Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re; Alberta oil, gas cleanup could reach $70B: report, April 9, 2019.

The fossils in the fossil fuel industry are strangely silent when it comes to ponying up for the cleanup costs of their mess. Governments have been trained to use taxpayers money to do this. They want all the gravy but none of the leftovers. Every industry in the world takes the same approach. When it comes to making money they’re first in line, when it comes to paying out their money to take responsibility for their products or their waste they are nowhere to be seen.  Each industry leaves behind a horrendous number of carcinogenic products as a result of their production processes along with a massive amount of physical cleanup. Industries have for centuries pumped their contaminated untreated waste water into the nearest watershed and dumped their waste in toxic landfills poisoning the rivers, lakes and oceans and making our drinking water undrinkable.

Again and again when industry is asked about this, they disavow responsibility and evade prosecution employing high priced lawyers and a legal system that is largely based on ‘voluntary’ compliance, which has simply been an escape clause for past two hundred years . Timid governments shield huge companies in the rich oil and gas sectpr to preserve a few hundred cyclical jobs. The only interest of these companies is in making money and avoiding responsibility – anything that gts in the way of that is a problem and a nuisance.

What we need in Ottawa, provincial politics and around the world are parties that will end the free ride for corporate businesses that have destroyed the world. Big industry has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are the enemy. Governments must establish ironclad ‘cradle-to-grave’ laws that govern all aspects of a products life-cycle. The industry should be fully legally and financially responsible for their products and more importantly for their waste. If high wages, pensions, healthcare, full-time work, environmental responsibility and every other aspect of business in relation to society were mandated by governments in legislation the benefits to us all would be infinitesimal. The public needs to take over as the fair-haired person of government. As it is we have the cart before the horse.

Taxpyers should never pay for the destruction of companies to our environment, our climate and our well-being or receive corporate welfare to get along. Business want the best of both worlds. It is high time they stared taking the good with the bad.  Let the fossils in the fossil fuel industry pay for the cleanup as they should.

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: Nuance aside, ban is wrong, Editorial, April 1, 2019.

The Star’s editorial takes the status quo position on Quebec’s progressive secularism banning of religious symbols in public. Their position misses the finer points of the argument that are important as well. They correctly defend the rights of minorities to equality under the law but they extend that equality to religion which is a problem. Although our constitution has a time honoured tradition of defending the rights of people to practice their religion, this has created massive problems for people throughout the ages. It is never that simple.

People’s religious beliefs deeply influence their behaviour whether in government, society or gender relationships. Religion is a pacifier for the once illiterate masses. The modern reality is that people’s religious beliefs dee[y influence their political beliefs whether they are majority or minority, Christian or non-Christian. This is one of the reasons that belief in religion is waning. Many of these beliefs are highly patriarchal, ancient and repressive not traditions to be preserved. The wearing of the niqab, the hijab and the burka are clear signs of the oppression of women in Islamic cultures. The opposition of the Christian right to abortion is another. Restrictions against homosexuality and adultery are others. By enshrining the right to practice religion openly we are enshrining the abusive oppression of religion contained within it. Most religions, Christian or non-Christian have subordinating demands on women but not on men.

Saying that the church and state are separate is ludicrous. The reason that we are in this position today is because of imperialist wars in the past that were fought on the basis of religious values. Our laws and democracy are framed in this context. The democratic state has long tried to separate religion from politics but without success.

Religion is so ingrained in the mentality of everyone that it cannot be ignored. Religious symbols in public are a constant source of psychological friction and unhealthy societal segmentation in a democratic society. The free practice fo religion, rather than being a unifier in society has been and unequivocal divider.

People are welcome to practice their religious beliefs in private as long as they don’t try to impose their religion on others. As history has shown us this is virtually impossible. This ban would apply to all religions – including the Catholic Church one of the largest socializers in the world.

