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Election reform now!

Unpublished letter sent to the Toronto Star

Re: Election results revive calls for change, June10, 2018.

Electoral reform is one of many changes that would enhance the voting process and engage voters but few are ever even considered, let alone implemented. The first-past-the-post antiquated system simply increases the frustration in an increasingly complex world.

The first change is proportional representation. The first-past-the-post system is an ancient British elitist system that wastes the votes of the losers. It was designed to present government as democratic while only rich, white, male, land-owning aristocrats were allowed to participate. The apathy of voters was built in. There was no point in voting even when they could when the elections were all a foregone conclusion. It was a two-party sham and we adopted it with gusto. We have been going through the motions for centuries. Proportional representation uses every vote to count towards parliamentary representation and as such is fundamentally democratic. It leads to no single party having a majority and all votes being counted. Multiple-party coalitions (a dirty word in first-past-the-post) are common.

The second is to reform the voting system. It is ironic that the most important function in society is stuck in the dark ages. Digital communication and use have revolutionized society, government and business yet there is little interest in implementing online voting. Concerns over the problems are overblown and an excuse for keeping us in the past. Trillions of dollars are moved around the world by secure, encrypted devices but we still resist allowing people to vote online. Voting should be web-based and electronic. You could log in with your social insurance number and verify your id with other personal pieces of information. A simple phone function could allow people to key in their choices. Such a move would save hundreds of millions of dollars, provide instantaneous data collection and provide anyone, anywhere and at any time the opportunity to vote. The fifty percent of people who mysteriously do not vote would be empowered. Similarly, Smarthones could be used for serious business rather than as a social distraction for humanity. Governments should be regularly posing questions on policies, legislation and items being discussed in the House of Commons to gain crucial and evidence-based information that would drive decisions. Technology has permeated every other part of society except government

Voting should be made mandatory. If it is such an important right of all citizens, it should be required of every citizen as in Australia. We are all required to keep our immunization up-to-date and our driver’s licences, why not our voting rights?

Finally, the Liberals and the NDP should merge the left. The first-past-the-post system is a two-party system. The two platforms are virtually identical anyway.

There is any app for virtually everything else but not voting. It’s time there was. These changes would transform our voting system and with it, society.

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Fordism and education

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: Dangerous mixed signals, July 18, 2018.

As a retired educator (teacher/principal) for more than 37 years in Ontario I thought I had seen it all but alas I was mistaken. Doug Ford’s rejection of the sex-ed curriculum (and the entire curriculum document) to replace it with  a twenty-year old one, reflects he and his party’s Neandertalic attitude towards the world and in this case educators and education.

On the basis of a miniscule minority of parents who believe in antiquated ideas about sex-ed he has trashed (literally) for simply ideological reasons an excellent up-to-date curriculum document that has been vetted with parents, experts, educators and the public at large for more than two years and implemented as best practice. The curriculum in Ontario already makes provisions for dissenting minorities while having a document that serves the vast majority of students appropriately.  Whining right-wing minorities now rule the day. Sexual education curriculum was developed because parents did not talk to their kids about this sensitive subject. Stick your heads in the sand and everything will be fine. The situation is absolutely ludicrous. The same approach will be taken with a variety of other issues including Hydro One, abortion. LGBTQ issues, immigration and privatizing healthcare to race, minimum wage and gender issues. Ford, like Trump, has a simplistic, limited business understanding that brings a wrecking ball to every problem. It is a disaster.

The really scary part is that in our first-past-the-post electoral system a tiny minority of people in Ontario voted for Doug Ford or abstained. The British electoral system is premised on people not voting so that upper class aristocrats can be elected. Most voters (and non-voters) made their decision often with little more than vague promises and often in absentia including teachers, police officers, government officials, doctors, nurses and education leaders. They and many others said that this is the kind of government they wanted with virtually no information to go on. What a deluded, irresponsible Luddite perspective.

