While attending university in Vancouver in the 90’s, he was jumped in broad daylight while innocently strolling down the university concourse by two nefarious individuals in suits. They shoved a credit card into his poverty stricken hands, rubbing their sweaty palms together in glee at the 19.9% compounding interest that would soon be coming their way. His eyes widened when he saw the $3,000 credit limit — an ungodly sum for him in those days when he largely subsisted off the $1 samosa shops that littered the downtown streets. At term end, he wasted no time in booking a cross-Canada rail trip with his girlfriend, a Newfie, to travel to her homeland. He distinctly remembers the day the music died: when his credit card was denied while trying to buy a souvenir Newfoundland sticker. At least he made it all the way across.

Of course he had no money to pay the debt his cross-Canada joyride had racked up. Plus, he felt the bank should be punished for the idiocy of giving a credit card to a 20 nothing student deadbeat. His file was eventually referred to a collection agency. Below is his response to one of their many letters (yes, that’s actually the supposed name of their lawyer). When their letters didn’t work, he started getting threatening phone calls from an aggressive sounding man with an Italian accent (I wonder if they recruit Italians on purpose, or simply give them lessons in sounding like mobsters). He simply hung up on him. Fortunately, he never came to break his kneecaps. I’m sure his file was written off as a business expense.

Dear R. Max Gold, LLB,

Thank you for your recent letter informing me of my outstanding debt to NCO Financial Services Inc. (formerly Financial Collection Agencies), authorized agents for Citibank MasterCard. I really do appreciate the diligence you have shown in reminding me of the money I owe. Without the industriousness of yourself and your colleagues, I should surely have forgotten all about my obligation by now.

Your conscientiousness stands in stark contrast to the state of neglect in which I have left our correspondence. By way of reparations, let me humbly offer an explanation for the tardiness of my payments. Simply put: I never borrowed any money.

Being a lawyer, Mr. Gold, you may not be as familiar as your client no doubt is about how money is created in our society. To best explain this process, permit me to back up a few hundred years.

The practice we now call banking started in several different places and times. But for illustrative purposes let’s take the case of the English goldsmiths of the 16^th and 17^th centuries. In those days gold coins were one of the main forms of money. When people accumulated many coins they would often deposit them with the local goldsmith, who tended to have a secure vault. In exchange for their coins, the goldsmith would issue them a paper receipt showing how much had been deposited. People soon found that, instead of withdrawing their gold to make a purchase, it made a lot more sense to simply sign over an equivalent amount of these receipts to the seller. Once the goldsmiths caught on, they facilitated this by not making their receipts out to any one person, but simply to the bearer. Whoever held the receipt was entitled to the gold. The Bank of England later refined this further by issuing notes in standard denominations, each worth a specific value in gold. And so paper money was born.

At first, depositors only wanted their coins back when presenting their receipts. This was because coins were often tampered with by shaving or “sweating” small portions of the gold off, or recasting them with less precious metals. But when Sir Isaac Newton was put in charge of the Royal Mint, he developed a coin that rang at a certain pitch when struck. Adulterated coins would quite literally not ring true. With the value of all coins now assured, goldsmiths could lump all their deposits together into a common sum.

Seeing this vast pool of gold all in one place got some of the more enterprising goldsmiths thinking: most of the time, their vaults were full of gold. Sure, in theory all their depositors could simultaneously demand their gold back and empty out their vaults. But barring a wide-scale panic, it wasn’t too likely.

Sensing a business opportunity, the goldsmiths began loaning out, at interest, some of this surplus gold sitting idle in their vaults. Of course, instead of loaning the actual gold, it was much more convenient to simply loan out more of those handy paper receipts.

In so doing, the goldsmiths crossed a crucial line – they issued more receipts for gold than they had gold in their vaults. With each new loan they made, they increased the amount of these paper receipts circulating in the economy, thus creating more money.

No one went without so that others could be loaned this money; no depositor’s receipts were taken away and given to a debtor. Completely new receipts were printed, in addition to the old ones, with both old and new promising to pay the same gold to the bearer on demand. It was, in essence, a vast game of musical chairs. The only thing holding the goldsmiths back from issuing unlimited amounts of paper money was the fear that there might be a run on their bank, and they’d have to redeem all those receipts at the same time and go bankrupt (from the Italian “banca rotta” or “broken bench” – which is what was done to the benches moneylenders did their business on when they went, well, broke).

Except for a hundred-odd year interval during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries when the world towed the British Empire’s line and adhered to the gold standard – which enforced a one-to-one ratio of gold to money (not a good thing, by the way) – we’ve pretty much stuck to this same system of money creation through debt. The old goldsmith’s fear of a run on his bank has been replaced with government-regulated “fractional reserves”, but these only require banks to possess a small fraction in assets of the total amount of money they loan out.

So just like back in Elizabethan England, when I “borrow” money from a bank these days, that bank conjures new money out of thin air and makes the numbers appear in my account as electronic impulses.

Since this money was not previously owned by anyone, including the bank, it cannot be considered as “borrowed”. It simply appeared, like some immaculate conception, in my bank account. If this money has a creator it is surely I, and not the bank, since it was by my will that this money came into existence. The bank was merely my instrument.

I’m sure you’ll now agree with me that I should be under no obligation to hand over my money to a financial institution in repayment of a loan that – when viewed properly – never even existed. Rather, in light of these revelations, may I respectfully suggest that you should in fact thank me for my noble display of generosity in assuming the awful burden of money creation through debt and spreading the resultant wealth far and wide.

Yours,

Yan O’Donnell

I don’t think R. Max Gold ever replied. I imagine the response of most bankers to this accusation would be silence, too. It’s best this sort of thing is not talked about too widely, lest people start resenting bankers even more than they currently do.

There was a lively debate amongst economists about whether banks really create money or not. Different theories were bandied about, until one economist, by the name of Richard A. Werner, actually decided to run an empirical test. He found a cooperative bank, took out a loan, and traced through their paperwork what happened next. What he found supported my friend Yan’s thesis above: that individual banks really do create money out of thin air every time they make a loan.

This should be common knowledge, but it seems to be not widely known. I wonder why?

Money is the air we all must breath in order to participate in the economy. Few of us can survive long without it. I expect future generations will look back at us and wonder why we paid private businesses a fee called “interest” for the right to breath.

Our current monetary system is the result of haphazard cultural evolution and selfish incentives. Money is just an idea, and we can design any system we think will work better. Werner’s vision for what a better monetary system could look like is worth quoting at length:

Among the many different monetary system designs tried over the past 5000 years, very few have met the requirement for a fair, effective, accountable, stable, sustainable and democratic creation and allocation of money. The view of the author, based on more than twenty-three years of research on this topic, is that it is the safest bet to ensure that the awesome power to create money is returned directly to those to whom it belongs: ordinary people, not technocrats. This can be ensured by the introduction of a network of small, not-for-profit local banks across the nation. Most countries do not currently possess such a system. However, it is at the heart of the successful German economic performance in the past 200 years…In addition, one can complement such local public bank money with money issued by local authorities that is accepted to pay local taxes, namely a local public money that has not come about by creating debt, but that is created for services rendered to local authorities or the community. Both forms of local money creation together would create a decentralised and more accountable monetary system that should perform better (based on the empirical evidence from Germany) than the unholy alliance of central banks and big banks, which have done much to create unsustainable asset bubbles and banking crises.

I now have a massive mortgage for my farm. I’ll be paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest over the next 25 years. Fortunately, we were able to get a loan from Desjardins, North America’s largest federation of credit unions. Instead of my interest going to enrich wealthy investors, my money will be paid out in dividends to everyone who banks at Desjardins, and be donated to community groups. Desjardins is also the only Canadian bank not invested in fossil fuels. The future is here now, you just have to look a little harder to find it.

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A person said to me recently that he wants to break through the metaphorical walls before him; they are holding him back from achieving his true potential. Another said to me that he believes there is a world of mental health out there, which he hopes to someday attain. I know others who believe the past was a better place overall, and we should try to return to some of its ways, and still others who believe the future will be far superior. I also know people who hope they are headed for heaven after they die. Then there are the many who believe their lives will be better once they buy that thing, get that job, marry that person, achieve that goal, etc.

What all these seductive beliefs have in common is utopian thinking – seeing a better world “out there”, somewhere, anywhere but here. The word “utopia”, coined by Sir Thomas Moore in his homonymous 1516 book, is drawn from the ancient Greek words for “no” and “where”. Utopias, in the sense of perfect worlds, literally don’t exist, but humans can make worlds that are at least improvements.

Why are humans so clearly drawn to imagining better worlds? Is it simply because we can? Life inevitably is full of hardships, and it’s reassuring to believe that something better is possible? I suspect other animals spend little to no time dreaming about what could be. Is our ability to do this our greatest curse, or our greatest superpower?

Sur la lune

Focusing on an imagined better world tends to take us out of the actual one we’re living right now – if you’re dissatisfied with your present reality, that dissociation is the whole point. I understand some people in extreme poverty, war zones, abusive relationships, or debilitating illness are living truly horrible realities that they need to escape from – if not in physical reality then at least in their minds. But what if your reality is objectively not that bad? What if you have a roof over your head, enough food to eat, a safe society, your health, and some people you care about? Your basic needs met. Put a child in that situation, and chances are that they will be happy. Put an adult, especially a relatively well-off modern adult raised with high expectations for life, and they will more often than not invent a whole lot of things that are “lacking”, which, if they could only fulfill, then they would, at last, live happily ever after.

Every moment spent dreaming of a better world is a moment you’re not living in your actual, real, current world. And our current world is pretty amazing. Consider the uniqueness of this living rock we’re on, hurtling around our star. Its liquid sumptuousness, its caressing breezes, its silken clouds, doing the dance of the seven veils through an azure sky. Consider the billions of years of evolution that has produced the dazzling web of life all around us, and the new kind of animal that is humankind. Consider the thousands of years of slow technological development that has allowed those of us lucky enough to be born in a rich country to lead everyday lives filled with the kind of comfort, power, and interest previously only attained by royalty. We are truly blessed to be alive in this time and place – a reality often forgotten through habituation, and remembered by those who have suffered near-death experiences.

Building a bridge to “no where”

But how did we get here, you ask, to this amazing place, absent some amount of dreaming of a better world?

And how did the Earth move from an inhospitable rock to a breathing biosphere that produces a species that can look back to the Big Bang, smash subatomic particles, and build artificial intelligences that can decode the languages of other lifeforms? Did the Earth have an urge towards “self-improvement”? Is life “better” than no life? Are multi-cellular organisms “better” than single celled ones? Are lifeforms who are more capable of thoughts and feelings and self-consciousness “better”, or at least “more evolved” – like evolution is an arrow pointing in one direction: towards more refinement and complexity? (Maybe the Earth is akin to a single life, one that progresses through birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, elderhood, and, finally, death. At what stage are we? Are humans the new frontal cortex of the biosphere, just coming in to self-reflection? If so, then is the Earth about three or four in human years? Perhaps the Earth still has a lot of growing up to do. If so, it better get a move on; life has had 3.5 billion years to evolve, and is expected to only have another 1.5 billion or so, before a heating sun burns off the oceans and makes the planet uninhabitable. It might help if the Earth had a parent to help guide it, but as far as we can tell, it seems to be an orphan. The good news is that progress seems exponential; if humankind can manage to not wipe itself out, the next 1.5 billion years should get real interesting. Given that kind of runway, I’ll bet we could even figure out a way to save the Earth from that fiery star death.)

Ultimately, ideas of “better” and “worse” are just human constructs; we have a bad habit of seeing ourselves as the pinnacle of creation, and defining “better” as that which moves closer to ourselves.

At the least we can say that somehow life began on this once sterile planet, and that something compelled that life to move from lesser to greater complexity, for better or worse. Perhaps it is just a simple equation: (struggle to survive and reproduce) x (increasing interactions with other increasingly complex lifeforms) x (time) = greater complexity. Minus the setbacks of mass extinction events.

Then we can say that humans, feeling bored, created art. And feeling hungry, created agriculture. And wanting to better communicate across time and space, created written language. And wanting to do things our bodies couldn’t, created manufacturing. And feeling unsure of our place in the world, created religion and philosophy. And wanting to cure diseases, created medicine. And wanting to organize into larger groups, created government. And wanting a way to get what others have without simply taking it, created economies. And wanting to understand the world and gain power, created science and technology. And wanting to do things our minds couldn’t, created computers. And wanting justice, created social movements.

Not all of these developments were positive. Most are mixed, rife with unintended consequences. But they all began with a wanting, a lacking, that people set out to rectify. They believed a better world was possible, and sometimes sacrificed their present happiness to attain it. Often the fruit of their labours was not seen in their lifetimes. They believed they were making a better world. Like it or not, we stand on their shoulders.

No animal has changed as dramatically as humans have in our short 300,000 year history. And we did so largely because of our ability to imagine a better future – that, and our capacity to carry out those imaginings. If you believe humans are on the whole better off now than 300,000 years ago, then you have to be glad that at least some of us indulged in utopian thinking.

Balancing the sky and the earth

How do you allow your head to peak above the clouds while keeping your feet on the earth? How do you love the present while striving for an even better future? How do you accept yourself while clearly seeing your faults? How do you love others despite all their failings?

