^th, 2013, as soon as I wrap up my commitments to the Executive Director hiring process. I returned to activity at the national level in FVC this winter not because my interests are focused at the national level or because I feel that the FVC organizational culture is a comfortable fit for me but due to a threefold crisis.

1. A Toronto “social entrepreneur” and the personality cult centred around him were attempting to seize control of Fair Vote Canada in order to place FVC under the direction of an affinity group whose main activity is shilling for elements in the Liberal Party of Canada that are working to stymie reform in Ontario and BC.
2. Fair Vote Canada had made disastrous personnel and leadership decisions that had sent it into a near-fatal organizational tailspin.
3. The endemic conflict and scorched-earth tactics that the above two factors produced were fundamentally altering the social contract of the voting reform movement in Canada, making it an unsafe and conflict-ridden space in sharp contradistinction to its previous social contract that had prized gentleness and diversity.

By the end of this week, issues 1 and 2 will have been successfully addressed. The challenge before us and our new executive director and the new executive you select following my resignation will be issue 3. Fair Vote Canada, as the largest group in Canada’s voting reform movement, will have to find a way to balance the need to provide a safe, stable working environment for volunteers that is free of harassment with the equally pressing need for an open organization in which newcomers feel welcome, one that can embrace a greater ideological and cultural diversity than it does today.

Because I am a poor fit for the Central Canadian culture of FVC, I will be making my contribution to the third issue in a different way. I will be working with Troy Lanigan, John Carpay, Stephen Broscoe, David Marley and others to build MOVE: The Movement for Voter Equality as an organization that pays special attention to the task of bringing conservatives back into the fair voting movement. We also hope to model a different, more consultive style of inter-organizational cooperation than other national and local voting reform groups that have recently appeared. We look forward to partnering with FVC and supporting our allies in their important work.

It is seventeen years since I co-founded the BC Electoral Change Coalition and chaired the first YES to PR referendum campaign in Canada. I am not exaggerating when I say that I love this movement. I helped to start it in its modern form when I was at my best. When I was at my worst, the movement took me in and helped to rebuild me not just as a political activist but as a human being, treating me with great gentleness and generosity. I owe so much to the fair voting movement. It (and tabletop RPGs, of course) have been the constants of my life, the communities that have been there for me wherever I have gone and whenever I have needed them.
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It has also been – and remains to this day – the cause of my life. The equal participation of all people in the governance of their society is the political value upon which all others must rest. FVC must never lose sight of this by falling into political paternalism or manipulating processes for predetermined ends. We are here because we trust the people. When PR loses a referendum or a vote in a legislature or convention, it is not because the people have failed us. It is because we have failed them.

Fair Vote has important work ahead of it. It will be a long time before we recover from the trauma of recent years; do not be too quick to pronounce us well. Let us remember that we are all healing and do what we can to rebuild the culture of gentleness our movement once exemplified. If a culture of gentleness could arise simply from individuals being nice on an ad hoc basis, the evangelical movement would have transformed society long ago. If a culture of gentleness entailed tolerating the intolerance of misbehaviour of others, George Galloway and the Respect movement would be the way forward. But neither of these is the solution. A culture of gentleness entails doing what reformers do best: thinking systematically about big groups of people and how they relate to one another and then making positive, systemic changes.

Let’s move forward together in doing just that.

Stuart Parker,

Founding Director, Movement for Voter Equality

PS        For the time being, I will be staying on as a director of my local chapter, Fair Vote Vancouver

Still no Age of Authenticity Part III. Instead, here’s my ultra-geeky submission to the Electoral Boundaries Commission that I’ll be doing tonight in Richmond. Warning: this is only for hardcore political geeks.

Submission to the Electoral Boundaries Commission

Presented by Stuart Parker, Los Altos Institute

Since 1988, the principles for Canadian riding boundaries have been set by the landmark BC Court of Appeal Dixon judgement which established that electoral district populations should vary no more than 25% from the average representation by population except in “very special circumstances.”

