Edward Snowden and Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois

Went to see Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden, last night.  Definitely worth the detour.  Snowden, you'll remember, is the young US cyber whiz who was employed by the National Security Agency and blew the whistle on the vast network of cyber spying governments are now involved in.

He was 29 when he broke into public, and seems an earnest, extremely articulate and intellent guy.  Full of principles too.  As such he reminds me of Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the 24 year old Quebec student leader who won the Governor General's award for non-fiction last week and on the weekend launched a campaign to counter propaganda in favour of various oil pipelines. They even look a little alike.

Of course, that may merely be due to the fact that skinny young white guys with half shaved beards can't help but resemble each other.  But it would be nice if there were a whole lot more people like them willing to stand up when it's important.

(And one more thing: this old lady finally learned something all the rest of you know: how they all keep their stubble at the proper length.  At one point in the film, Snowden says he can't shave off his beard entirely because he hasn't got the right razor head.  Okay, I guess you're allowed to be a little concerned about your appearance if you're also so straight up about more important things.)

Saturday (or Tuesday) Photo: Brasília

A year ago I was in South America, doing the last bit of on-the-spot research for Road through Time.  The photo is of the cathedral designed by Oscar Niemeyer in the Brazilian Capital, Brasília.  The building is spectacular, but like much of the city, hasn't aged very well. 

Why that's so is one of the things I want to talk about in the new book, but I haven't got there yet. Because the subject is vast--roads as vectors for change and exchange--it's taking me a long way to get from the first roads taken by humans in Africa and out of that continent to populate the world.  I've just finished a chapter called "Mysterious Roads" about the paths taken into the Americas by First Nations.  The next one is called "The Revenge of the Roads" and begins with a comparison between the wonderful Inka Road in South America and the Spanish Road, which Phillip II of Spain ordered to be built from Milan to Flanders.  Needless to say,   the Inka one was much better in the period.

All this is a way of explaining why I haven't been posting very much lately.  Too many things going on, too many trails to explore...

Saturday Photo: Springtime in the Andes

Just a year ago I was on a plane on my way to my excellent South American adventure.  That's the view as we neared the crest of a 4200 meter pass in Peru, and the bus that took me from Cuzco to Puerto Maldonado.  The road we were traveling was the Estrada do Pacifico.  Following it (which has more than one name along its length,) you can go from the Atlantic to the Pacific over the Andes and into the Amazon basin. 

Right now I'm a little more than half way through a first draft of the book that I was researching on the trip, Road through Time.  The next chapter will talk about the Inca road as well as the very bad roads that existed in the 16th and 17th century in Europe.  I've got a ways to go before I make it to the present!

Red Poppies: Wars Are Eternal

Today is Remembrance Day, but I'll not be wearing a red poppy.  It's fine to honour the dead, but not to glorify war.

So I'm posting here a picture I took last summer in Portugal.  The poppies were growing in a field near the old Roman town of Conímbriga which was abandoned to attackers about 300 AD. 

Conímbriga's ruins are spectacular and definitely worth a detour.  The fact that poppies grow in distrubed soil nearby just testifies to the way that wars go on and on.

Saturday Photo: Champlain's Asters

After much back and forth, it looks like the new bridge across the St. Lawrence is not going to be named after a hockey hero.  There's even a  chance that it will bear the name of Samuel de Champlain like the existing one.  Stephen Harper may not like it that a French explorer got here first, and  in his campaign to tie Canada more closely to the British tradition, but he can't deny that fact.

Champlain was much more than just a dude who sailed around and claimed territory though.  In his 27 voyages across the Atlantic, he produced amazingly accurate maps, and also brought back much flora from the New World to France.  Among them were samples of the lovely asters that bloom at the end of summer. 

I'm not sure of exactly which of the many native varieties bloomed in our yard until a few days ago, but I love them.  Champlain probably did too.

School Boards: Do They Respond to Educational Reality?

Voter turn-out for school board elections in Quebec yesterday was abysmal, particularly in Francophone boards.  While about 20 per cent of English school board electors voted, province-wide it appears that an even smaller percentage voted than the 8 per cent turn out four years ago.

This is pretty pathetic,  and the current Liberal government is going to use it as another reason to change the way schools are governed dramatically.  Whether the boards will be completely eliminated is unclear, but certainly there is going to be more centralization in the system.