Doug Ford’s election has reaffirmed my longstanding belief that teachers must demand full professional status (like doctor’s and lawyers) rather than labour associations that gives them independent, professional control over education. They need this designation to assert their expertise over curriculum decisions and preserve them from the constantly revolving door of ideas of various governments that regularly reverse or change quality practices. Respect for teachers will increase and decision making will be removed from the vagaries of government. Governments would have input but not control just like parents. Education would be delivered from minority control by a few angry parents or politicians who are dissatisfied with sex-ed or any other curriculum program or approach.  Saying teachers will have ‘flexibility’ doesn’t cut it. The only way to stop this destabilizing and destructive pattern is to make teachers fully professional and make education independent of the province. Teachers are the experts and like doctors and lawyers should make the decisions. Only this kind of power would stop Ford or any other government from reversing factually-based, quality education.

It is time for a people’s revolution. Down with Fordism, Trumpism, Ludditism and all other narrow and misguided forms of regressive, extremist, religious or political beliefs that would hold humanity hostage from sensible progress. Down with the antiquated first past-the-post system that wastes votes and allows this to happen. Apathy will get us despotism.

by admin

The failure of leadership

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: School boards have two weeks to toe the line. August 1, 2018

Where are the leaders that are so often touted as the necessary, strong, assertive, vocal and capable individuals who are required to lead our modern institutions like education and forge the ‘just society.’ They are for the most part AWOL in the debate over the sex-ed curriculum changes and its cancellation. Leaders like this are good at ordering people around and organizing their school boards but not so good at following their moral and ethical conscience. These are not leaders – these are hirelings. If all they do is follow the directions of the elected government then it stands to reason they would serve a dictator much like the troops serving Bashar Al Assad in Syria. In every situation leaders must make moral judgments about what they are being asked to do and determine if those directions serve the needs of the vast majority of people in this province – whether they voted or not.

Instead of seeing a full-page ad in the Star with the names of Directors, organizations representing supervisory officers and trustees, the various executives of the teaching affiliates standing together decrying the tactics and policies of Doug Ford and his Neandertal government, we are greeted with silence. Showing collective leadership that actually means something rather than cowering in their offices waiting for the of consequences of Ford’s decision making. This is not to engender revolution but a firm resistance that will temper the measures and benefit everyone.

This is the endemic problem with the entire patriarchal leadership model of organizations everywhere. It is a model based on fear, intimidation and violence if necessary. It is a male model of power, hierarchy, prestige, deferential relationships and most of all obedience and authority. It is the same model that excuses domestic violence, male control of women, a vicious dog-eat-dog economic system, religious domination and a thousand other abuses in society. It is a model that no longer has relevance – if it ever did. The model is broken.

We need leaders who are kind, calm, compassionate, loving and understand the complexity and diversity of humanity without threats. To accomplish this we need to introduce transparency into all human interactions. Where are these leaders?

by admin

St. Mike’s boys

Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star

The lurid details of the sexual assaults at St. Michael’s College private boy’s school in Toronto are only the tip of the iceberg. They reflect an antiquated “boys will be boys” mentality of roughhousing and hazing that used to be the norm but are now are out of touch with modern society. In our high-tech world of instant news an incident that formerly wouldn’t have even been noticed is now headline news.

This is not just the behaviour of eight students who were expelled but a reflection of the entire school culture that everyone must take responsibility for. It is a deep-seated and widespread problem across society. Like most other initiation rites that have been abandoned, the ones at St. Mike’s are archaic male rights of passage that need to go the way of the dodo bird. There have been enough public outings of men from the sexualized frosh chants to the numerous #MeToo movement events for any school not to know that this kind of testosterone fuelled behaviour is unacceptable – whether directed at men or women. And yet it keeps happening.

It is a culture of patriarchal dominance and arrogance that pervades the school and society from top to bottom. Whether in our worshipping of male sports figures, to our romanticization of police, doctors and lawyers on T.V. dramas or our idolization of major military figures, the culture of patriarchy is reinforced again and again.

Behind the exclusive, private doors of male educational clubs with a high price of admission to weed out the riff raff and keep the prying eyes of the media away, normal social restrictions appear not to apply. Private boys schools are training grounds for the future elites of society. Students are schooled in a patriarchal hothouse of male ego and heroic traditions and attitudes by Basilian fathers without anything to temper their authority and control. The videos demonstrate this pack mentality and dominance. There is a hierarchy that must be observed. Only the fittest survive and only the greatest succeed. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. They cloak this behind a patriarchal Catholic mystique and privacy. It is a closed, incestuous. cloistered male mentality that students exist in. The elite schools of society like St. Mike’s and others continue to educate in a patriarchal tradition that is still pervasive, powerful and prevalent yet invisible across our modern globe. This social culture is also responsible for virtually every problem in the world today.