I agree with the commission’s approach, unlike that of recent provincial boundaries commissions, of refraining from declaring “very special circumstances” in British Columbia. While British Columbia presents diversity, transportation and other challenges unequaled in most provinces, its problems do not rise to the kind of circumstances faced in Labrador, Northern Québec, the James Bay Lowlands or the three Territories. As such, I concur with the commission that 25% variation is more than sufficient to accommodate BC.

Where I differ with commissioners is with respect to their apparent criteria variation within the Dixon bound. Of the forty-two proposed electoral districts, the following have received higher than average per-capita representation: Skeena-Bulkley-Valley, Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge, Port Moody-Coquitlam, Fort Langley-Aldergrove, Richmond West, Richmond East, Mission-Matsqui, Delta, Vancouver Kingsway, Langley-Cloverdale, Burnaby South-Deer Lake, Vancouver Granville, Vancouver Quadra, Chilliwack-Fraser Canyon, South Surrey-White Rock, Abbotsford-Sumas, Vancouver South, Coquitlam-Port Coquitlam, Burnaby North-Seymour, Victoria and Vancouver Centre.

With the exception of Skeena and, to a limited extent, Chilliwack, these districts are urban or suburban in character. Furthermore, with the exception of Skeena and Victoria, all are Greater Vancouver districts. I must ask: why is it that commissioners felt that the British Columbians meriting the highest per capita representation are overwhelmingly urban and suburban Vancouverites whereas those meriting the lowest representation are rural British Columbians who do not have the good fortune to live in Skeena?

This is not to suggest that voters living in densely populated areas do not have significant representation challenges that commissions should address. In particular inner city voters wrestling with poverty, urban aboriginal voters, voters with limited official language proficiency all might merit deviation within the Dixon bound to deliver higher per capita representation. Yet curiously, it is where one finds the highest concentrations of such voters in urban BC that the commission deviates from its policies of over-representing urban and suburban Vancouverites at the expense of rural British Columbians. Vancouver East is the only district in the City of Vancouver to receive below average per capita representation; Newton, Whalley and Guildford are likewise singled-out for underrepresentation in a map that significantly over-represents all other suburban voters south of the Fraser River. Finally, the lower mainland’s only other significant inner city, New Westminster is also underrepresented.

Typically, the reason to downwardly vary district magnitudes is to deal with one or more of the following three issues: (a) the presence of difficult to represent voters, (b) geographic or transportation constraints that limit the adjacent communities that may reasonably be united in a single district and (c) the “shelf life” argument, i.e. over-representing communities with high rates of anticipated population growth. I fail to detect the consistent application of any of these principles in the draft boundaries presented by the commission.

Excepting the admirably drawn boundaries for Skeena-Bulkley, it almost seems as though the commission has inverted principles (a) and (b), while simply ignoring (c). This latter approach is something with which I concur. So, in offering my suggestions as to how the commission might improve its map, let me begin with where I concur with the commission in breaking with the last boundaries panel.

The 1998 provincial and 2002 federal boundaries commissions both explicitly spoke to the principle of “shelf-life,” that the commission should not draw electoral boundaries based on current population levels but instead based on anticipated levels. The absurdity of this approach was showcased almost immediately when the Comox Valley municipalities changed their community development plans in order to receive higher per capita representation in the 1998 provincial boundaries. Obviously, it is highly problematic for a districting commission to alter the level of representation voters enjoy based on the land use and development policies of their municipal and regional governments. I am therefore pleased that the commission chose not to grant increased representation on that basis to high-growth areas like Southeast False Creek, Kelowna, Whistler and North Nanaimo.