Thus the reason for Quebec’s ban. It is for this reason that Quebec’s law is just – perhaps unknowingly – just the beginning of a long process of liberating people from the oppression of religious belief. If we truly are a modern, progressive society we should not support ancient mysticism and is various accoutrements but a belief in humanity and its power to govern our morality. If we did this, our world would be vastly improved.

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re; Stop threats of violence, Editorial, March 18, 2019.

Donald Trump is only symptomatic of a much deeper problem in modern society. His casual references to violence, white supremacy and his bombastic, dictatorial style reflect the values of patriarchy. It is a system of power in which men dominate and is characterized by violence, hierarchy and control. It is a male worldview. It has existed as a social culture for around five thousand years and has influenced our leadership styles, economic and religious practices, our cultural beliefs and geopolitics. It crosses economic, geographic, cultural and religious lines and affects everyone in the world. Under recent patriarchy white men are considered superior to other individuals or groups in society. Men are responsible for the vast majority of violence, economic and geopolitical problems in the world often driven by religious beliefs and yet as a society we will not face up to the fact that men are the real problem in the world and until we call them out nothing will change.  Patriarchy is the invisible problem that is destroying the world because we will not acknowledge it.

People of all faiths will continue to be slaughtered as they have for centuries and we will continue to react in horror because of these misguided racist and misogynist beliefs until we socialize patriarchy out of society. This means that society needs not only #MeToo and token western celebrity endorsements for women who have been sexually assaulted but deep-seated systemic change around the world for all women and in the very foundations of our social fabric. We need to start by socializing our young boys into gender neutral rather than macho, heroic roles and provide a balanced androgynous approach to gender identity from the time they are children throughout their lives. We also need to radically reform our predatory capitalist economic system, our male-dominated religious beliefs and our competitive education system in real ways that de-emphasize competition, hierarchy and adversarialism and promote collective harmony.

This is a stark demand and a tall order but without it we will not survive. Over the last two hundred years men, who occupy all the important leadership positions in the world have destroyed it in their pursuit of personal gain. They have lost all credibility to guide us into the future. We need new thinking and a new plan. The first step it to acknowledge the problem for what it is. If we do not change patriarchal thinking we are all doomed.

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: No winners in new arms race, Editorial, February 17, 2018.

Contrary to the Star’s assertion there were big winners in the last arms race and there will be big winners in the coming one – the arms industry or what Dwight D. Eisenhower called ‘the military-industrial complex’. Continue reading →

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: Sex-ed protest empties school – Front Page, September 09, 2015.

The Star’s sensationalist front page headline was completely unwarranted, misleading and unnecessary. It made a small single protest appear as though it was a provincial issue. It served only to give inflated credence to a non-issue and prolong the misguided efforts of a minuscule number of unrepresentative ethnic minority parents to argue their case in the media for accommodations to the province’s new sex-ed curriculum, based on their archaic religious beliefs regarding the teaching of sexual education to their children. Continue reading →

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: Court’s ruling on niqabs just plain wrong. September 19, 2015.

Congratulations to Rosie Di Manno and her intelligent, accurate and insightful critique of the court’s ruling on the wearing of the niqab. Clearly, it is in itself a polarizing issue reflecting the dilemmas of an evolving democracy within a global culture. Continue reading →

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: It’s a new Canada, Headline, October 20, 2015.

In the euphoria and after-glow of the massive and much needed election victory of the Liberal Party and Justin Trudeau Canadians should be reminded that in reality little has changed and little will change despite even the well-meaning and naive intentions of Mr. Trudeau and his party. Continue reading →

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: Public must be warned, Editorial, October 28, 2015.

The revelation by The Star that yet another charity has been revealed to be fraudulent should come as a surprise to no one. What is surprising is how feeble the laws are governing this and other charitable enterprises. Continue reading →

Re: ‘We are the voice of the voiceless’, Headline, October 31, 2015.