How good public schools are is important to everyone in society, not just those who have kids.  Schools prepare the future, and if they aren't doing a good job, well, we're in real trouble.  The thing is that in Quebec, by many criteria they're doing not badly. 

What is is going to make them better is not direction from the top, I'm pretty sure.  Local communities must be involved too, and eliminating school boards or drastically decreasing their number is not likely to do that.

Saturday (or Friday) Photo: Smashing Pumpkins, Eh? (In the British Sense of Smashing)!

Sophie took this photo Sunday night just after Jeanne, Thomas and their mothers, plus Grandma had spent a great hour making pumpkins. 

The gang will be Jeanne's house tonight.  They'll visit a few neighbors and then hand out goodies.  She's been convinced to wear a tiger costume over her winter coat for the trick or treating, but she'll have on the great princess/fairy costume inside.  Thom will be a fireman, although, at two,  he only has a fuzzy idea about what's up.

Grandma and Grandpa will take a pass though.  Got to keep up on our reading, including this essay on  capitalism, zombies and vampires in The New York Times.  It comes highly recommended by our friend Sid Ingerman, but for the life of me I can't figure out what it's about.  Maybe I've turned hollow-headed like a Jack o'Lantern.

Recession Has Increased Child Poverty, Unicef Report Says

The statistics are dire: The eight years since things went belly-up in 2008 have been terrible on children in many, many countries.  But it's clear that many people are going to see in them what they want.

The CBC reports: "Canada's child poverty rate down despite recession."

The Guardian says: "Child poverty up in more than half of developed world since 2008."

And the UN agency's own release states: "2.6 million more children plunged into poverty in rich countries during Great Recession"

What has happened is that where austerity measures were put into place, children have suffered because their parents frequently did not have enough money to feed them and because the social safety net put up in the last 25 years was torn down.

"Many affluent countries have suffered a ‘great leap backwards’ in terms of household income, and the impact on children will have long-lasting repercussions for them and their communities,”  Jeffrey O’Malley, UNICEF’s Head of Global Policy and Strategy, was quoted in the Unicef release.  It continues:

 "In 23 of the 41 countries analysed, child poverty has increased since 2008. In Ireland, Croatia, Latvia, Greece and Iceland, rates rose by over 50 per cent.
   
"In Greece in 2012 median household incomes for families with children sank to 1998 levels – the equivalent of a loss of 14 years of income progress. By this measure Ireland, Luxembourg and Spain lost a decade; Iceland lost 9 years; and Italy, Hungary and Portugal lost 8...  

"In the United States, where extreme child poverty has increased more in this downturn than during the recession of 1982, social safety net measures provided important support to poor working families but were less effective for the extreme poor without jobs. Child poverty has increased in 34 out of 50 states since the start of the crisis. In 2012, 24.2 million children were living in poverty, a net increase of 1.7 million from 2008.
   
"But in 18 countries child poverty actually fell, sometimes markedly. Australia, Chile, Finland, Norway, Poland and the Slovak Republic reduced levels by around 30 per cent."


 Canada was one of them: the decline was 2.4 per cent, from 23.2 per cent to 20.8 per cent.

But before Canadians should pat themselves on the back for that relatively good showing, we should note that a bigger proportion of Canadian kids are poor than are French kids, even though the child poverty rate increased by 3 per cent there to 18.6 per cent of children are classifed as poor. 

Similarly, the social safety net that has sustained our kids is being threatened by provincial and federal governments who still have got the message that austerity makes things worse.

Pure Laine Terrorists, Or Why a Little Religious Education Never Hurts

I have no way of knowing if the two troubled young men who took down Canadian soldiers this week had any kind of religious education as children.  Given their age, they probably were exposed to a bit of Catholicism in school, since when they were little kids, Quebec schools boards were set up on religious lines.  The change  to a language based system came in 1997, although a certain amount of teaching about religion--as opposed to teaching religion itself--remains in a compulsary ethics and religious culture course.

The school commission reorganization was something I advocated when our kids were little: schools should be neutral when it comes to religion, I think.  But teaching kids about religions is important, as is touching base with whatever religious heritage a family has.  That's why we started taking our kids to Sunday School when the oldest was about five.  For  a couple of years I'd see them into the church basement and then go read in the library until they were done.