There are those who think the world is going to hell; there are those who think it has never been better. The truth is, I think, that the world is simultaneously better than ever, and still needs to be so much better. In other words, we should be grateful for what we have, but never give up improving.

This is a difficult line to walk. Many people fall into the pit of “never enough” – satisfaction is as elusive as finding the end of a rainbow. They are never good enough, or rich enough, and others always disappoint. Baselines shift – what was once considered the goal, once attained, now becomes insufficient, and a higher goal is set. Happiness is always just beyond the horizon. Real life is never as good as it was imagined it would be. The present is a constant disappointment to the past that imagined it, the future a hallowed land of glories.

Others fall the other way, into stagnation, complacency, and a sense that themselves and the world are irredeemable. Unlike the “never enoughers”, these people can at least be happy, if they just want to live a simple, enjoyable life. But if they have any desire to change the world, they are likely to become cynical and embittered in their perceived inability to change anything.

One group will never be happy, no matter how much changes, and the other group just doesn’t believe change is possible. The trick is to be happy with the present, while believing that change is both possible and worthwhile.

If your basic needs are met, chances are that the work you put into improving your lot still further will not be worth it. Studies show, for instance, that past a pretty basic level of income, happiness does not increase much, if at all. Your time would be better spent just enjoying what you have. If you enjoy getting better at something, then by all means do it. But do it because you enjoy it in the moment, not because you think that attaining some mastery will somehow make you happier. Happiness doesn’t need to be earned through pain; it is here, now, free for the taking. Everything is perfectly as it should be, right now.

If you do choose to sacrifice present happiness for some future betterment, for goodness sake do it for others! If you’re doing okay in your life, there are a lot of people who are doing worse than you and could use some help. This simple act will increase your happiness more than focusing on some personal goal (although don’t do it for that reason, do it out of genuine love and empathy). With a little bit of creativity, I’m sure you can find a way to help others that is also doing something you actually enjoy. Win-win!

If you’re imagining a better world, try to keep it grounded in this one. The best approach to spirituality I’ve heard is not the kind that holds up a beautiful metaphysical reality at the expense of our lived physical one, but the kind that uses a literacy in the intangible to further enhance the richness of our embodied selves. Or to give another example: revolutions are rarely anything but destructive, because they try to force too much change too quickly, unmoored from history. While some institutions probably are irreformable, it’s generally better to try to build on what’s already there, and be patient with the degree of change one generation can absorb.

Humans have the unique ability to ignore the beauty all around them, and it’s often failing to see that beauty that drives our “improvements”. But we also have the ability to genuinely make things better, not just for our species but for the flourishing of the Earth as a whole. That latter is in short supply lately, but the potential to return to it still lives within us. Let’s be a species that appreciates the wonderful world we’ve been gifted, and uses our unique powers to make it even better.

What do you do to enjoy the present?

What do you do to improve the future for all beings?

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But I’ve been a little busy trying to hold on to my farm. Here’s the backstory: I bought my farm back in 2012 with three other owners. Now all three feel it’s time to move on, and I, along with my partner, Abby, are trying to buy them all out. Of course, in the intervening 13 years, our farm has more than doubled in value, so it’s as if I need to buy the farm all over again, then some, only with half the people.

Suffice to say I’m learning a lot about mortgages, insurance, leases, and business plans. It’s a time of great churn, but I’m confident and excited that something new and better will emerge from the chaos.

So please hang in there; I’ll have lots of pent up writing energy to release soon.

Sean

PS: If you know of anyone who would like to rent a commercial kitchen, farmland, storage space, an office/studio, a room to live in, an event space, or a barn to keep their horses (or wildebeest or whatever) in, tell them to get in touch!

Note: You may notice a different format for this newsletter. I decided to migrate my seanbutler.ca site over to Substack. The main reason is that I’ve found that my other Substack, Farmer’s Table, where I write about food and farming (subscribe if you haven’t already!), is more discoverable by being a part of the Substack network. If you took out a paid subscription to the old site, first, thank you! And second, I’ve given you a comp to this new site for at least as long as your old subscription. If you like what you read in this newsletter and would like to support my work with a paid subscription (as well as gain access to subscriber only posts), it’s only $5 a month or $35 a year, and would be greatly appreciated. I lot of time and care go into these articles. Thank you!

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Canada has always been a country in search of a national identity. Living in the shadow of its much larger neighbour, and sharing with it a language and common cultural origins, it has struggled to discover what it is about itself that makes it unique and worthy of building a nation for. But it has been a mostly introspective struggle; we hand-wring internally about who we are, but rarely have outside forces tested us.

In 1812, before we were a country, the young American republic did test us, and we repelled their invasion – albeit with British troops and First Nations doing most of the heavy lifting. A half century later, with the US Civil War newly won by the north, Alaska just purchased, and talk among Union leaders of perhaps putting their large army to further use fulfilling Manifest Destiny, several British provinces decided they’d better join forces and form a country, resulting in the Canadian Confederation of 1867. Canada at its inception was born out of a rejection of being American.

Canada has enjoyed largely friendly relations with its cousin to the south since – that is until the newly reelected President Donald Trump started openly musing about making it the 51st state. His words – and the trade war he has initiated with the apparent intention of paving the way to annexation – have lit the fire of a long-dormant Canadian nationalism, bringing the self-indulgent navel-gazing of wondering who we are into the realm of existential imperative.

Mark Carney, who recently rapidly ascended to the prime minister’s office, largely because he’s widely seen as the person best qualified to oppose our newly belligerent former ally, addressed in his victory speech what he sees as the main differences between the US and Canada: “In America, health care is a big business. In Canada, it's a right. America is a melting pot. Canada is a mosaic. In the United States...they don't recognize First Nations. And there will never be the right to the French language.”

So there it is: free health care, multiculturalism, indigenous reconciliation, and bilingualism. These are the four pillars, according to our new leader, of Canadian identity – all in opposition to American identity. The last three all have to do with bringing disparate cultures together under one identity, while still respecting their differences – a tightrope walk that Canada has arguably walked better than any other contemporary nation state. (Although one could also argue that the “bringing together” part has atrophied while the “respecting the differences” part has grown stronger, to the detriment of our national self-identity.) Our identity is the self-referential act of trying to bring multiple identities together into a “mosaic” rather than a “melting pot”. The one thing that does unite us – universal free health care – is actually not that unique in the world; most developed nations have it. It is only the Americans, exceptional as they are, who don’t – thus providing us with a useful foil for our national identity.

The man Carney just replaced, Justin Trudeau, struggled to define the identity of the country he led for a decade, even going so far as to claim that Canada was without any “core identity”, and suggesting that we could be the “first postnational state”. (His father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, was much more ambitious in his nation building, consciously constructing a self-identity around two of those pillars – multi-culturalism and bilingualism – while repatriating the constitution.)

The Justin Trudeau decade was not a good one for Canadian identity, or Canada generally. Those who reported being “very proud” of their country dropped from 52 percent to 34. Our real GDP per capita is at the same level as ten years ago. And our happiness ranking compared to other countries slipped from 5^th (our best showing) to 18^th (our worst), making us one of the “largest losers”, according to the most recent World Happiness Report.

Perhaps sensing weakness, Trump decided to pounce. But in so doing, he has proven that Canadian nationalism, though weakened, still has life to it. If there’s one thing we are certain of, which has always been our strongest bond, is that we do not want to be American. From right-wing Pierre Poilievre to left-wing Elizabeth May, and from libertarian Alberta to socialist Quebec, opposites came together in a sound rejection of that idea. Since the Trump threats began, pride in Canada has rebounded by 10 percentage points, a grassroots buy-Canadian movement has swept the land, and polls show that 90 percent of Canadians don’t want to join the US.

Nationalist not all

But there is one group who entertain the idea more than most. In a January Ipsos poll, a whopping 43 percent of those aged 18 to 34 said they would vote in favour of joining the US, provided they were offered full citizenship and conversion of assets to US dollars. Only 17 percent of those 55 years and older said the same.

What’s driving this dissatisfaction among younger Canadians? Élie Cantin-Nantel, writing in The Hub, and a self-described member of Gen Z, spoke to other members of his generation, and basically chalks it up to three beliefs about life in the US: that incomes are higher, housing and other goods are cheaper, and taxes are lower.

It is true that, when measured in GDP per capita, Canada is far behind the US, and the gap is widening. In 2002, Canada’s GDP per capita was about 80 percent that of the US’s; 20 years later it had fallen to 72 percent. Canada is also falling behind other peer nations: Canada and Australia had equal GDP per capitas in 2002, but by 2022 Canada’s had fallen to 91% of Australia’s. Canada is still higher than New Zealand and the UK, but both those countries have been catching up.

The advantage continues for the US when it comes to the cost of buying a home. The average home in Canada costs $465,000 USD ($668,000 CAN), while the average sale price in the US is $357,000 USD. Visual Capitalist has a great graphic showing how much housing prices have increased in various OECD countries relative to income since 2015. Canada has had the second-highest increase, at 37%. (The US didn’t fare much better, though, coming in third at 30%.) Young Canadians are understandably furious about being essentially shut out of the housing market, and they see the US as a place where they stand a better chance of achieving the middle class dream of home ownership.

The picture is more complicated when one looks at the cost of other goods. It’s well known that staples like gas and groceries are cheaper in the US, but across the spectrum, goods in Canada actually cost about 10% less than in the US. However, when you look at purchasing power – which combines income with the cost of goods – the US is 6^th in the world, while Canada is 23^rd. So stuff is a bit cheaper in Canada, but we have a lot less money to buy it with.

The tax picture is even more complicated, with much depending on which state or province you live in and where you fall on the income scale. The US’s lowest federal income tax rate is 10%, compared to Canada’s 15%. But the US’s highest rate is 37%, compared to only 33% in Canada. However, the US has more deductions for high earners. Then there are state and provincial income tax rates, which range from 0% to 13.3% in the US, versus 4% for the lowest earners in Nunavut to 25.75% for the highest earners in Quebec. Finally, sales taxes run the gamut from 0% to 7.25%, depending on the state, compared to 5% to 15% combined provincial and GST taxes in Canada. Looking at these rates, it does appear that for most people, the tax burden is less in the US.

A common metric for how much countries tax their citizens is to look at the tax-to-GDP ratio. Canada collects 33% of its GDP in taxes, while the US collects only 28%, suggesting that in the aggregate the tax burden is indeed heavier in Canada.

Looking at all these numbers, it would seem that young Canadians have a point: life in the US, at least speaking from an economic point of view, does seem better. This could explain one reason why young Canadian’s happiness has slipped so much in recent years: in the World Happiness Report, older Canadians actually ranked 8^th in the world, while those under 30 were way down at 58^th. The only countries to report a worse decline in young people’s happiness were Jordan, Venezuela, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.

Clearly, something is rotten in the state of Canada for young people. The kids are not alright. Who can blame large numbers of them from showing little loyalty to the country they grew up in?

Is the grass really greener south of the border?

While I have no desire to diminish their very real concerns, especially when it comes to the out of control housing market, I still have a nagging doubt. Even through the narrow (but understandably important) lens of economic well-being, would most young Canadians actually be better off in America? Our taxes are higher, sure, but those taxes fund free health care and other benefits not available in the US – benefits that make life more affordable for Canadians. What would a more holistic view of affordability look like in a head-to-head comparison of the two countries?

When it comes to health care, the US spends double per person what Canada spends, and yet gets considerably worse results. In a comparison of 11 high-income countries, the US ranked dead last – by a wide margin. In fact, it ranked so far behind the other countries that it had to be excluded from the average so as to not skew the results.

However, Canadian’s pride over how much better our health care system is than the US’s hides a truth that, when you zoom out from our North American backyard, quickly becomes evident: the US’s system is the only one we’re better than. Canada ranks 10^th in this list. Hardly much to brag about.

Still, Americans without employment-based health insurance – which is about half of them – can expect to pay around $477 USD a month on average to give them some coverage in case of medical needs, while still facing the stress of possibly being denied coverage should they make a claim. 56 million Americans struggle with medical debt, and being unable to pay one’s medical bills is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US.

In addition to free health care, prescription drugs are nearly three times cheaper in Canada on average, thanks in large part to the Canadian government negotiating maximum drug price with pharmaceutical companies, and plans are in the works for a national pharmacare plan that will cover the cost of many drugs (Quebec has had a partial one for years). A national dental care plan is also currently being rolled out, meaning lower income Canadians will no longer have to pay to have basic procedures done to their teeth.

Perhaps the most telling statistic that sums up health is life expectancy; Canada is best in the Americas (and 19^th in the world), at 82.88 years, while the US sits at 48^th, at 79.61 years – worse than Albania.

What other major factors affect affordability? Well, think about the common phases of life: you get an education, you find a job, you have kids, you retire. Let’s look at each of these.

Education

Canadians can expect to pay about $30,000 CAN (around $21,000 USD) in tuition fees for a four-year university degree. Universities do not charge out-of-province students more (with the new exception of Quebec; in-province university students in Quebec pay the lowest tuition in the country: about $20,000 for four years.) The same degree costs on average more than double – $44,000 USD – at an in-state public college in the US, with that figure rising to around $100,000 if you wish to study out-of-state, or $175,000 if you go to a private college. A four year degree at Harvard, without grants or scholarships, will set you back $236,000.