However, it is my view that the commission should look seriously at offering higher per-capita representation to groups that facing representation challenges on the following bases: (a) poverty, (b) official language challenges, (c) rural and remote location and (d) aboriginal ancestry. It should be noted that the districts of Vancouver East, New Westminster-Burnaby East, Prince George-Peace River, Cariboo-Prince George, Kootenay-Columbia, Kamloops-Thompson-Carioo, South Okanagan-West Kootenay, North Okanagan-Shuswap, Surrey-Centre, North Surrey-Guildford and West Surrey-Whalley are already underrepresented on a per capita basis. Yet these ridings contain disproportionately large numbers of hard-to-represent voters and thus merit downward not upward deviation within the Dixon bound. It is my view that these ridings merit serious re-evaluation by the commission.

There is something amiss when a member of parliament representing the Similkameen, Kettle, South Okanagan, Boundary, Arrow, Lower Columbia, Slocan and West Kootenay valleys has nearly twenty thousand more constituents to represent than the member representing Pitt Meadows and Maple Ridge. This is true not only from the difficulty of representation standpoint but from the perspective transportation logistics and traditional communities of interest.

While my main point in this presentation is to urge the commission to vary district populations downward rather than upward based on the difficulty of representing their voters, I would like to offer some suggestions about how commissioners might consider responding to certain particularly controversial boundaries decisions in key areas:

1. The North Shore: The combined population of Vancouver’s North Shore suburbs, North Vancouver City, North Vancouver District, West Vancouver and Lions Bay is approximately 186,000, meaning that two north shore suburban districts could be created within the Dixon Bound with approximately 93,000 residents each, slightly smaller than the proposed Maple Ridge district. Alternatively, two districts could also be sustained, again within the bound, incorporating the Sunshine Coast and Bowen Island along with the North Shore Suburbs, yielding districts with approximately 115,000 residents each, slightly larger than the proposed West Kootenay district.
2. The Squamish-Lillooet Regional District: Even since the paving of the Duffy Lake extension of Highway 99, boundaries commissions have continued to split this area between a southwest portion districted with West Vancouver and a northeast portion districted with the Cariboo; the commission has innovated upon this by moving the typical dividing line southwest of Pemberton. It is my view that the commission should consider districting all of the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District with the South Cariboo. The commission might also consider the inclusion of Hope and Electoral Areas A and B of the Fraser Valley Regional District in such a district.
3. Nechako Region: Skeena-Bulkley Valley, despite being the lowest-population district still only varies 16% from the average district magnitude. This means that the commission could choose to remove Fort St. James from Skeena and place it with the community through which one is required to pass in order to reach it by car, Vanderhoof. Fraser Lake, also highly integrated with Vanderhoof, merits similar consideration.

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4. North Thompson Region: There are many options for districting Blue River, Clearwater and Vavenby. While they are most closely associated with Kamloops, their placement with 100 Mile House or Valemount is also reasonable and should be considered in any significant modification of the proposed map.

It is my view that, by removing the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District and Fraser Canyon from Greater Vancouver’s districts and instead placing them with the Interior and by applying conventional difficulty-of-representation standards to the question of district magnitudes, the commission can and should reduce the number of new districts in urban and suburban Vancouver by one and increase the number in the mainland interior by one. I believe that in doing so, the commission should be especially attentive to the voters in the Kootenays, North and Cariboo who face substantial representation challenges.

Based on my survey of census data, it strikes me that the following districts could be sustained without a deviation of more than 25%:

Prince George-Peace River: This district could shed a substantial portion of Prince George in order to facilitate the creation of Prince George-Yellowhead.

Prince George-Yellowhead: Given a larger proportion of Prince George, there exists sufficient population to create a crescent-shaped riding beginning east of Burns Lake, taking in the Nechako Region, most of Prince George, the Robson Valley and the North Thompson/South Yellowhead to Clearwater.

Cariboo: There exists sufficient population to enable the commission to recreate this historic riding which has been part of nearly every BC electoral map since Confederation. By incorporating the whole of the Cariboo, along with the Fraser Canyon and Squamish-Lillooet Regional District, the commission could end the division of the Cariboo and create a viable rural district in the Central Interior.