The result was that both of them have an appreciation of the more attractive tenents of Christianity and a good moral compass even though they are far from being believers. But that's it. 

In contrast the shooters seemed to have had  holes in their spirits that cried out to be filled by religion.   Their psychological problems resonated with the appeal of radical Islam.  

There is no way of knowing if exposure in a positive way to religion in their families would have made a difference.  But I think that kind of education should be considered seriously by all parents.  Look at it as vaccination against fanaticism, less painful but more time-consuming that the shots that keep our kids from getting diseases. 

Saturday Photo: What the Champs des possibles Was Like Before CP Trashed It

This picture was taken a couple of years ago in early summer when a former industrial site was beginning to bloom.  These are the Champs des possibles, acquired by the city of Montreal in 2006 and managed by a citizen's group Les Champs des possibles as a natural wild space surrounded by buildings and train tracks.

But Canadian Pacific razed part of the area--what you see in the background of the photo--on Friday.  An "accident," the railway says through spokespersons.  But locals aren't so sure. 

CP wanted to do some work on the rails, and so set out to put up new track.  When called on it, the company apologized and promised to set things back to the way they were. 

Lotsa luck.  There were beehives and butterflies, insects and all manner of wild things in the little island of verdure.  Given the fact that it's only been a few years since the area was set aside for non-development, it's quite amazing what has returned.  Shame on CP: there's absolutely no reason for what they've done.

Saturday (or Thanksgiving Weekend) Photo: Time for a Walk

Been cold, will get warmer, but nowhere near as warm as a good Thanksgiving supper!  We did our annual number with a bunch of friends and family (23 adults and 7 kids, age range was from 1 to 85) on Sunday. Lots of good food, good company and good conversation (if you could hear over the kids rollicking around.)

This is a  beautiful time of year when the fruits of the summer are abundant, if you're lucky.  We are, and while I'm far from a believer, I think it's a good thing to stop and recognize just how good life has been for us.  Privileged folks, indeed, living in a privileged corner of the world with such gorgeous days as today.

And now, since all the dishes from yesterday are done and the kitchen floor is mopped, I think I'll go slice some more turkey for our supper.  Leftovers are worth being thankful for, too.

Imagining the Cities of Tomorrow: A Conversation

What can we do to make our cities more liveable? Here's a conversation between yours truly, transit expert Taras Gresco and architect and urban ist Avi Friedman. I do a lot of humming and hawing, while the guys are more articulate. But it's worth listening to if you care about cities, I think.

Saturday Photo: Emerald Ash Borer on a Sunny Sunday

Lee and I took Thomas out to the Parc du Cité-du-Havre today.  It's one of the unknown gems of Montreal, open space in the middle of the St. Lawrence, where the channel to the Old Port leaves the main body of the river.

There are picnic tables and bicycle paths, short trails down to the edge of the water, and grand views of both the city to the west and the mighty river to the east.  What's more there's free parking, and practically no one but a few fishermen on a chilly Sunday morning.

Two year old Thom liked walking along the edge of the road, following the lines painted on it, and going up and down various steps and ramps.  The crispy brown leaves were also fun to kick around.

But those leaves gave me the willies.  They weren't the usual early fall red and orange ones, but decidedly dead ones from a small grove of ash trees.  As I looked closer I saw that the trees themselves looked dead, and had been marked with what looked like signs tagging them for removal.

Emerald ash borer is the culprit, I'm pretty sure.  The insect has attacked in the Montreal area for the last three years with thousands of trees as possible victims.  It's too late for the ones in the lovely little park, but elsewhere some attempts are being made at stop the assault.  The sign above lately appeared on several mature ashes not far from us.  The tree is being treated, it says, and we all should be vigilant in protecting other ashes.  There are 200,000 in Montreal, it adds, and losing them would be great blow to the urban forest.

Something to make one shiver even when sitting in a sheltered, sunny place.

The Reason Why We Need Local Government Boards and Why Governments Want to Cut Them

The Liberal government of Philippe Couillard is anything but "liberal" in the sense of progressive or enlightened.  It is slashing government spending, endorsing austerity while denying that is its aim, and generally messing things up.  The health and education system are being pressured to make particularly harmful changes.