Employment

The US often has a lower unemployment rate than Canada – it is currently at 4.1, versus Canada’s 6.6. However, those who have given up search for work are not counted in this statistic. A more accurate measure might be the labour force participation rate. In Canada, 70% of those aged 15 to 64 have a job; in the US, it’s 67%. This number would seem in indicate that unemployment is actually lower in Canada.

And in Canada, when you do find yourself without a job, there’s a better social safety net to catch you. (This could partly account for the lower unemployment rate in the US, as workers face greater pressure to accept any job they can find, at lower wages: the federal minimum wage in America is a measly $7.25 USD; it’s $17.30 CAN in Canada.) Employment Insurance in Canada typically lasts for 45 weeks, while in the US, benefits vary by state, but are generally to a maximum of 26 weeks. And unlike in Canada, there is no federal paid sick or parental leave program in the US. In fact, the US is in a select club of only seven countries in the world who offer no paid parental leave, rubbing shoulders with countries like Papa New Guinea, Micronesia, and Tonga.

The US continues its outlier status when it comes to federally mandated paid vacation time. It is one of four nations in the world (hello again Palau, Nauru, and Micronesia!) who don’t force employers to give their workers at least a few paid days off. Canadians get a minimum of two weeks, or vacation pay in lieu.

One final stat, from the OECD Better Life Index: 10% of Americans work “very long hours”, compared to only 3% of Canadians – probably reflecting a sizable underclass in the US forced to work long hours at miserable pay just to make ends meet.

Childcare

In addition to the parental leave Canadians are entitled to, the Canada Child Benefit, brought in in 2016, pays a maximum of between about $6,500 and $7,800 CAN per year per child ($4,600 to $5,500 USD), depending on the age of your child and your income. Having reduced child poverty by 40%, it is a significant positive legacy of the Justin Trudeau years.

In the US, the Child Tax Credit, which did pay a refundable amount up to $1,600 USD pre-Covid, was raised to a maximum of $3,600 during the pandemic, lifting millions of kids out of poverty. But it was not renewed, and is slated to decrease to $1,000 after this year.

Another positive legacy of Trudeau is his federal child care program, which aims to expand the standard set in Quebec of $10-a-day daycare across the country. Speaking as a Quebecker, who got to enjoy affordable daycare when my son was little, this was a hugely helpful benefit. We paid about $2,500 CAN ($1,700 USD) a year for our son to go to a delightful home daycare. I feel bad for Americans, who can pay up to ten times that amount: between about $5,300 to $17,000 USD a year per kid.

Retirement

When it comes to government pensions, both the US and Canada have similar systems: equal pay-cheque deductions are made from employees and employers and benefits are paid out at retirement according to how much was contributed over a person’s working life (known as Social Security in the US and the Canada Pension Plan north of the border). That said, without reform, the reserve that funds Social Security will be depleted by 2033, resulting in a reduction of payouts to retirees. The CPP (or QPP in Quebec) on the other hand, is projected to be sustainable for at least the next 75 years.

In addition to the CPP, Canada also overlays two other payments for seniors: Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement. OAS pays about $8,500 to $9,500 a year to every Canadian over 65 with an income of less than about $150,000 – a kind of guaranteed income for seniors. In addition to that, lower income seniors receive up to about $12,000 a year from the GIS. As a result, the poverty rate for seniors in Canada is only 4.7%; it is over 10% in the US.

OK, that was a lot of numbers. But who wins?

So when you factor in costs and benefits around health, tuition, employment, child care, and retirement, the lower income/higher taxes picture in Canada appears to be mitigated by a whole lot of government policy and benefits. But does it tip the balance in Canada’s favour? Is the economic reality for Canadians still worse, the same, or better than that for Americans?

To try to answer that over-arching question, I searched high and low for some indicator that takes into account all these factors: income, taxes, costs, and benefits. I couldn’t find a perfect answer, but household net adjusted disposable income gets close. It adds up all the after tax “income from economic activity (wages and salaries; profits of self-employed business owners), property income (dividends, interests and rents), social benefits in cash (retirement pensions, unemployment benefits, family allowances, basic income support, etc.), and social transfers in kind (goods and services such as health care, education and housing, received either free of charge or at reduced prices).” The US ranks first in this measure, at an average of $51,147 USD a year. Canada comes in 13^th, at $34,421 USD, meaning that the average American is, at the end of the day, $16,726 USD better off than the average Canadian.

Over $16,000 USD (nearly $24,000 CAN) is no small chunk of change, and this would seem like a slam dunk for the argument that life is better, economically speaking, in the United States. But note the word “average” in the paragraph above. Now cast your mind back to high school math class, and try to remember the difference between “average” and “median”. As I’m sure you remember, “median” refers to the midpoint in a distribution of numbers. So “median income” refers to the person who has exactly the same number of people making more and less money than them.

A look at median incomes produces a different picture. In a 2019 paper from the Centre for the Study of Living Standards, entitled, “Household Incomes in Canada and the United States: Who is Better Off?”, Simon Lapointe drew attention to this distinction. Adjusting for Purchasing Power Parity (a way to account for the variable costs of goods and services in different countries), the average household income in 2016 was almost $83,000 USD in the US and about $74,500 USD in Canada – in other words, about 10% lower in Canada. But in the same year, the median income in the US was almost $59,000 USD, while in Canada it was about $59,500 USD, or 1% more.

How is this possible? Basically, there’s more income at the upper end of the spectrum in the US, skewing the average higher. It’s well known that the US has more economic inequality than Canada – or anywhere in Europe, for that matter – with 47% of income going to the top 10 percent of the population (versus 36.5% in Canada). So all those stats showcasing higher average incomes in the US are in reality just showing higher incomes for top earners.

Another way to look at this is how income is distributed across the population. Lapointe sliced the population of each country into 100 equal parts, from the lowest income 1% to the highest income 1%, and averaged the income of each part. He found that “Canadian households in the bottom 56 per cent of the income distribution are in fact better off than American households at the same point of the income distribution”. And keep in mind that this analysis doesn’t take into account all the government services Canadians enjoy for less cost than Americans, likely making the financial situation for lower and middle-class Canadians even more favourable.

This gets to an essential truth about an important difference between Canada and the United States: Canada is a better place to be if you’re poor or middle-class, while the US is better if you’re rich. In the States, it’s easier for the rich to get richer, and their wealth can buy better health care and education than what is available in Canada; but if you’re poor or middle-class, life is more of a struggle. In Canada, it might be harder for the ambitious to get ahead, but for everyone else, life is easier.

The “American dream” has always dangled this tantalizing possibility of getting fabulously rich in front of its citizens: with healthy doses of hard work and talent, anyone can elevate themselves into the top 10%. The Canadian dream, less articulated but implied, is more about the idea that anyone with a decent work ethic can achieve middle-class comfort and security. Needless to say, the Canadian version, though less exciting, is much more attainable for the majority of people

This accounts for at least part of the well-documented “brain drain” from Canada to the US. The very talented in Canada often head south to achieve levels of fame and fortune unavailable to them in their homeland. This results in a certain degree of mediocrity to Canadian culture; the people who remain here are often not those most driven to high achievement (with many notable exceptions, of course). The departure of these high-ability workers also contributes to the gap in GDP per capita and productivity observed between the US and Canada.

However, the brain drain appears to have been slowing for the past couple of decades. In the first ten years of this century, Canada experienced a net loss of about 15,000 permanent residents on average each year to the United States. But by 2021, the net loss had hit a record low of 3,339, with 11,955 Americans emigrating to Canada and 15,294 leaving Canada for the US. While the net loss is less, it should be noted that it is significant that it exists at all, considering the much larger population in the US – all other things being equal, you would expect a net gain of immigrants to Canada.

But perhaps a net gain is on the horizon. Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, the Canadian media has been running stories about some of our most famous human exports moving home, from comedian Shaun Majumder, to Pink Floyd music producer Bob Ezrin.

Americans are also feeling the call to migrate north. In the first 24 hours after Trump’s election victory, Google searches for “move to Canada” jumped by more than 5,000%, as “Trumpugees” contemplated relocation. Three high-profile departees to date are all Yale Profs jumping ship to the University of Toronto: power couple Marci Shore and Timothy Snyder (author of “On Tyranny”), and Jason Stanley. Three big brains who may be the beginnings of a significant “brain gain” for Canada, as Trump attacks higher education in the US. American doctors are also looking northward, and Canadian medical superstars, like heart surgeon Marc Ruel, who had been offered a job in the States, have decided instead to stay put.

People voting with their feet is perhaps the best indication of preference for where to live, and the balance may be beginning to shift in Canada’s direction.

Growing up

The question of whether Canada or the US is a better place to live probably has a lot to do with stage of life. The near majority of 18 to 34 year old Canadians who said they would prefer to become US citizens are likely less persuaded by cheaper health and child care in Canada, and probably more focused on “making it” in their careers – and the US is a more enticing place for that priority. Also, attachment to place tends to grow over time. When I was young, I was quite willing to live anywhere other than Canada. Only after travelling to some other places did I gain a greater appreciation for where I am from. That’s why seniors tend to be the most patriotic.

Regardless of which is the better country to live in, the mere fact that a large number of young Canadians believe they would be better off in America shows if nothing else that significant differences do exist between the two countries.

One country, born in a revolution against its colonial parent, chose personal freedom as its defining feature. “Live free or die”, the New Hampshire motto, emblazoned on its licence plates, is its starkest expression. The other country chose to sacrifice some personal freedom for “peace, order, and good government” – the famous phrase from the Canadian constitution that seems to define our approach. Over time, “good government” has come to mean a government that looks out for everyone, with an array of support programs. Government is generally seen as a force for good in Canada. In the US, on the other hand, there has always been a strong element of mistrust in government. Libertarianism, Ayn Rand, and Friedrich Hayek all found fertile ground there, propagating the “Road to Serfdom” notion that government was, at best, a necessary evil, and should be minimized as much as possible – focused on protecting rights, especially property rights. Any government support, these people argued, would lead to an inevitable slide into totalitarianism. Government was seen as the antithesis to freedom.

I think we can all agree that individual freedom is desirable; no one likes to be told what to do. But can you have too much freedom? We can all think of instances where we’re overwhelmed by choice and wish there were at least some constraints on us. And what do we sacrifice when we put freedom above all else? Just look to the US for the results of that experiment: high poverty levels, unrestrained money in politics, and gun violence, to name a few outcomes. The homicide rate in the US is 6 per 100,000; in Canada, it’s just 1.2. Ironically, the home of the free also has one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet.

Europe, especially Scandinavia, has charted a very different course. Finland taxes its citizens heavily, but has topped the World Happiness Report for eight years running. People there have less freedom to spend their money how they wish, but feel more economically secure. If money can’t buy you happiness, perhaps security can. However, some Europeans seem to move to North America to escape thickets of legislation that can leave people feeling overly constrained.

Canada exists somewhere between Europe and America politically. Culturally, we lean more American, but politically, more European. We strike a different balance between freedom and security than that offered by either our southern or our transatlantic neighbours. Partly this has to do with prairie populism, which in 1930’s Alberta ignited a politic party that eventually evolved into the left-wing New Democratic Party. (Ironically, modern prairie populism now drives the right.) Canada is atypical for Westminster-derived first-past-the-post democracies in that it has more than two major political parties, and the NDP, while never forming government federally, has historically exerted a gravitational pull to the left on the centrist Liberal Party. (In the US, third parties have been actively discouraged by the two main political parties, neutering this possibility for more progressive politics from the get-go.)

Then there’s the French influence in Canada. Throughout this article, I’ve made a point of mentioning how Quebec has a more interventionist government than the rest of Canada. Without the influence of Quebec, I suspect Canada would be much more similar to the US. You can trace this influence back to France, and the different political culture that developed there compared to Britain. The British tradition placed greater emphasis on personal liberty, the French on more collectivism. Canada inherited both these traditions and created a new blend – a concoction always influenced, now increasingly, by its third founding nation: the First Nations. What other nation combines these three influences?

Is it a good mélange? I tend to think so – but I’ve never really lived anywhere else. I know I’m a product of the very system I’m trying to look critically at, but the balance between personal freedom and economic security seems pretty good to me here in Canada. This, as I see it, is our core identity: this particular balance we strike between freedom and security. That, and how we offer this balance to immigrants from around the world.

Canada has a chronic inferiority complex. I guess that’s not surprising, living next to the most powerful country in history. But on the world stage, Canada is no midget. We are the 9th largest economy in the world. At 40 million inhabitants, we’re not that far behind countries like France and the UK, both in the 60 millions. And we’re growing faster, likely to surpass our parents by the 2070’s.

Canada is the second largest country in the world by landmass, controlling vast amounts of natural resources. In a warming climate, our image as a frozen wasteland will transform as we become one of the most habitable places on Earth. No wonder the United States is once again greedily eyeing us up. We will have to start acting more like a country our size, and look for friends outside of our immediate neighbour, if we are to survive this new attention from an empire rapidly devouring its own liberal institutions in favour of a fascistic regime.