Regrettably, in our modern world we are forced to prioritize misery. Despite the desperate state of the Syrian refugees, the Canadian government and its citizens cannot save the world from itself and must take care of their own problems before lending assistance to other war-torn nations – most urgently that of the plight of our 1st Nations peoples. Continue reading →

Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star

Re: Canadian-led thinking filters through at Davos index launch, Business, January 23, 2016.

Jennifer Wells offers an incisive critique of short-term, short-sighted “quarterly capitalism” – as coined by Canadian economist Dominic Barton in her article while presenting some crucial changes that must take place to produce a socially responsible and just economic system in the future. Don’t hold your breath. There is little to no appetite for simply critiquing capitalism let alone altering its fundamentally destructive dynamics. The fact that 10% of the world’s adult population owns a staggering 88% of the world’s assets according the Credit Suisse Policy Institute’s 2015 Global Wealth Report receives only a passing notice in financial and public news media. We have long ago accepted gross inequality as the hallmark of capitalist economics. As long as unbridled greed drives free enterprise nothing will change. As Barton notes the deep reform required is to change how we view business’s value and its role in society. Currently, the private sector perceives their role as creating individual not social wealth. This is done by publicly socializing risk and privatizing wealth.

Wells provides an example of this methodology in her description of Chainsaw Al and his deceptive, corrupt and fraudulent leadership practices that left investors, employees and public taxpayers holding the bag for his incompetence and mismanagement. Regrettably, this not unique to free enterprise and is in fact all too common. It is a cautionary tale for those who laud such leaders as change agents and assertive decision makers rather than assertive disaster makers. Canadian tech darling Nortel is another case in point. Wall Street high-flyers were viewed in the same light until they blew up the financial system in 2008. Some may still remember the Bre-X mining fraud. Not a single individual has ever been prosecuted or convicted of a crime for their roles in the financial disaster that brought the world to its knees and from which we still have not recovered. Highly touted current CEOs like Hunter Harrison of CP Rail continue to practice Al’s slash and burn management ethos of cut costs, cut staff and then cut out. Harrison has chopped 7,000 jobs since becoming CEO of CP in an ongoing blood-letting of the company’s staff in the name of “efficiencies.” These job cuts are solely intended to boost the share price of CP that has risen dramatically since he was appointed. The most recent job cuts announced come as the company reports record profits.  This is a common strategy of CEOs today whose performance bonuses are directly tied to stock options. The CEO of Blackberry, John Chen is yet another example who makes a salary of just under $350K but banked $89.7 million in 2015 based on stock options as reported by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Hugh McKenzie despite the flagging fortunes of his company and massive job cuts to the former RIM.  Unfortunately, in too many cases the company subsequently falters from this brain drain and the CEOs conveniently cut out with hefty severance packages leaving the organizations they once ran in ruins. In the case of Hunter Harrison, CP will soon be left an empty shell to be picked over at some point in the future by vulture hedge funds in bankruptcy courts much like Sunbeam. The Lac Megantic disaster was the result of similar mismanagement style of the company responsible. As Wells and Barton point out, CEOs are rewarded whether they succeed or fail instead of having their salaries linked to innovation and efficiency and with clear penalties for failure. The new S&P Long-Term Value Creation Global Index to track long-term growth of companies is a promising initiative.

This is the real and ugly face of modern corporate capitalism where value is not built by organic growth but by ‘controlled destruction.’ It is a predatory and parasitic process that is destabilizing the world’s economy on a massive scale driven by amoral greed and by “management without conscience.” We need a system of “fair market” economics that structures the role of business as one of collective socially responsible value-creation for all in society through wealth distribution and progressive taxation, economic mutuality and non-authoritarianism based on fairness and freedom for all. We need to abandon the view that leaders make companies succeed when in reality it is every employee who does and all deserve a share of the rewards. It the company fails – all should suffer equally – including the CEO and shareholders. A level playing field will lead to a levelling of the playing field for everybody.