Women are resisting this male impress – but only in western celebrity societies. Globally, the values of the Islamic crown princes of Saudi Arabia are more often dominant and desired as they are at St. Mike’s. Every time we see another #MeToo movement incident, or a woman is assaulted or killed in a domestic violence or blasphemy situation, or our capitalist economy destroying our climate or another war breaks out in our militarized and weaponized warrior culture we are exposed to the phenomenon of patriarchy, a male values structure that permeates our world. It exists in Donald Trump, Doug Ford, the Saudi princes, Vladimir Putin, Bashar Al Assad and ISIL. It knows no boundaries of geography, race, ethnicity, religion or politics. It saturates our sports, music, art, literature, science and education to name only a few.

If we only focus our energies on each incident without realizing that the larger system of patriarchy is the real problem we cannot see the forest for the trees nor will we ever create a more humane world. 3`The forest is in need of immediate, radical pruning before a wildfire breaks out and destroys the world but the world has yet to wake up to the fact that all these incidents when collected together make it the major social problem of our modern times causing a litany of issues. St. Mike’s and all other male bastions of these values are incubators for this way of life where a few superior men rule everything and the rest just serve. Rather than fighting every single issue we need to bring attention to patriarchy and begin to raise and educate our male children in an entirely different way to be compassionate, loving, sensitive and caring in opposition to being aggressive, dominant males. As much as we tout the advances of our civilization, we are still animals at heart.

If we don’t the St. Mike’s of the world will continue to churn out their graduates.

by admin

Sardine children

Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star

The Ford government’s onslaught against reason and science continues. Removing the cap on class sizes in JK/SK and the Primary grades (1,2,3) demonstrates an antiquated, conservative ideological view regarding the workings of classes of this age. Doug Ford views teaching young children as women’s work and a simple task of supervision and control with a few learning outcomes. Nothing could be further from the truth.  This is the view of most people in the general public, politicians and even educators themselves) hold in our a top down patriarchal system of teaching and its value and impact. They are entirely wrong.

It is exactly the reverse. Teachers of primary children are the most skilled and least respected professionals in the province due to the age of the children they teach. Our hierarchy of respect that places university professors at the top of the value ladder and ECE teachers (daycare) at the bottom of the social scale is a throwback that should be abandoned and replaced with a balanced valuing of primary and ECE teachers on an equal level with secondary and college and university professors. The education system itself gives virtually no professional respect and responsibility surrounding decision-making to elementary school teachers. This would be unheard of in the university system. Our respect should be based not on the complexity of the knowledge that is imparted but on the complexity of the responsibility that the teacher holds. Kindergarten teachers have full parental and professional responsibility for the children they teach, whereas as children age, they take on more responsibility for their own learning until in university they are mature adults. Teaching is a gender-based profession.

The relief that most parents evoke when their children go back to school is demonstrative of the level of complexity and care that is required to teach and socialize a single child let alone a single family’s children. Teachers instruct ten to fifteen families children simultaneously in a cramped classroom every day for five hours a day, five days a week for ten months of the school year.  It is gruelling work. No other profession does this.

In fact the scientific knowledge base establishes that learning in the Primary grades is crucial to future success as an adult. The child/student you have in Grade 3 is generally the adult you will see later in life – for better or worse. Many studies have shown that smaller class sizes in these divisions result in better long-term learning and fewer problems later in the students school life. Packing children into a classroom like sardines hearkens back to the “factory-schooling” model of education that existed in the early 20th century where male students were warehoused until they met minimum graduation standards.  It also ignores the learning styles and needs of the students who are active, participatory learners. Kindergarten classes often seem chaotic but they are carefully controlled and planned chaos organized by the teacher around specific play-based learning outcomes while at a particular centre. Sand centres, reading centres, block centres and listening centres all serve a specific purpose in allowing students to engage with the material that is there while socializing in an appropriate way with other children.  We continue to underestimate the value of this in the short term or particularly the long term.