That begins with recognizing our distinctiveness, what ties us together, and owning it. We’re far from perfect, but we’ve got a pretty good thing going here – and looking better by the minute, as other democracies around the world slide into xenophobia and authoritarianism. Canada has the potential to become a bastion of liberal democratic resistance to this onslaught, taking in political refugees from the US (an intensified redo of the Vietnam War’s draft dodgers), and allying with like-minded nations. Taiwan, South Korea, Finland, and the Baltic states all provide examples of small countries who have survived and even thrived for decades living next to malevolent authoritarian regimes. We can too – but we will need to believe in ourselves, and inspire others to believe in us.

We also need to make life more affordable – especially for young people currently shut out of the housing market. And we need to do that not just through our reflexive turn towards redistributive government programs, but also by strengthening our economic performance. We’re blessed with a lot of land and natural resources, but we need to push further beyond our tradition investments in hewing wood and hauling water, and move up the value chain, to become a country that can truly look after its own. Build Canada has been putting out some good ideas around this lately.

Trump’s threats seem to have awoken this country from a long slumber. It was the cancellation of a free trade policy and threat of annexation at the end of the American Civil War that spurred Canadian Confederation nearly 160 years ago. Now history is repeating itself. I’m hoping this latest round of aggressive talk from our unstable neighbour will push us to double down on what we have so far created here – millions of people of different backgrounds coming together to protect freedom, but also to make sure that no one is left behind – and to take it to the next level, forming a stronger union.

A bracing wind in our sails, a warm jacket to protect us from the cold, and open arms to the world – with elbows up against anyone who tries to threaten what we are in the process of co-creating here. That’s an identity I can get behind.

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In April of 2001, I hopped on a chartered bus in Toronto and rode ten hours to Quebec City, where the walls of the old city had merged with a new, 6km long security perimeter. It was guarded by 6,000 police, and had been erected to ensure the unimpeded functioning of the third Summit of the Americas. Behind this three meter high fence, the 34 heads of state of every country in the Americas (except Cuba) had gathered to try to hammer out a hemisphere-wide free trade deal. We were there, in the tens of thousands, to protest it and, for some, to try to physically break in and stop it.

These heads of state certainly stood at the summit of power. And they were organizing the economy to benefit those at the summit of wealth. Fitting that they should gather at the summit of this hill town, and even name their gathering a “summit”.

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was to be the culmination of the 1988 Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement, and 1992’s NAFTA, which brought Mexico into the fold.

The protest was also a culmination of previous anti-globalization protests, which began in North America with the famous Battle of Seattle in 1999, where thousands of protesters succeeded in largely shutting down a meeting of the World Trade Organization, setting the template for future confrontations.

The FTAA would never come into existence, and the anti-globalization movement would quickly fade away just five months later, when terrorists flew planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, and the world reoriented itself towards the War on Terror.

The ambition of summits like the one in Quebec City, and the militancy of the protests that rose up against them, seem now like visions from another world. That large numbers of world leaders used to gather together, with hopes of crafting grand, unifying agreements; and that broad social movements could coalesce around arcane economic debates and inspire people to take to the streets – these things seem unimaginable now.

It was a post-Cold War world, when the G was briefly 8, and progress seemed inevitable. Globalization was, it was argued, the height of progress, and an unstoppable force.

It was also a world where the internet was still just a curious novelty; people still read books and met in person. It was Generation X’s – my generation’s – coming of age. We didn’t have a war (thankfully) to protest, like our parents in the 60’s, so we picked this as our fight. It wouldn’t turn out to be a long one. The War on Terror quickly brought a chilling effect on dissent. And we would soon have new wars to protest that seemed more urgent than trade agreements.

We lost that fight against globalization. By the time the anarchist Black Block even smashed their first window, it was already well underway. We can see now what thirty-plus years of it has wrought. A growing class of millions of left-behinds in the US who, in their justifiable anger, have cast their lot with the one leader who promised them relief: Donald J. Trump.

Bernie Sanders could have been their savour, offering them not a regression to the past, but a step forward into a new kind of country that cares for those in need. But the Democrats, beholden to wealthy donors, sabotaged him.

Instead Trump filled this void. He promised he’d bring their jobs back, but he also promised to score victories in a culture war that had long been used as a cudgel by the Democrats, and liberals generally, to shame these left-behinds.

So this is what globalization has given us: a large segment of Americans, whose good union jobs have been shipped overseas, pissed off and ready to vote for a man who promises to be their “retribution”. The fact that he is profoundly undemocratic, a criminal, immoral, a bully, a grifter, a con-man, a racist, a misogynist, and the oligarch-in-chief, is not enough to outweigh three decades of degradation under the machinations of globalization. They want their jobs back, they want their lives back, and tariffs are how they hope to get them.

Free trade with the United States is likely over. And as the world’s economic superpower, this could be a trend that will spread. The tide may start shifting globally over the globalization consensus.

The US has already been moving in that direction since Trump’s first undisciplined term. Even Biden didn’t undo Trump’s tariffs. Now Trump will ratchet them up even more in his second, more disciplined administration. They are simultaneously his tactic for bringing jobs back to the United States, and his main foreign policy weapon for bending recalcitrant nations to his will. That’s why he has repeated called “tariff” the “most beautiful word in the dictionary.”

The US has had over a generation now to experiment with free trade, and the reelection of Donald Trump signals that the nation has decided it was a failed experiment. While it created a lot of cheap goods for US consumers, as imports from China and other countries with much lower wages surged, it also hollowed out the economy of vast sections of the country, as manufacturing happily fled to those lower wage, lower regulation countries.

This is the trade-off of free trade. Its boosters in the 90’s claimed that the theory of “comparative advantage” proved its benefits would outweigh the costs. Gen Xers like me, and the trade unions, left-wing political parties, church groups, and many others said they wouldn’t. It’s looking like we were right – only in ways we didn’t predict.

We predicted the job losses – even globalization’s cheerleaders acknowledged there would be losers – but we didn’t foresee the rise of a totalitarian leader like Trump being the eventual result. Globalization exacerbated the division between winners and losers in the US and fed into the polarized nightmare we see today.

Going back to the beginning of the concept, free trade was a liberal cause, with conservatives opposing it. But by the time a Canadian federal election was fought over it, in 1988, the Conservative Party was in favour, with the Liberals and NDP against. After the “no” side lost, the Liberals got back on board with the free trade agenda, and a consensus. emerged worldwide across the political spectrum – at least for the ruling elites – that free trade would lift economies and promote peace. Free trade is a complex enough idea that it transcends left and right.

For those of us who still stood against it, it wasn’t so much free trade as a concept that we took issue with, as the devilish details of the agreements made under the “free” trade banner – details like the ability of corporations to sue democratically elected governments over decisions that could adversely impact their international investments. We feared a race to the bottom, as nations competed to lower employment and environmental standards in order to attract foreign investment. At its heart, we saw these international trade liberalization agreements as ultimately geared towards catering to the desires of transnational corporations at the expense of regular people. They greased the wheels of the freer movement of trade and capital, but left human beings largely trapped behind national boundaries, creating a two-tiered global order where money was free to move but people were not. “Free” trade was a freedom for only one class.

Globalization has benefited developing countries like China, whose economy has grown more than 30 times larger over the past three decades, so much so that the US now views them as a strategic rival. The West thought that economic integration with China would lead inevitably to liberal democracy in the Middle Kingdom, but the Chinese continued to chart their own course, increasing at odds with the West. So not only did globalization destroy much of the American middle class, but it also literally manufactured a replacement for Russia in an emergent new Cold War.

Canada should probably get used to a pre-1988 trade environment with the US. Protectionism is back. We’ve been given a one month reprieve on tariffs, but Trump probably is just seeing how much more he can extract from us with threats of a 25% tariff, before he imposes a smaller one – maybe 10%, like the one now on China. We should just accept that this is the world we now live in and get to work adapting. Free trade with the US, and falling for their line about a “rules based international order”, lulled us into an over-dependency on selling into the American market. Now we’ve got to rebuild our internal market, while also diversifying our portfolio of trade partners.

Who knows, this might end up being a good thing for Canada. We have not been feeling like much of a real country lately. Polls have suggested that our “deep emotional attachment” and “pride” in our country had dropped to 30 year lows by the end of 2024 (from 65% to 49%, and from 78% to 58% respectively). Trump perhaps sniffed out this weakness, saw a Prime minister on his last legs, and decided to attack, with an economic assault he hoped would topple us from independent nation to 51st state.

But it appears to have backfired. Both emotional attachment and national pride have rebounded in Canada by 9-10% in the space of a couple of months, with, surprisingly, Quebec leading the charge. In a stroke, Trump has dealt a blow to Quebec separatists, reinvigorated our national pride and unity, and seriously jeopardized the easy majority the Conservatives, under Pierre Poilievre, seemed destined for, with their 25 point lead now narrowed to seven against the Liberals. Presumably Trump would much prefer Poilievre, with whom he shares an anti-woke and small government worldview, than Trudeau, whom he once called a “far-left lunatic” and the illegitimate son of Fidel Castro. But his clumsy aggression has been a gift to his opponents.

Canadians had grown complacent, with our isolated geography and friendly relations with our only neighbour. This could be the thing that shocks us out of our complacency – that stops us feeling like, as the novelist Yann Martel once said, “the greatest hotel on Earth”, and more like a group of 40 million plus people rooted to this land and engaged in a common project of living well together.

So do I get to say, “I told you so” now? I guess so, although there’s no satisfaction in it. It’s a Pyrrhic victory. This new spate of protectionism will certainly bring some jobs home, while raising prices for some goods, but it’s still driven by the interests of the same 1% who drove the free trade train from the end of the last century into this one. We still face the same challenges we fought against in the streets of Quebec City 24 years ago: how to break the self-reinforcing upward spiral of great wealth and great power, and liberate the people from their depredations.

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The post A quarter century ago, I was tear-gassed protesting free trade first appeared on Sean Butler.

It was the first day of the year

when Israel targeted a neighbourhood in Jabalia camp.

A Hamas leader named Nizar Rayyan was killed.

He was buried under the rubble of his house

with fifteen of his family,

mostly his children, the youngest aged 2.

On TV, I watched when a man pulled out a headless child,

another with no arm or leg. So small

I couldn’t tell if boy or girl.

Hate ignores such details.

The houses were not Hamas.

The kids were not Hamas.

Their clothes and toys were not Hamas.

The neighbourhood was not Hamas.

The air was not Hamas.

Our ears were not Hamas.

Our eyes were not Hamas.

The one who ordered the killing,

the one who pressed the button thought

only of Hamas.

– from “The Wounds’”, by Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha, published in his 2022 collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, about the First Gaza War, in 2008-2009, also known as Operation Cast Lead, or the Gazan Massacre

The current genocidal bloodshed unleashed on millions of innocent civilians with the bad luck to live next to a place known as Israel can trace its history back to European antisemitism. It was the relentless discrimination and murder of Jews by other Europeans, culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust, that first convinced large numbers of Jews of their need for their own state, and then the victors of the Second World War, with guilty conscience, to grant it to them. Their guilt was mixed with relief over finding a place to offer to all their unwanted Jews, and a strategic hope that this new Jewish state would serve as an outpost of European culture – and military force – in the Middle East. The Jews got their state, the Europeans – and later, the Americans – got their toehold in the Middle East, and the Palestinians, who already lived there, got killed, displaced, and corralled into an oppressive occupation over which they had no agency.

The Arabs tried to resist of course. Who wouldn’t? But I think it’s fair to say that their efforts have resulted in a long trail of defeats. The Palestinian Arabs have been squeezed into tinier and tinier pieces of land, while enduring recurring wars and apartheid conditions. Each act of resistance has only served to provide greater justification for the militarization of Israel and their own ethnic cleansing.

After the provocation of October 7, it looks like they might be entering the final act of their annihilation. Gazans, living in what is already one of the most populated places on Earth – with the descendants of refugees from the previous ethnic cleansing known as the Nakba having fled there during a time when 60% of Palestinians became refugees – are now being bombed, shot, starved, deprived of sanitation and health care, and forced into even smaller areas. The official death count is over 42,000, the majority women and children, but nearly everyone thinks that, when all the deaths from disease and starvation are taken into account, as are those of people lost under the rubble, the true number is in the hundreds of thousands – perhaps 10% or more of the population dead in one year. Killings and land seizures in the West Bank have also stepped up, and one of the Palestinians’ few allies, Hezbollah, has been invaded to the north of Israel in Lebanon, with the usual disregard for civilian casualties (about 100 killed a day since the invasion began). And now the ethno-nationalist government that currently runs Israel is gunning for a fight with Iran.

How has Israel been so successful against its enemies since its inception in 1948? Basically, it has received a lot of support from outside the region, especially from Europe and the United States. During the civil war in what was then mandate Palestine, and later the first Arab-Israeli war that immediately followed, which Israelis call the War of Independence, millions of dollars were raised in the US from supporters of Zionism to buy arms. Although support also came from Stalin, who was perhaps happy to have somewhere to send his unwanted Jews.

As time has gone on, support from the US in particular has become “unshakable”, in President Biden’s words, or “ironclad”, in Vice President Harris’s. She appears to be even willing to risk losing the election rather than change course from her boss’s policy, as Michigan, a battleground state, has the second largest Muslim population outside of the Middle East (after Paris), and they are understandably not happy with her. Her opponent, Donald Trump, promises to be even more supportive, if that is possible. The two political parties, who disagree on almost everything, are united in their doting adoration of the state of Israel. Why is the US so steadfast in its support?