But interestingly some school boards are refusing to comply or going public with the terrible effects the cuts--much of which were announced after the start of this school year--will have on the quality of education.  Public outcry over the elimination of $4.26 a day given mentally handicapped people working sheltered workshops forced the governement to back down.  So did the mobilisation of the cultural community in protest of a plan to axe music five music conservatories in areas some distance from Montreal  that in effect are the heart and soul of their regions. (The video is of a protest concert last week.)

This has not set well with Couillard or his ministers who say that their cuts can be made by eliminating fat in administration.  They say: combine regional health boards, chop staffing in school board offices, stick to the "basics" in everything else.  And do it now.

In other words, get rid of all the local or regional instances who have a mandate to listen to people in communities and react to their concerns.  I can imagine that Couillard and his friends are cursing those uppity school commissioners and regional health administrators who question what's going on.  Pursuing an austerity agenda is so much easier if you don't have any organizations around who know what's up and are in a position to protest vigorously. 

Gee, wouldn't it be great that way, say I in an attempt at irony?

BTW, kudos to Amir Khadir of Québec Solidaire (one of the party's three MNAs) for denouncing Pierre Karl Péladeau for being an "aggressive capitalist."  PKP may talk against austerity as he positions himself to run for the leadership of the Parti Québécois, put he's an economic conservative from the get-go.

Make Refuges, Not Refuse: The Fate of the Seas

A very upsetting story about oceanic pollution in The New York Times today, "Swimming through Garbage" by Lewis Pugh.  He spent a good part of his summer swimming in the seven seas, literally: the Mediterranean, Adriatic, Aegean, Black, Red, Arabian and North Seas. The longest swim was 37 miles and took him two days.

What Pugh saw was desolation almost every place but where an area had been made a designated refuge.

He writes: "I saw no sharks, no whales, no dolphins. I saw no fish longer than 11 inches. The larger ones had all been fished out.

When I swam in the Aegean, the sea floor was covered with litter; I saw tires and plastic bags, bottles, cans, shoes and clothing."

And: "In the Red Sea, I saw no coral and no fish. It looked like an underwater desert. But then, a little more than a mile later, I swam into a protected area, where fishing had been restricted. It was a sea as it was meant to be: rich and colorful and teeming with abundant life."

So there you go.  There's where it goes--all the garbage that's tossed into water courses and off the sides of boats, all that stuff we'd rather not think about but which we discard. We'd better think about what we're fishing too.   

Pugh addes:  "As I was about to jump into the Red Sea, I asked the boat’s skipper whether I should keep a lookout for sharks. He told me not to worry — they’re long gone. Well, that’s exactly what does worry me. An estimated 100 million sharks are fished out of the world’s oceans every year. That’s like removing the lions from the Serengeti. It wouldn’t be long before the gazelles, zebras and wildebeests had multiplied and eaten all the grass. And when the land was laid bare the grazers would starve."

Is anybody listening?

Saturday Photo: Making Honey While the Sun Shines

This weekend has been an absolute gift.  After several days of cold, the temperature rose last week, and this weekend we had some of the nicest days of the summer, even though summer is officially over.

Friday evening Jeanne was over and she and Lee went to the neighborhood park after supper.  They stayed until dark--which was about 7 p.m.  Quite a change from mid summer when the evenings seemed to stretch out forever.  But there was a special charm to having sun-dress and sandal weather when the leaves have begun to turn colour.

The big hydrangeas have been blooming for several weeks, and the bees have been enjoying their nectar.  Despite the fact that our pears appear not to have been pollinated in May, there are many bees around, including several new hives hidden away in some abandoned spaces.  Nice to see the little creatures hard at work in such lovely weather.

First ERDC Claim Comes In!

It's always nice to see something take off, particularly when it's been forever since the preparations began. But on Friday morning the very first claim arrived in the ERDC's post box.  Marvelous!

Now freelance writers who wrote for The Gazette between 1985 and 2010 have until March 5, 2015 to follow the example.  For more info, click here.

Electronic Rights Defence Committee: Payout Starts

I consider this something  of a personal victory.  After more than 17 years of work and worry, the Electronic Rights Defence Committee (ERDC) has received the green light from Quebec Superior Court to distribute the fruits of its class action against The Gazette  and the newspaper's various owners. 