Kindergarten classrooms are busy places. Even with two adults in the room it with 30 children is a challenge for the adults to constantly monitor every child every minute of the day. There is a significant safety concern alone here. Even at the current numbers two adults cannot meet the needs of every student – not even close. Kindergarten classes should be slashed to a hard maximum of 20 students with two adults to create positive momentum for children. Adding even more students to this mix will only accomplish warehousing of children and definitely degrade the short-term and particularly long-term abilities of these students. While this may be convenient for parents it is a disaster for their children. Anyone wo has been in a kindergarten class when it is operating knows that there is barely a place to step without care or a second to spare. The physical size of kindergarten classes prevails against this direction.

This is what happens when you let people who know nothing about education or as in the  case of parents thing they know everything about education run education. They run it into the ground. We cannot continue to run education on a four-year political cycle. We continue to undervalue ECE, JK/SK and Primary teachers who remain primarily women while they are doing the most important work in education. We have been doing this for a century. We need educational reform not educational regression. Increasing class sizes or privatizing education is penny wise and pound foolish.

by admin

Capitalism and workers

The closing of the GM plant in Oshawa is another in a long list of examples of capitalism at work. Worker’s and their unions just don’t get it. GM will close one of their most efficient and award-winning plants at the end of 2019 – end of story. The decision is based on costs not awards or quality. Gerry Diaz makes a lot of noise but he should be the one who knows best how corporations operate having been in the business for a long time.

For the past century the model of capitalist corporations has been exactly the same – make huge profits by cutting your costs to the bone, charging as much money as you can get away with including taking all the corporate welfare that you can while crying poor and increasing the efficiency of your production. The Robber Barons of the early 20th century were a primitive prime example. Today we live in the era of the technological Robber Barons. The names of Morgan, Getty and Vanderbilt have been replaced by Gates,  Zuckerberg and Bezos. There has over the last 50 years been a significant increase in the size of companies and profits. They have perfected cost reductions by paying worker’s subsistence wages with no healthcare, pensions or other befits, eliminating full-time work and globalizing labour. When cheaper labour or other costs show up anywhere in the world they cut production, cut staff and cut out, yet Diaz rails away as though he is going to change GM’s mind and save the worker’s jobs.  He would be better to give the money they spent on the Super-Bowl ad directly to the workers. Every large corporation in Canada and all over the world operates the same way. He’s dreaming in technicolour. The closure is an amoral business decision and the signing of a renewed NAFTA deal was the last nail in the coffin for Ontario automotive workers. When GM can pay Mexican workers a pittance compared to what they pay Ontario’s workers it’s a no-brainer. All Diaz needs to look at is across the border in Detroit. Michigan used to be the automotive capital of the world – now it’s an ugly rust belt of shuttered factories that not even the wizardry of Donald Trump will never bring back. From Electrolux to Kraft’s marshmallow factory the story is always the same. Corporate capitalism is a brutal, predatory system that places profits before people and the company before commitments.

What I don’t understand is the why the government, workers and their unions accept these premises so readily and have yet to learn their lesson. They have all drunk the Kool-Aid. They are still thinking in 1950s terms while the world has moved on. They have been walking into this “job’s trap” for decades. They are the losers in every negotiation with big corporations who constantly wring more and more concessions out of the unions and governments to bring the jobs to Canada. Corporations have been playing this game globally and governments have willingly acquiesced. Instead of banding together and raising corporate taxes they capitulate. At some point corporations finally close the business and move it somewhere cheaper in the globalized government casino lottery that we live in today. Governments always like to be there when the jobs are coming and are absent when they are leaving. Why don’t governments sign ironclad agreements with heavy financial penalties for failures to deliver streetcars like Bombardier or when they close plants like GM with full repayment clauses before giving them taxpayers money. GM was nearly bankrupt in 2008 before the Ontario government stepped in with $11 Billion in emergency funds to save the company. Why didn’t’ the governments extract serious legal commitments  from GM then to pay back the money with interest and to remain in Ontario? Theh government would have been better to give the $11 Billion directly to the workers paying them all $3.3 million. When the private sector cuts deals with governments like the Saudi’s the financial penalties are prohibitively heavy to cancel the contract. When will workers realize that unless they change the economic rules they’re going to get shafted every time. When are they going to learn that it is the capitalist system that runs this way and it will never change. Worker’s eagerly voted in Doug Ford with the same blind trust and glee that he was “for the people” and are only now realizing it was all a dupe. From Cami-Ingersoll, Heinz, Maple Leaf Foods, Inglis and on and on plant closures happen over and over. Until workers start electing different governments that will change the rules and have their interests in mind – line up at the food stamps window and pass another Looney beer.

by admin

The belief war

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

LRe: The real war on Christmas, Editorial, December 23, 2018.