There are two theories. One is that most US politicians, who, with their country’s lack of campaign finance limits are open to legal bribery, are essentially bought by AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobby that is spending $100 million in this election alone to defeat candidates critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. There’s an eye opening interview between Tucker Carlson (of all people) and Republican (and libertarian) Congressman Thomas Massie in which Massie reveals the extent of AIPAC influence on American elected representatives. And that’s just the political realm; groups backed by Israel and its supporters also put huge amounts of pressure on the media to tone down any criticism of Israel and silence Palestinian voices, lest they get slapped with the poison pill of antisemitism. 

The other theory is that the US, and to some extent western Europe, rely on Israel as a geostrategic asset against often hostile Arab states, many of whom sit on large reserves of oil. Britain originally invaded Palestine – then part of the Ottoman Empire – to secure Mideast oil fields and the Suez Canal during the First World War. President Biden famously said that “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.” If you’re up for a long read, Andreas Malm, a Swedish author and associate professor, has a piece entitled The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth, in which he argues this case.

Add to these two influences Christian Zionism and the military industrial complex (Israel has been a lucrative client) and you can discern many reasons for the blank cheque that the US government continues to write for its Israeli ally. This despite the fact that, in poll after poll, the majority of American citizens support an arms embargo to Israel and ceasefire in the current conflict, as well as an independent Palestinian state – although it’s important to note that Americans have always viewed Israel more favourably than the Palestinian Authority.

And yet the arms continue to flow, even after Israel has crossed every red line you’d think a civilized country would hold, breaking the US’s own laws around supplying weapons to a country engaged in human rights violations, as well as international law. The Biden administration meekly expresses “concern” when aid convoys are attacked, when UN workers are killed, when journalists are intentionally targeted and die in record numbers, when 2,000 pound bombs are dropped on hospitals and schools and refugee camps, when Palestinians are used as human shields for Israeli soldiers, when starvation is used as a weapon of war – but the shipments of bombs never stop. “No one in the world would let us starve and thirst two million citizens, even though it may be just and moral until they return our hostages,” said Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich in August; I guess there are still some lines they feel they can’t yet cross, at least not openly. American allies, including Canada, have largely stopped supplying arms, but few have made any forceful statements against Israel. The only country to show any true backbone has been South Africa – a country that, back when it was an apartheid state, Israel was closely allied with. Now that it has thrown off those shackles, it leads the charge against the atrocities being committed by Israel, with its accusation of genocide at the International Court of Justice – this, against the victims of the worst genocide of the 20th century, for whom the Genocide Convention was largely enacted. The abused has become the abuser, as often happens with trauma, and the truth of this is being called out by a country that has stood on both sides of that abused/abuser divide and managed to take great strides in healing its wounds. South Africa has now been joined by 12 other states in its court case, and many scholars now believe the threshold for this crime of crimes has been met. Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, has also issued a report in which she says that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Another act of bravery is the request filed by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court seeking arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders on allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan and the world have been waiting for over five months for the judges of the court to issue their ruling, while the death toll mounts.

ICC Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan

Beyond the incomprehensible tragedy of the hundreds of thousands of innocent lives cut short in this needless conflict; the many thousands more wounded and traumatized for life; the millions displaced; the states forced into failure, with unknown future ramifications; the destroyed infrastructure that will take decades to clean up and repair; the despoiling of the environment; the waste of tens of billions of dollars that could have been spent saving lives instead of ending them; the rise in hatred towards both Jews and Muslims around the world; the seeding of a generation who will surely seek revenge against Israel and the West; and the ruination of the reputation of Israel amongst anyone not deluded by their propaganda, with the all-too-easy to imagine future real antisemitism (instead of the chimeras the Israel lobby chases everywhere) this war may engender; is the obliteration of whatever tattered remains there still were of the West’s vaunted principles, proclaimed since the Enlightenment, of human rights. The only right that remains is the phrase, repeated like zombies by politicians across the Western world, of “Israel’s right to defend itself.” Which is code for “Israel’s right to destroy those who would seek to avoid having their land stolen.” Which is itself a naked declaration that the “rules based order” is nothing but a facade; raw power – money and guns – is still the only true law of the land.

Where does this leave us? Israel will win this war, and every war after it – the UN, the ICC, the ICJ be damned. Throw as many acronyms as you want against them – the United States and Israel, along with fellow rogue states China, Iraq, Libya, Qatar and Yemen, have signed on to neither the International Court of Justice nor the International Criminal Court, and Israel and the US are two of only four countries (along with Russia and Sudan) who have indicated they never intend to ratify the treaty establishing the ICC. Israel and its best buddy America still have way more guns and money than anyone else, accounting for 40% of total global military spending – three times as much as its closest rival, China, and nine times as much as Russia. As a percentage of GDP, Israel ranks sixth in the world in military spending and the US ninth. It was guns and money that created Israel, like all countries, and it has been guns and money that have kept it alive. 

It seems extremely unlikely that change will come from within Israel. Conservative, religious forces have been gaining ground there for some time, intent on claiming all of the occupied territories as their own.

Change will have to come from the US, with its ability to turn off the taps of aid. And opinion is changing there, including from Jews. Perhaps as the current younger generation – the ones in the campus protests – take the reigns of power, the US will start enforcing some red lines for its Middle Eastern proxy. Or maybe the US will go the way of the USSR eventually and lose much of its ability to send aid to its far flung military interests. But both of these eventualities will take time. The reality we are living with now is blatant injustice, genocidal hatred, and cold, calculated murder playing out on our screens on a daily basis for over a year now, for anyone who cares to notice, with no end in sight. It has profoundly shaken my belief that our civilization has progressed much beyond the Bronze Age when it comes to war. It is the worst thing I have witnessed in my 50 years of life.

Palestine is a land where nationalism, colonization, religion, and collective trauma have all come together into a diabolical brew of never-ending war, which threatens to pull all of us into its vortex. If we are ever to end the scourge of war, in Palestine as in the world, we’re going to have to empower international law, and stop allowing ourselves to be manipulated by leaders who seek to whip up our latent hatreds to serve their own power-hungry goals.

For those who are standing on the other side

shooting at us, spitting on us

how long can you stand there, fenced by hate?

– from “A Litany for ‘One Land’”, by Mosab Abu Toha, published in his 2022 collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

The post The Annihilation of Gaza is the Final Nail in the Coffin of “Western” Values first appeared on Sean Butler.

To the Wakefield News:

The Wakefield News has seemed like a peaceful place for the past little while, after the flurry of posts discussing what should be allowed on this list. But I have recently learned that this is a manufactured peace, imposed on us by the list’s admins.

I know of two list members whose posts have been flagged for moderation, meaning that all their posts must first be approved by the admins before being disseminated, and that some of their posts have been deemed inappropriate, and censored. There may very well be more that I am not aware of. (If you don’t hear from me again after this post, you’ll know what happened.)

When these two members have asked the admins why their posts have been censored, they usually receive no answer. Once, one received the answer: because “you disrespected us.” You can read more about this member’s interaction with the admins, in his own words, here.

I reached out to the admins privately, hoping to persuade them that they owe it to our community to be transparent about how they are administrating this list. I was not aware that moderation was an option, as I suspect many of you are not either. They did answer me once, saying that, “The majority of members want local content,” and that they intend to use post moderation and, if necessary, banning members to keep it that way. When I followed up that email with another in which I asked them if they intended to inform our community of their actions, I received no reply.

So I am writing the list today to inform everyone that this is how our list is being managed.

I want to say here that I do not think our admins are bad people. They are community members who are volunteering and doing what they see as best for our community. I’m sure their actions make perfect sense to them.

But the people they are censoring are also not bad people, and yet their voices are being excluded from our community. The admins claim that “the majority” want only local content on this list, and they base this on the “many emails” they have received privately saying so. But we were all witness to the many people who wrote publicly on this list that they would like to be exposed to content that goes beyond the local. I don’t think that any empirical claim can be made by anyone as to what “the majority” wants this list to be.

It seems to me that an opportunity was lost by the admins to take all the feedback received about this list and do something with it. Convene a committee of volunteers to suggest a compromise; rewrite the rules to make them clearer; create a poll. But instead, the admins simply ignored it all, and imposed a “local only” interpretation of the rules.

In one of only two posts the admins made to this group during this controversy, on Feb. 2, titled “Reminder of the purpose, rules and how to get banned from this group”, they quoted the “editorial statement” of the News as:

“The Wakefield and Outaouais News is a community bulletin board for information about the Outaouais.” (their red added)

However, the actual statement on the website reads that the Wakefield News is, “An uncensored, bilingual, community bulletin board for information about the Outaouais.” (my red added)

The admins chose to highlight the “information about the Outaouais” part, but literally censored the part about it being uncensored. Oh, the irony!

Now, some of you are probably asking yourselves, “How can you have a list that is supposed to be about only one thing that is also uncensored?” And you’re absolutely right. This editorial statement is internally inconsistent. But my point is that the admins could have interpreted it either way, and they chose the “local only” way.

Even if your interpretation favours the local, there’s no reason why the mission of this list can’t evolve with the times. We’re living in an increasingly dangerous world, and hiding our heads in the sand will only make us less prepared as a community to deal with it. The global, sooner or later, becomes the local.

This list doesn’t belong to the admins. This list is a commons, a community resource, of which they are just the current, temporary, caretakers. I do not recognize their authority over it. They are not even following their own rules. They:

– ignore the “editorial statement” about the list being “uncensored”

– censor people who have not broken the only two stated rules: “Be nice”, and “Do not post the same message more than once per 24 hours”

– refuse to tell the list that they are moderating some members

– moderate members on the basis of them “disrespecting the admins” without making a request to that member (as the “How to get permanently banned” section states) or even informing them that they are being moderated

– refuse to clarify what are confusing and contradictory rules

– continue to allow some non-local content that they deem inoffensive (or meet some other criteria – we don’t really know because they don’t tell us)

You can read the rules here: https://groups.io/g/wakefieldnews/wiki/13982

Those who wish to keep this list focused on the local have stated repeatedly, “Why don’t those who want a more broadly focused list just create their own?”

To this I answer: “Why don’t those who want a solely local list create their own?”

Or, even better: “Why can’t we all coexist on the same list?” Is it really so hard to skip – or mute – topics not of interest to you? Why does the need for some people to be totally unexposed to anything beyond the local trump the need for others to freely exchange ideas and information in the same forum?

Wakefield is a very outward looking community. While we work hard making a better world close to home, we also don’t turn our backs on the wider world. We are lucky to live where we do, and we feel an obligation to share our privilege with those less fortunate. It seems so anomalous to have a flagship local community space, such as the Wakefield News, voluntarily emasculate itself.

True community is a messy thing, but a beautifully messy thing. It’s a place where radically different people learn to live together, maybe even learn to see things a different way. If the Wakefield News split into two groups, it would be a failure of community. The more we talk only to people with whom we agree, the less community flourishes.

And this is a community that knows how to talk to itself. Without exception, all the comments posted on the Wakefield News during the recent controversy were respectful. The admins have it wrong: it’s not respect towards themselves that should get people censored, it’s respect between members of this community that should matter, and we’ve proven ourselves more than capable of having grown-up conversions in a constructive manner. We don’t need to be treated like children.

Phil Cohen said that he created the Wakefield News to make a “stronger community based on love.” You don’t learn to love your neighbours by avoiding difficult conversations with them. You learn to love them by having those conversations, in a respectful way, thus gaining a better understanding of their point of view. I share Phil’s desire to strengthen our community, and I strongly believe that strength is in our diversity.

The opportunity to listen to the community and respond is not gone. I believe our admins are willing to listen, as caring members of our community, if they believe there is a strong desire to expand the mandate of the Wakefield News beyond just the local. If you’d like to write them, you can reach them at wakefieldnews+owner@groups.io.

May a different sort of peace come to the Wakefield News – not one based on the suppression of voices raising uncomfortable subjects, but by the collective action of a community showing strength and love in its diversity.

The post When the Global Hits the Local – Part 2 first appeared on Sean Butler.

But I’m a bit of a policy wonk, and this is pure, unadulterated policy, in all it’s local, rubber-hits-the-road glory. I can’t look away.

For those of you who are subscribed to this compendium of all things Wakefield and environs, and are perhaps all too familiar with the debate that has been simmering away there lately, you can scroll down to the heading for my conclusion. For those not in the know, here’s a brief backgrounder:

The Wakefield and Outaouais News, as it is officially called, is a Groups.io email list that goes out to about 950 locals every day. It is usually made up of posts about lost dogs, requests for advice, yoga classes, and stuff for sale. I lean on it to get the word out about our farm or the Wakefield Market.

But, this being Wakefield, it frequently moves beyond such prosaic matters, with local authors posting their work, or, literally, poetry. I fall into this category, too, with links to stuff I post on this website, or my new project, Farmer’s Table.

People have also always posted the odd link to a petition or protest or news article that didn’t pertain strictly to the definition of this list as a “community bulletin board for information about the Outaouais” (my italics added). This was tolerated because it was of limited volume and not too controversial given the politics of most people on the list.

But with the violence in Israel and Gaza dominating the news since October 7, both the volume and the controversy of these sorts of postings increased.