Claim forms are now available at http://www.erdc.ca  Freelance writers who wrote for The Gazette between 1985 and 2010 should fill one out if they want to take part in the distribution.  Writers will receive shares of Postmedia A stock according to a point system that was approved at a special ERDC general meeting in 2012.  

Claimants will have until March 5, 2015 to file, listing all freelance stories they wrote for The Gazette during the period covered by the class action.  The on-line resource Canadian Newsstand (Proquest) may be helpful in doing this.  It is available through many libraries including the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec.  To gain access to the collection by getting a free BAnQ card, consult http://www.banq.qc.ca/services/pret/carte/index.html.

In various settlements, the  ERDC received 189,479 shares in PostMedia A stock and $83,210.27 in cash, all of which have been held in trust.  In accordance with the Quebec Superior Court decision of September 5, 2014, the cash plus the proceeds of the sale of about 20,000 shares will be used to reimburse the Fonds d'aide aux recours collectifs (the Quebec agency which provided $86,999.35 in seed money for the class action,) and the ERDC lawyers, who are entitled to receive 25 per cent of cash and stock, plus taxes, under their agreements with the ERDC.

And why is this such a big thing for me?  Not that I ever wrote much for The Gazette.  Before the kids were born I wrote frequently for the Montreal Star, but when I started back in the freelance game it had folded.  So I did  a few things from The Gazette, and then the newspapers--along with many others--started its electronic rights grab.  Without permission and compensation, freelancers articles were made available on-line.  Eventually the Canadian Supreme Court (in a similar case brought by Heather Robertson against the Thomson chain) ruled that copyright belongs to writers, unless expressly conceded, whence comes the ERDC's settlement.

I was a bystander at the beginning of the case but for the last ten years or so, I've been closely involved.  Takes a lot of mulish determination to see something like this through, and I'm proud to have been part of this persistent, perservering effort.

Saturday Photo; The Ducks on the Pond

For several years ducks have nested in parks around here, but this year I didn't see any early in the summer.  However, for the last week or so a little family has taken up residence for at least part of the day in Outremont's Parc Beaubien.

Nice to see them again.  It may be that the summertime activities in the park--there are a day camp, soccer games and playgrounds full of kids from mid-June to late August--kept these little quackers away.  But they seem to be making themselves right at home now.

Jeanne and Thomas paid them a visit, and were charmed. 

Want to Know Who Will Win? Ask a Bookie

This is the day when the world (or at least a part of it) is mulling over the 55.3 per cent rejection of Scottish independence on Thursday.  Lots of talk on Radio Can and the Francophone press about what it means for Quebec.  (In short, the conclusion not surprisingly is that it doesn't augur well.)  I imagine there's probably a similar amount of navel gazing in Spanish-language media about Catalonia.

What should really interest people who care about the democratic process is how the polls in Scotland initially grossly underestimated the force of the independence movement, and then dithered around giving quite different predictions this last week. 

Polling is hard, and it's getting harder as people stop answering or even having land lines. The alternative of electronic polling in a universe of respondpents who are carefully selected to reflect the general population is clearly imperfect.  Justin Wolfers in The New York Times today, however, suggests that the real problem lies in not asking the right questions. 

Bookies, he says, do and got this one much closer than the pollsters.

He notes that the betting markets in Britain in elsewhere early on suggested that the vote would be much closer than the pundits thought.  "Throughout most of the campaign, few gave the pro-independence supporters a chance. From the early surveys in 2012 and 2013, all the way through to those run as recently as June of this year, most polls registered support for the Yes campaign as running in the mid-to-low 30s. A few nudged above 40 percent, but far more registered support in the 20s. It’s no surprise, then, that the news media largely ignored the referendum, and that pundits basically wrote it off as a sideshow."

It wasn't until a poll last month showed a surge in "Yes" support that the guys in control woke up.  The lesson?"Instead of focusing on whom people say they plan to vote for, ask them instead to focus on who they think will win. Typically, asking people who they think will win yields better forecasts, possibly because it leads them to also reflect on the opinions of those around them, and perhaps also because it may yield more honest answers."






Are you listening, my political junkie friends?