The Star’s editorial would portray the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities as a war on the fundamental freedoms of capitalist democracy.  It implies that the celebration of Christmas with its nauseatingly excessive commercialization and excess is just all part of expressing religious traditions. If only it were that simple.

It would be good to remind them that religious persecution is the basis of most geopolitical hostility in the world today and has been ongoing since the beginning of time with periods of slaughter by Christians, Muslims and non-believers like the Chinese government that pale in comparison to what is occurring now. Their holier-than-thou editorial posture glosses over the previous history of egregious murder, rape, disease, sexual impropriety and brutality including slavery carried out by Christianity. Has the Star forgotten the vicious massive tragedies of the indigenous peoples of North and South America – all in the service of a Catholic god. The barbarity carried out by religion goes on today across the globe by all religions. Saudi Arabia beheads people in the streets for religious offences.

The imperialist Judeo-Christian message that faith is harmless and people just want to practice their religion in peace as an act of religious devotion is nothing more than simplistic piety.

Religion has always been heavily tied up with adversarial politics, economics and exclusion with each of the major religions claiming their faith as the one true belief and rejecting anyone who is a non-believer. Most countries orient their policies based on religion, including the west despite assertions to the contrary. Religion is a co-conspirator of capitalism and patriarchy and has taken a leading role throughout history in asserting that males are

superior and the wealthy are god’s children because they are smart enough to be rich. If only religion was non-political it would be bearable but it is the constant tunnel-vision moralizing of people of faith that is so intolerable. This is not religion, it is latent vigilantism.

Its not about eliminating one religion – its about eliminating all religion. Belief has been intentionally manipulated by men to do their bidding since time immemorial justifying their patriarchal universe. It has validated the subordination and degradation of women of all faiths. The wearing of the niqab is is a religious symbol of subordination to Mohammed and through him to all men. What we really need is for all religions to be replaced by a single humanitarian global belief that focuses on the quality of life of people around the world rather than mystical figures. That’s a religion that everyone can support without fear of persecution.

by admin

Guns are the problem

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: Violent 2018 sparks concern over what’s next, Headline, January 2, 2019.

What’s next – more violence of course. We know no other way in modern capitalist society and we fail to address the root causes of the problem – not gangs but the shutting down the arms industry. It is a massive, hugely profitable and powerful series of corporations that have some very serious political allies like the NRA in the United States. They dictate policy on guns and support the archaic 2nd Amendment rights of Americans who have one of the most violent societies in the world. They sell to both sides making the world a polluted wasteland of weapons. If government’s really represented the people they would have gone to the source of the problem and banned all guns and made the manufacturing or the possession of guns a criminal offense punishable by life in prison without parole. The only exceptions would be production for a small military and police forces for public safety. As the gun ban settled in the need for military and police forces to have weapons would be reduced. Imagine for just a moment what could be done to poverty if the trillions of dollars currently spent on military and police expenditures around the world could be spent instead on debt reduction, social programs and poverty elimination. Economic problems would be solved. It’s all a matter of priorities. “The market” doesn’t always determine the correct priorities – that is a capitalist myth.  Governments would be shutting down the rich arm’s industry to stop all wars and  all violence. Long guns, short guns, machine guns or cannons – they are all weapons that kill people and animals. There is no justification for them and no other suse for them. Hunters are a dinosaur group that kill what few defenceless wild animals we have left under the auspices of “sport.” There is no sport in baiting traps and shooting animals in the wild with a high-powered rifle from five hundred yards away to mount its head on a wall in your den to satisfy men’s macho egos. The few wild animals that are left must be protected. Weapons are a patriarchal holdover that we must rid ourselves of if  we want to survive and evolve. It is also the right thing and the only thing to do.