The fuel was laid, and, when someone questioned the one-sidedness of these posts, the match was lit.

In most communities, I’d venture, this would have quickly devolved into the sort of online shouting match we have grown all too accustomed to. But a few respectful comments were posted in reply, and the original poster thanked the respondents. That could have been the end of it.

But then Phil Cohen, beloved “village poet (now emeritus)” and creator of this list some 20 (?) years ago, in a post entitled “Misuse of the Wakefield News”, offered his judgement in two cutting sentences, which I’ll quote in full here:

“When I invented the Wakefield News I intended that it be a vehicle for making Wakefield a stronger community based on love. I did not intend that it become a vehicle for stoking the flames of anti-Semitic hatred.”

Mic drop.

A gallon of gasoline had now been dumped on this nascent fire, and we were off.

Dozens of posts followed, examining from every angle the righteousness of free speech versus the desire to not sow division on a list that was supposed to bring people together. Many people offered potential compromises, such as creating a new list just for political discussion, but no one seemed willing to actually implement any of these suggestions. John Kingsley posted in methodically laid out arguments why this list should only be used for its intended purpose, while Kimberley Mansfield summed up the other end of the spectrum with these words: “I categorically refuse to be told what I can and cannot talk about, say, or discuss!”

I enjoyed and appreciated both sides of this irrepressible Wakefield spirit. One poster said he was “heartbroken” over what Wakefield has become, and that he wanted to sell his house and get the heck out of town. To him I say, “I’m sorry you feel that way, but I love it!”

The admins, who were often thanked for their volunteer work, stayed mostly silent and, as far as I know, didn’t exercise their power to kick anyone off the list (although at least one person did unsubscribe in protest). The discussion about the rules for this list was quintessentially local, after all – although they never gave any indication that the rules actually were up for discussion. They neither enforced nor altered the rules, and us policy wonks yammered on for days, much to the annoyance of those who just wanted to find out what was happening in their community.

I found myself being swayed back and forth by the good arguments being put forward by both sides. I also sympathized with those who simply wanted us all to just shut up already.

Alright, background done. Here’s the conclusion I’ve come to.

And then yesterday, right about the time this discussion seemed to have finally run its course, some clarity descended from on high (or somewhere) and settled the two warring factions inside my soul. Here’s how I hold two things to be true at the same time:

1) The Wakefield and Outaouais News was created as a community bulletin board by and for local people to spread the word about local goings-on. Any mission creep into non-local topics, particularly controversial ones, waters down this original mission and ultimately takes away from its intended purpose. I assume that most people have subscribed to this list to be served by this purpose. It’s for this reason that I think I have always tried to stick to this purpose in my postings. Even when I post something about a non-local topic, as I do often on this seanbutler.ca site, my rationale is that I am a local writer – so posting on a email list for local stuff might stretch the rules somewhat, but not break them. I hope I haven’t annoyed anyone by doing so; I’ve never had any complaints.

2) I don’t actually care what people post on the Wakefield News. Post about your strongly held belief that Elvis is alive and living in a cabin in Ladysmith for all I care! The reason for this is simple: it’s ridiculously easy, given the table of contents at the beginning of each digest email, to skim through the topics and just pick the ones I’m interested in. I’m never interested in all of them. In fact, I’m rarely interested in more than one or two of them. Not in the market for a used car? Skip! Not interested in square dancing? Pass! Don’t care to read about world politics on this list? Swipe left!

As I’ve said, I’m actually way more interested in the global politics type posts, but I totally respect people not being into that. We all skip stuff we’re not interested in in the Wakefield News – is it any harder to skip the political stuff, if that’s not your jam, than to skip an ad for a puppy, if you’re not looking for a puppy?

Could it be that simple? Am I missing something? It seems to me that being unwilling to skip stuff you’re not interested in and demanding that it never be posted in the first place is unreasonably censorious, no?

The one bit of housekeeping I would suggest, to make this whole approach smoother, is to clearly state what your post is about in the subject line of your email. Sometimes people just put “post” as their subject, perhaps not realizing that this is what will show up in that handy table of contents in the daily digest email. When the subject is unclear, it necessitates me having to waste precious seconds actually reading the first few words of the post to ascertain if it is of any relevance to me.

Does any of this solution-ing matter? Probably not, given that the admins have seemingly already hit upon their solution: do nothing. Moral suasion will probably restrain most people most of the time from straying too far from the intended purpose of this list, but for those whose speech will not be restrained, they will probably be tolerated if they don’t abuse it too much.

That’s it. Viva respecting the rules! Viva saying whatever the heck you want! You’re free, I’m free, we’re all free to follow the rules or not! (Just try to be nice.)

The post When the Global Hits the Local first appeared on Sean Butler.

But it’s been obvious to me for awhile that my approach to food is different from most people’s in the culture I’m embedded in. Usually, this reality recedes into the background, as my own habits don’t seem unusual to me. But when I stay with other people, as I did this past summer, I get a front row glimpse into a food reality that, while foreign to me, seems to be the norm for the vast majority.

My food universe is a reflection of my livelihood as a farmer. If I were to put a chronology to my food philosophy evolution, it would be this:

• having a father who enjoyed culinary adventurism (in the 80’s when I grew up, going to a Greek restaurant was exotic) and home cooking, fostering taste buds appreciative of diverse flavours;

• in high school, reading about the evils of the industrial meat system, and becoming a vegetarian;

• while in university in Vancouver, sharing a backyard with free school radical and author Matt Hern, who introduced me to the world of vegetable gardening;

• deciding that one of the main problems with our society was the twin sides of the coin overwork/overconsumption, and committing to spending as little time as possible earning money, which left me plenty of time to grow and cook food, and needing to save money by doing things myself, like homebrewing or baking;

• coming across the concept of permaculture, and taking a two week design course, which blew the seemingly simple practice of growing your own food into a whole systems multiverse of revolutionary cultural transformation;

• working on several farms, usually as a volunteer, from British Columbia to Newfoundland;

• working in the kitchen of the old Chez Eric’s in Wakefield, under the chef’s reign of the great Susan Jessup, who introduced to me the novel idea that meat, when well-sourced, could be ethical, and when well-prepared, could quite possibly be the most divinely delectable thing on the planet, and ditching my previous vegetarianism in favour of an ethical omnivorism.

By the time I was in my early 30’s, my food philosophy was more or less fully formed. It consisted of, as much as possible, growing my own fruits and vegetables, and when not possible, buying local; choosing organic when available; often cooking from scratch; and buying meat and eggs from humane farms. When, in my late 30’s, I got the chance to buy a farm and begin my career as a farmer, it was just the culmination of these evolutionary steps.

I’ve called this piece “How to Eat Like a Farmer” because it has a nice ring to it, but the truth is, I only eat like other small-scale organic farmers I know. I don’t think most farmers actually eat like we do. The sad reality is that a lot of farmers don’t even eat what they grow themselves; they’re producing “commodities” for the world market, and often those commodities need to go through some pretty intense processing before they even become somewhat edible (like high-fructose corn syrup), or completely inedible (like ethanol). I might more accurately have called this “How to Eat Like a Farmer (Like Me)” or “How to Eat Like Someone Who Cares About Food”, but they lack the same punch.

Another problem with this piece is how to write it without coming off as a pretentious food snob, judging the poor gastronomic choices of my fellow women and men. I’ll try to diffuse at least some of this critique with the following caveat: I understand and sympathize with the pressures people in our culture are under to make different choices than the ones I’ve made. The convenience, abundance, and cheapness offered by our modern food system is a temptation few can resist in a culture strapped to the wheel of consumerism and overwork. We in North America also don’t have a deep food culture, with culinary traditions stretching back for countless generations, like people do in other parts of the planet not dominated by relatively recent settlers. We are adrift in a world saturated with the latest gadgets, but bereft of connections to a tradition around eating. We are food orphans.

I also realize that not everyone needs to be as obsessed with food as I am. I love everything to do with it, but there are other things worth being obsessed about too (I am told). But we all need to eat every day, and I believe that our culture has a pretty unhealthy relationship with food; it’s improved a lot from the days when Cheez Whiz reigned supreme, but we still have a way to go. I think that if people placed at least a bit higher priority on making time for the procuring, preparing, and consuming of food, it would be healthier for them and the planet.

Despite the above disclaimer, I’ll probably still come off as too precious about my food. Guilty as charged. My apologies if this rubs you the wrong way. I can’t help it.

One final caveat: I’m not a food nutritionist (as you’ll see, I don’t place much stock in their advice), and I’m certainly not a doctor. What follows is simply my approach to food. It’s up to you to determine your own approach, and to what degree it follows expert advice. I certainly believe there is an important role for expert opinion.

Because I tend to write essays whose length tests the patience of most online readers (another failing of mine), and this piece is no exception, I’ve broken this up into four parts, which I will release gradually in the coming days. To read parts 2-4, where I will finally delve into the meat and bones of my food philosophy, go to my new newsletter, Farmer’s Table, at https://farmerstable.substack.com/. Subscribe to get it delivered right to your inbox, and never miss an installment! There are both free and paid subscription options.

A SPECIAL NOTE TO MY SEANBUTLER.CA PAID SUBSCRIBERS: As a thanks for your support early on in my new writing endeavour, I have gifted you a one-year paid subscription to Farmer’s Table, which, unlike seanbutler.ca, will focus exclusively on food and farming. Expect shorter and more frequent postings, drawn largely from my personal experience growing and preparing food, but still drawing connections to the larger issues around food politics. I will continue posting about other subjects that interest me on seanbutler.ca, but, out of necessity, less frequently. Expect to receive Part 1 of How to Eat Like a Farmer from Farmer’s Table shortly, and then the other installments in the days to come.

The post How to Eat Like a Farmer first appeared on Sean Butler.

One is that I live on stolen land, despite my knowledge of the injustice of how the First Peoples were forcibly removed from where I now live, from the land I now “own” and make my living from farming.

The second is that I continue to burn fossil fuels in the engines of my vehicles, despite the fact that I know full well that this activity is contributing to the opening act of climate catastrophe, on full display this summer as forests across Canada burn, sending clouds of smoke as far south as New York City.

I’m sure that in the days of slavery, many a conscience was troubled by the institution, and yet no one spoke up because it seemed too entrenched, and the oppression brought tangible benefits to the oppressors, even if they felt guilty at night about it.

Almost everyone I know around me are hypocrites similar to me, mouthing our concerns over climate change and reciting our land acknowledgements, but continuing to drive our gas-powered vehicles to our stolen homes. It is so much easier to commit a crime when you are part of a mob all doing the same. Still, I know others feel guilty like me.

Guilt not acted on just festers and eventually metastasizes into toxic defensiveness. But guilt, like anger, can be channeled into positive action. Guilt can be like a hunger pang for the nourishment of a more whole world, where the needs of everything alive are provided for.

Our colonial legacy and climate change – both products of a Western worldview of social superiority and ecological exceptionalism – are problems too large for the individual to fix alone; they can only be solved on the political level. In other words, people working together.

But as we’ve seen in the past, sometimes a political movement can be sparked by an act of resistance from one individual. From Rosa Parks to Mohamed Bouazizi to Viola Desmond to Greta Thunberg, individuals with the courage to resist the overwhelming pressure of mob injustice can inspire millions more to follow their lead.

While less courageous perhaps, writers, like Tomson Highway (or me), try to inspire change through their words. At the recent Writers’ Festival in Wakefield, speaking before the wildfires broke out, the Cree writer wondered aloud if it would take fires coming down from the north and burning Ottawa to the ground for the Canadian government to take the climate crisis seriously. During the subsequent fires, thick smoke did blanket the capital, but no fire. Yet.

The Western worldview is playing out to its logical conclusion. Its timber is old and dry. It might only take one spark to set it all ablaze. Got a light?

If you like what you’ve read here and wish to subscribe to receive an email whenever I post something new, then go to the subscribe page and click on the blue subscribe button – it’s free!

If you’d like to go a step further and support me with a paid subsciption of $30 a year, then click on the yellow “Subscribe” button. Don’t worry, this is not like choosing which coloured pill to take in The Matrix. Neither will you receive any special access, merch, or your name somehow magically inscribed by the northern lights across the sky. But you will receive the warm, fuzzy feeling of supporting my work. Thank you!

The post Who’s Got a Light? first appeared on Sean Butler.

Seeing this form of media self-censorship and bias play out before my eyes, I began to take everything the legacy media said with a grain of salt. Don’t get me wrong, my father and step-mom are both life-long journalists, and I truly believe the vast majority in their profession seek the truth as best they can. But the pressures to conform to a socially acceptable range of opinions can be both intense and unconscious, especially in a highly politically polarized environment. If the mainstream media had gotten so many things about covid wrong, what else could they not be trusted about?

After taking a media sabbatical, I began tuning in to more alternative media. Podcasts like Lean Out (hosted by Tara Henley, who quit the CBC and penned a much-read essay explaining why) and The Unspeakable (hosted by another mainstream media dropout: former LA Times opinion writer Meagan Daum) became my staple. I found a community of people who were thinking like me – Daum called them “heterodox” thinkers. People willing to colour outside the lines, and talk about a growing list of things that the mainstream media considered out of bounds. I turned to Substack – a new platform for writers and podcasters that subsisted on a paid subscription model instead of advertising and, critically, did nothing to interfere in the content of the creators on its site – more often than mainstream outlets. Whereas once I had described myself as a CBC junkie, now I could barely stomach listening to more than a few seconds of its radio broadcasts. The narrow range of topics it covered and the total predictability of the angle it would take on any given story offended my sense of intelligence.