In the same spirit, I encourage the commission not to further dilute West Kootenay representation in a South Okanagan district but instead to downwardly vary riding populations to enable the Arrow Lakes and other regions to remain with the Castlegar and Nelson.

Most importantly, however, I want to reiterate the importance of establishing and articulating clear and reasonable principles for varying riding populations. It is my view that the commission has not yet done so. While not identical to the criteria I articulate for this, I draw the commission’s attention to the legislation passed by the Alberta government following the Dixon judgement to govern future boundaries commissions, which articulated the basis on which a district should receive high per-capita representation:

(a)     the area of the proposed electoral division exceeds 20,000 square kilometres or the total surveyed area of the proposed electoral division exceeds 15,000 square kilometres;

(b)     the distance from the Legislature Building in Edmonton to the nearest boundary of the proposed electoral division by the most direct highway route is more than 150 kilometres;

(c)     there is no town in the proposed electoral division that has a population exceeding 4,000 people;

(d)     the area of the proposed electoral division contains an Indian reserve or a Metis settlement;

(e)     the proposed electoral division has a portion of its boundary coterminous with a boundary of the Province of Alberta.

While not addressing language or poverty, except with respect to indigenous peoples, I consider this list to be an excellent starting point for the commission in considering the conditions under which to vary district populations and would hope both that such a list is adopted and that whatever list is developed is presented transparently to the general public.

I want to thank the commissioners for their hard work and the time and thought they have put into their proposals. It is exciting to see British Columbia finally receiving the representation it deserves. Let us work together to make sure that the benefits of this new representation are enjoyed equally and fairly.

I’m close to finishing both chapter five of my book and part three of my Age of Authenticity essay but neither is quite ready yet. So here is the second David Lewis tribute post. Here we again have scans of copies of copies of twenty year-old material. But again, it’s up-to-the-minute relevant. David was making ends meet as a labourer on the expansion of the Celgar Pulp mill which the company insisted on continuing to run, even as it was being renovated. The result: a chlorine gas leak; David came to work the next day and circulated this memo.

Sadly, I’ve lost the daily “official bulletins” he continued distributing until he was fired. All subsequent bulletins began, “It has come to the attention of Celgar Pulp that bogus official bulletins are being distributed in its name. This is not one of those bulletins.”

David was most famous for his variant on Bob Bossin’s Home Remedy for Nuclear War: small bottles of air that he would sell using an antique nineteenth-century portable sales display. He rented a booth at the Globe 90 UN conference in Vancouver and attempted to sell a bottle to Gro Harlem Brundtland, the author of Our Common Future and inventor of sustainable development. She didn’t buy one. While I’ve lost my bottle, I do have some tattered copies of the brochure.

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Here’s a one-page version, even more tattered.

As I’ve acknowledged in previous posts, the most significant influence on my political thinking was David Lewis of Crescent Valley, BC. Here are some highlights of his satirical work in the 1990/91. Pardon the poor quality of the copies of scans of twenty year old material.

Here is his political self-portrait:

And here is his mock version of the newsletter of the BC Round Table on the Environment and Economy:

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Back in the 90s, David Lewis spoke to the big issues the environmental movement still has yet to confront: the unimaginability of a society that is not on a collision course with the planet’s life support systems, the centrality of scale as the issue we must confront and the importance of climate change relative to all other issues. His incredible clarity as to the magnitude of the crisis was matched with an superb sense of humour and a belief in electoral politics as a means not to model a future society but as the way we can most powerfully witness against this one. In future posts, you will be able to see the piercing intelligence with which he dissects the smallness of the thinking of environmental leaders, not to demobilize but to radicalize.

The movement still needs a Socrates: someone who knows how little we all know and who asks questions that nevertheless drive us towards knowledge. I wish David would once again, as he put it, “polish off [his] daily allowance of puffed grass and stroll out into the deadly UVB radiation at high noon to announce that this town isn’t big enough for any of us.”