And I found an alternative media that was questioning more than just covid issues. While both Henley and Daum described themselves as “coming from the left”, they often interviewed guests who raised doubts about leftist dogma around culture war issues. Sometimes these guests were openly conservative, other times they were progressive but dissenting on certain issues. They were spinning new ideological configurations, drawing from both sides of polarized debates in ways that accorded with their own sense of logic rather than the received wisdom of one tribe or the other. I found it intellectually invigorating – a huge breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale and oppressive media landscape.

Then, in the late winter of 2022, the trucker protest descended on my hometown of Ottawa, and everything I had been following and thinking about just got ratcheted up another level. Here was a group of people brought together by their frustration over the collection of covid policies that had been shoved down their throats for the past two years. Many of them were right-wing – that being the side that had chosen to defy these policies – but many others were simply working class people who had had to deal with covid on the front lines, not from a cosy home office. A good number of them were right-wing and working class, a combination that seemed unthinkable 20 years ago, but now seemed the norm. How had the left largely lost the working class?

My new alternative media heroes had an answer: because the left had become obsessed with identitarian politics – those culture war flashpoints mentioned earlier, promoted as the most important lenses through which to view politics – and had largely forgotten about class. Yet the working class is not defined by their skin colour or sexual identity, they are defined by their lower economic status. While the left had been arguing over pronouns, wealth inequality had risen to historic levels. Is it any wonder that millions of them voted for Trump, when he said to hell with all this race and gender shit – I’m going to bring good jobs back to America?

Why had the left become overly focussed on issues other than class? Perhaps one answer is that a focus on gender and racial identity is less of a challenge to the capitalist status quo. The very wealthy are fine with women, queers, and people of colour gaining more power, as long as their stock holdings are not threatened. But demanding a more equal portioning of the economic pie does target the thing they hold most dear – their wealth and the power it confers. That is why the wealthy donors to the Democratic Party could accept a candidate like Barak Obama, but not Bernie Sanders, or why corporations can easily voice support for Black Lives Matter. Campaigning against racism or transphobia doesn’t directly challenge their position in society in the way that fighting for more income equality would. Racism and transphobia are issues that need fighting for, but when class is left out of the equation, the working poor can see these issues as distractions from their biggest struggle: not enough money. They suspect middle class liberals of “virtue signaling”, and attitudes towards race and gender can become a wedge issue differentiating themselves from those with more economic privilege. Then the right can swoop in with their anti-”woke” ideology and poach the left’s former main voting bloc. The left, instead of being the voice of the working class, becomes a bastion of the “laptop class”.

We saw this play out in the trucker protest. The worst name the left can call you is not a dictator, not an oligarch, not a tycoon, but a racist. Because you can call anyone white, rich or poor, a racist. And that’s just what the left-leaning Canadian media did to the truckers and their allies. They piled on relentlessly. There were some white supremacists there, for sure, and the media predictably put all their attention on them. But they ignored the vast majority who were simply working class and fed up with being told what to do by an elite they felt had long ago abandoned their interests. The media failed miserably in their job to try to understand the roots of this protest, and instead immediately wrote them off as crazies and bigots.

As a farmer – someone who works with my hands – I felt a certain kinship towards the protesters. I can tell you that ten years of working hard to grow food for little money has changed me in ways I didn’t even realize until this protest materialized. Seeing people work cushy desk jobs, with all the benefits, and easily make double my income, all for doing a job that looks from the outside as mostly unnecessary (one in five people believe their job is meaningless, by the way), while I work outdoors in all kinds of weather, with risk of physical injury, and no safety net, in the service of providing a clearly needed good, makes you see the world differently. I’m not complaining – I probably could have chosen the cushy desk job route, and instead I chose farming, and I’m glad nearly every day that I did. But I can still understand the resentment that those who work hard for little money can hold against their more pampered fellow citizens.

And so I felt a degree of solidarity towards the protesters and sympathy towards their frustrations. Not enough to ever go and join them, but enough at least to see how unfairly the media was treating them.

It was hard to know who to believe: my Ottawa friends and the media who universally complained about how rude and all-round awful the protesters were, or other friends who visited with the protesters and found them to be as friendly as could be. I did drive by once and was gifted with some free samosas through my car window. Probably the protesters’ personalities morphed depending on if they felt like they were dealing with a friend or a foe, just as people’s attitudes towards them altered depending on the degree to which they agreed with them. Everybody seemed to look past the nuanced reality of an assortment of different people from across the country uniting in common action over a multitude of complex issues, and instead saw just black or white.

While the Canadian media was monolithic in its condemnation of the truckers, they actually got a fairer hearing in the last place I expected to find balance: Fox News. Fox, in my mind, had always been the enemy of everything good in political commentary and unbiased coverage – the driver of a toxically polarized media landscape in the US. I was grateful that its counterpart had failed to take hold in Canada. Yet this polarized media environment provided a space to tell a completely different story about the trucker protest than the single message we heard in Canada. I was a little shocked when my sister sent me a video of Tucker Carlson opining about the protest – I had never watched him before, and I felt a little dirty pressing play. But he does have the most watched cable news show in America, so, I told myself, I should watch at least one clip. I did find him to be a skilled rhetorician, and his perspective on the protest was refreshing, pointing out the hypocrisy of a supposedly left-leaning government clamping down on a working class protest. But I also found him to be unnecessarily combative and divisive, and I don’t think I’ll be going back for more. But Fox News has become a home of sorts for people of different political stripes who have been shut out of other mainstream media organizations.

In the end, I felt like the trucker protest was a little too interesting for Canada, especially for that most staid of cities, Ottawa (its residents actually rallied around the slogan “Make Ottawa boring again”). For a brief period, the world, including even our more exciting cousins south of the border, found the news coming out of Canada enthralling. Then we declared a national emergency and put an end to those bouncy castles and hot tubs. Party’s over.

Stirring the Pot: Left, Right, Centre, Woke

Before the pandemic swept away all my progressive certainties, I always associated the left with being on the right side of history, with justice, challenging authority, altruism, pacifism, and a belief in the inherent goodness of human beings. The left was the side that spoke truth to power, was creative, free-thinking, and held an almost exclusive monopoly on humour. They were the hippies and artists and radicals and thinkers and Bohemians. They were cool. The other side lived within an intellectual and emotional straitjacket, seeing things in narrow moralistic terms of black and white, and as a consequence could rarely rise to the level of being funny.

But, in the last few years, it seems all that has been turned on its head. It began before the pandemic, perhaps in the mid-Twenty-Teens, but I only noticed it when covid brought it to the fore. The right – who derive their designation from where the monarchists sat in the National Assembly during the French Revolution – has become the revolutionaries, seeking to overturn established powers. The right is talking about things the left dares not mention, defending free-speech. The right is championing – at least rhetorically – the interests of the working class. Trump and his MAGA supporters are actually against US military adventurism. The right advocated for less “hair on fire” approaches to dealing with covid, in line with what Sweden was doing. Sweden!

The left, meanwhile, seemed to distrust people and saw a racist in everyone. The left’s war on intolerance made them intolerant of almost everyone, tearing themselves apart in an arms race to purity. While the right used to call for the banning of things they found offensive, now the left spearheaded a ferocious cancel culture. The left fell in love with the government and even the FBI, and became xenophobic towards the right’s old bogeyman: Russia. The range of questions one could ask in leftist circles was circumscribed, as were the range of acceptable Halloween costumes. Perhaps worst of all, having gone down their own rabbit hole of moralistic thinking, the left lost the ability to be funny, and provided the right with the material they needed to create truly brilliant satire. The right was laughing at the left! What had the world come to?

This is not to say that I’m about to become a card carrying member of the Conservative Party of Canada. Most of what comes out of the mouths of people like Pierre Poilievre or Ron DeSantis I still find repulsive. But I don’t reject it out of hand like I used to. I am more willing to at least consider that what they say may have some merit. Maybe we shouldn’t assume that all anti-abortionists, for example, are in thrall to the patriarchy; maybe many of them simply have a different notion of when the autonomous life of a fetus begins. Part of getting over the intense polarization that plagues our politics is to not assume the worst of those with different views. Maybe we actually agree on most things, such as values like protecting the life of children, and just differ on the finer points of how to go about that. Our beliefs have less to do with our moral character than we tend to assume; they’re often more the practicalities of reaching an end goal than the end itself.

At the same time as I’m slightly more open to ideas coming from conservative voices, I’ve also had to question many of the tenets of liberal belief that until recently I never doubted. For instance, most liberals voice unconditional support for immigration. If you’re anti-immigration, the thinking goes, you must be a racist. But again, that is ascribing the worst motivation to your ideological opponent. There are possibly good reasons why someone might not be gung-ho about allowing a lot of new people into a nation state. If you value a certain amount of cultural homogeneity and the bonds that can create, then you might be hesitant about watering that down too much with new arrivals. This is a tension across much of Europe, where people have deep cultural roots that are important to them and add to their sense of collective solidarity and happiness; people with different cultural traditions can sometimes undermine that sense. Of course immigrants can bring a lot of creative dynamism to a society and ultimately make for much more interesting social landscapes, but if you value connection to the familiar over novelty, you could be both anti-immigrant and not a racist. Canada prides itself on its diversity, but it can also be a place lacking in communal connection in the way that many older European cultures share.

Another reason you might be against immigration, if you are working class, is you could see these new arrivals as competitors for scarce housing. Canada is in the midst of a severe housing crisis, which is driven largely by a lack of supply, and yet the government is committed to bringing in half a million new people every year. It says these people are needed to fill the labor shortage and keep the economy growing, yet it is mostly the well-off who reap the rewards of increasing GDP, while the poor suffer with higher rents. One could argue that neoliberalism has outsourced jobs to poorer countries while at the same time bringing in more people from those same countries to compete for the remaining jobs in Canada, driving wages down and rents up. You can see how the working class might feel betrayed by this approach and not overjoyed at the prospect of massive immigration. The laptop class, meanwhile, can safely support immigration from the sidelines, content in the rising value of their houses and the continuation of a low wage service sector.

So while I think Canada, as a relatively safe haven in the world, should accept a lot more refugees, I’m not sure I agree with the policy of bringing in the number of non-refugee immigrants that we are currently. Germany and Japan both have enviable economies without growing populations.

Besides immigration, the list of issues up for debate in my mind is long: has there been a downside to the many gains achieved by feminism? Are young men now actually worse off than young women? What, if any, are the differences between women and men? Are declining fertility rates a good thing? Can you have too much personal freedom? Are universities still a place for free and open discussion and having your beliefs challenged? How can the media regain trust, and how can we start believing in a common reality again? How important is family? Or religion? Should we be encouraging teenagers to take hormone blockers and delay puberty when they feel their sex doesn’t conform with their gender identity? Should we censor hate speech? Was #MeToo a success? Is the history of European and American imperialism so bad that we should basically give a free pass to the imperialism of places like Russia and China? Is Critical Race Theory helpful? Who’s to blame for the rise of Trump? Is war ever justified? I have more questions than answers.

In order to try to answer some of these questions, I have another question: what media do I trust? Where do I get the information that will form my opinions? Although I spilled a lot of ink in this essay being critical of the mainstream press, I do still believe it is an excellent source of information on a wide gamut of topics (as indeed many of my links in this essay attest). There are some blind spots, to be sure, and a fair amount of bias, but if you can consume it with a critical eye, you can still get a pretty good picture of what is going on. I then turn to my alternative media to fill in the blanks and offer a different perspective. One is not necessarily better than the other – the alternative press is not held to the same fact-checking standards as large media organizations trying to avoid lawsuits, and, depending on the integrity of the source, they can be rife with inaccuracies – but the two can complement each other. We should strive to read, watch, and listen to as widely as possible any news sources that you trust not to completely lie to you. No one source holds a monopoly on the truth.

Ideally the mainstream media would offer this diversity within itself. “The major legacy media already have very robust policies in place for racial diversity,” points out Tara Henley. “If the concept of diversity was expanded to include geographic diversity, diversity of political viewpoint, and even perhaps — although this would be harder to do — educational diversity…Our whole business has gone from being a working-class trade, which really is what it should be — it’s not rocket science to go out and talk to people — to becoming an elite profession.” Perhaps mainstream journalism can get back to that kind of diversity of viewpoints.

My mind now pried partly open, I’ll strive to keep it open. The purpose of the media should not be to confirm what we already believe, but to teach us something new. The world is too big and complex for our understanding of it to not be continually evolving; if you ever think you’ve got it all figured out, you’re deluding yourself.

The last few years have certainly stirred the pot. While in some senses polarization has seemed to increase, the neat boundaries between left and right have also blurred. Leftish natural living hippies suspicious of vaccines have made common cause with gun-toting libertarians suspicious of anything coming from the government. Dreadlocked digital nomads invested in Bitcoin support Trump because he wants to weaken the state. Environmentalists angry at how the rich and powerful are destroying nature get lost down the QAnon rabbit hole. In Europe, populist political parties, such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, combine traditional right-wing antipathy to immigration with a strengthening of the welfare state. My journey is just a less extreme version of this same intermingling.

Some commentators have proposed that instead of thinking about left versus right, we should look at the current political dynamics playing out in countries around the world as the margins versus the centre. The centre – made up chiefly of a vaguely liberal middle to upper class – has done alright during the last 40 years of neoliberalism, but everyone else, whether they skew right or left in ideology, is growing increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo. This could explain how the left and right sometimes unite in common cause against their common enemy: the complacent status quo.

Another way to look at it might be to say that left and woke are two different things. That is certainly the contention of philosopher Susan Neiman in her book Left is Not Woke. She argues that woke-ism goes against some of the central values of the left, including a commitment to universalism. By focussing on certain groups that have purportedly suffered more than others, we divide society into those who deserve justice and those that don’t. Neiman, who is Jewish and critical of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, says that Benjamin Netanyahu is the culmination of this kind of thinking, where the extreme injustice perpetrated on one group becomes a justification for their own perpetration of injustice on another group.

But for me, the enemy is not people with different beliefs – whether left, right, centre, or woke. The enemy is shuttered thinking, self-righteousness, and the judging of others based on their beliefs. If we can meet each other in respectful dialogue, we can defuse the polarization and animosity that’s eating away at our democracy like a cancer, and move forward in tackling together the many problems that face us.

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The post Into the Political Wilderness – Part 2 first appeared on Sean Butler.

In the before times, that innocent age before we knew what an M95 mask was, or could conceive of something like a vaccine passport, or when gathering indoors around a Christmas tree was taken for granted, I generally voted for the Green Party federally – sometimes the NDP if I was feeling unusually centrist. I didn’t really know anyone who voted Conservative, and often asked myself, like many bubble-dwelling liberals, who the hell actually votes for those jerks, anyway?

When the pandemic first ripped into our lives, I unquestionably adopted the positions dictated by my political polarity; doing everything possible to stop the spread of this virus was what people who cared about others naturally did. Evil right-wingers, on the other hand, who had shown for years their blatant disregard for the well-being of others, would logically gravitate to positions that minimized the severity of the virus, and push for less impositions on their personal freedom, in a selfish super-spreading orgy. The Great Barrington Declaration was their manifesto, and it was an abomination.

When good friends of mine voiced support for this declaration and other ideas like it, I was shocked. People so like me, thinking so differently? How was this even possible? When they complained of their ideas being censored, I scoffed. We have a free media and free speech in this country, after all. We don’t do censorship.

If anything, maybe our speech was too free. For a brief period, at the high water mark of my adherence to my tribe’s anti-covid fervour, I even thought this whole free speech thing might be overrated. If free speech could allow people to spout untruths which led to more people dying, was it really such a good thing? Maybe we had something to learn from the way China controlled its citizens’ access to information – weren’t they the envy of the world with their rock bottom covid numbers?

When 40-somethings like me were first given access to a covid vaccine in the spring of 2021, despite it being a dose of bad press plagued AstraZenena, I jumped at the opportunity. The news  – which I had started consuming in large doses since the beginning of the pandemic – had been full of dire stories of people my age getting seriously sick and even dying from covid, and to be honest, I was a little freaked. While the side effects from the vaccine were unpleasant, they were compensated for by a sense of relief to be better protected from this nasty virus and also, I must admit, a slight glow of virtuousness for having “done the right thing”. I got my second jab a few months later – this time the much smoother Pfizer vintage.

I was now ready to put this whole disagreeable episode behind me. I had followed all the advice, and done everything I’d been told to do. I was part of the righteous double vaxxed, and so were most of my fellows, so we should be out of the woods, right?

Wrong. The Omicron wave in the fall of ’21 was the first crack in the screen of my projected reality. How could this be happening? Vaccines were supposed to put an end to this, but this zombie virus kept rising from the dead. I learned that the high 90’s percent efficacy of these much-lauded vaccines in reducing hospitalization and death was really only for the first few weeks, and that it declined sharply after that. Moreover, they were even less effective at preventing viral spread from person to person, falling to 21% by this measure against the Omicron variant a mere six months after inoculation. Not only did the vaccines have a very short lifespan, but they did little to stop transmission. (For more on this, read my January 2022 article, World War Covid.) The whole underpinning for a moral imperative to get vaccinated – to protect not just yourself but others too – was shaken. And with it my faith in my political affiliations began to crumble away as well.

I should clarify here that I don’t believe that the covid vaccines were ineffective – they certainly helped protect the vulnerable (provided people kept up with their boosters every few months). But they were oversold in their effectiveness, and they never should have been aggressively pushed on the entire population in some quixotic quest for herd immunity. Leaving aside for now the fact that the mRNA vaccines are a totally novel technology – never administered to humans until two and a half years ago – for which the long term effects are unknown, and mass vaccination basically amounts to a calculated roll of the dice for the entire population (but surely there have never been unintended side effects from medical interventions before, right?), the intense top-down pressure for literally everyone to get vaccinated (even 6 month olds) created unnecessary social divisions, resentment, and swelled the ranks of those who already distrusted vaccines specifically and “expert” or state authority in general.

If center/left governments had misled us so much about vaccines, what other parts of covid policy had they gotten wrong? Certainly the vaccine passport system and mandates now seemed off the table. The decision to get vaccinated had become a personal choice, not a social one. One could argue that you still should get vaccinated to relieve your potential burden on an over-capacity health care system, but wasn’t that the fault of years of government under-funding? Society had failed to adequately fund its health care system, and now a small group of people were being asked to sacrifice their beliefs for a society that had failed to sacrifice their tax dollars.

I didn’t know it back at the end of 2021, but later research has shown the questionable appropriateness of everything from mask mandates to school closures to border restrictions to lockdowns (this paper claims that lockdowns “may claim 20 times more life years than they save”), citing their ineffectiveness relative to the collateral damage they did to people’s well-being in other aspects of their lives. Governments had carefully prepared pandemic preparedness plans prior to covid (which did not include lockdowns), but in the hysteria of the moment, they threw them out the window and zealously followed every idea for how we might potentially beat back this disease by any margin to their logical conclusions, ignoring a whole suite of negative side effects that these ideas brought forth.

But there was what you might call a moral panic about covid – particularly towards those who were seen as causing the disease to spread: the unvaccinated, the unmasked, the noncompliant. We literally accused them of murder. Noam Chomsky, that hero of the left and of mine, said that the unvaccinated should be “isolated” from society, and that getting food to them is “their problem”. Those who questioned the official response to covid were vilified beyond any reasonable measure, egged on by a Prime Minister who said the unvaccinated were often “misogynists” and “racists” and “unfit parents”. They lost their jobs, were barred from whole spheres of public life, were prevented from traveling, and were even threatened with fines by Quebec Premier François Legault. Instead of pulling together to fight the common enemy of covid, like we did early in the pandemic, we did what humans usually do when afraid: find a scapegoat group and viciously attack. And our politicians, who feed on division, were only too happy to capitalize.

How ironic that a virus that infects everyone can divide us so.

BOTTOM-UP CENSORSHIP MAY BE NEARLY AS BAD AS TOP-DOWN

As my views on the official response to covid shifted, I began to discern the outlines of the particular form that censorship can take in our liberal, open society. The mainstream media, gutted by loss of ad revenues since the rise of the internet, had also largely abdicated its role as a critical eye towards government policy. The age of the scrappy reporter was over; the few remaining journalists were more concerned with not rocking the boat and holding on to a precarious job than raking politicians over the coals. Media organizations had lost the capacity to do investigative journalism and largely accepted government pronouncements unquestioningly. The watchdog was old and gone to sleep.

There is also the question of political leanings, which inevitably creep into newsrooms, even when good efforts are made towards objectivity. I used to wonder why conservatives always complained about the “liberal media” when it was obviously right-wing. It was controlled by wealthy publishers and funded by corporate advertising, after all.

But now, I began to see that maybe conservatives had been right all along, and that most of the people who work in the media actually do share a generally liberal worldview. According to a 2020 article in Science Advances, 60% of US journalists surveyed self-identified as Democrat, 17% as Republican, and 23% as independent. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since most journalists are both college educated and urban dwellers, two demographics strongly correlated with liberal political worldviews. Even at the uber-capitalist Wall Street Journal and other financial publications, left-of-centre journalists arguably outnumber their right-wing counterparts 13 to 1.

The Science Advances article, it should be noted, contends that this partisan imbalance does not translate into biased media reporting. But media bias can be hard to measure. And it stretches credibility to believe that – humans being humans – even with the best of intentions towards impartiality, such an extreme tilt towards one side of the political spectrum among the practitioners of the media does not inform to some extent their coverage. It casts journalists as somehow superhuman, immune to the cognitive biases that science has repeatedly shown we are prone to.

It wasn’t always this way. Back in 1956, newspapers were perceived as fair by more Republicans than Democrats, and were overall seen as fair by 66% of Americans. In the 1970’s, Walter Cronkite’s nightly newscast on CBS was trusted by 72% of viewers. But it’s been all downhill from there. A 2020 Gallup poll found that, for the first time ever, more people had zero trust in the media than had “a great deal” or “fair” amount combined (38% versus 34%). And while both Democrats’ and Republicans’ trust declined for decades, Democrats’ confidence rebounded sharply right around the election of Donald Trump at the same time as Republicans’ plummeted; a whopping 70% of Democrats now say they trust the media, versus a mere 14% of Republicans.

Is it that Republicans’ beliefs have spun so far outside the mainstream that regular centrist media can no longer reach them? Or has their mistrust sprung from the fact that the media failed to see the appeal of Donald Trump’s message to certain groups, and then when he was elected, turned on him with an obsessive vitriol never seen before? Even as someone who is no fan of Trump, I was struck during his presidency by the constant drumbeat of negativity towards him from the media. Many in the press no longer believed they could or should cover Trump the way they had always covered past US presidents; they saw it as their civic duty to attack this imposter to the throne who might start a nuclear war just because he was having a bad day. Liberal voters, shocked that someone such as Trump was occupying the Oval Office, rallied behind a media establishment intent on criticising his every move, while Trump supporters migrated to Fox News or even more extreme media outlets.

Trump’s surprise election was the final step in the complete polarization of US media. It was now divided into two warring camps, each side not believing a word said by the other, if they even bothered to read it. Two collections of “facts” contradicting each other. The country roughly split in half by two separate realities. And when covid came along, the two sides had to quickly choose opposing viewpoints. It mattered less which side they chose than that they were in sharp disagreement.

“Schismogenesis” is the term used to describe the common phenomenon of groups defining themselves by their differences. Canadians love to define themselves by their publicly funded healthcare system, precisely because the US system is much less universal. In the same vein, if liberals were pro-masking, then conservatives had to be anti-mask, and vice-versa. And moreover, their positions on masking defined what kind of person they were: from the liberal point of view, a responsible member of society versus an anti-science sociopath; from the conservative point of view, a free-thinking guardian of personal liberties versus a cowed sheep blindly following the dictates of an oppressive state.

I was surprised at first that conservatives did not embrace the opportunity covid provided; it seemed to play to their concerns about safety and security, about rule-following and border restrictions. But maybe I was still thinking about an older sort of conservative. In the end, perhaps all it took was for Trump, ironically a self-confessed germaphobe, to take a somewhat dismissive tone towards this new germ to set the trend for all other conservatives to fall in line.

The mainstream press, being at war against all things Trump, naturally had to take a hard line on this new war against covid. To oppose mandates around masks, vaccines, and lockdowns became heresy. To even question these core tenets was an irresponsible misuse of one’s mouthpiece as a journalist. What if it caused the masses to question things, and that led to non-compliance, and that led to more deaths? Self-reinforcing group-think spread from newsrooms to the general population and back again.

Adding fuel to fire was the fact that journalists graduating from college these days increasingly see their work as a mission to influence their readers and change the world. Being an impartial voice is boring and impersonal. Everyone wants to be a star. And postmodernism teaches them that impartiality is impossible and objectivity an illusion anyway. Some newspaper editors are now openly questioning whether they should even be striving for journalistic objectivity anymore – an ideal only about a century old, and never perfectly implemented.

But the political bent of the mainstream media has made them bad journalists. When the Hunter Biden laptop story emerged during the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election, in which an email seemed to show then vice-president Joe Biden using his political office to advance the business interests of his son, they dismissed it as Russian disinformation, because they couldn’t stomach reporting on anything that might damage the man hoping to unseat Trump, despite the fact that the story had real legs. Both Twitter and Facebook joined in the censorship by blocking the spread of the story on their platforms. It was only well after Biden’s election that the mainstream press started to take the story somewhat seriously.

Earlier, the same media had been all too eager to believe someone who had claimed knowledge of a video showing Trump watching two prostitutes peeing on a bed that the Obamas had supposedly slept on in a Moscow hotel room – a video that was now supposedly being used to blackmail the then presidential candidate and make him a stooge of the Kremlin. No evidence for this “pee tape” or incident was ever found.

Another case study is the lab-leak hypothesis. When this idea first emerged, it was quickly smacked down by a letter written by a group of “experts”. Never mind that the mastermind of this letter, Peter Daszak, was the president of a non-profit that had received millions of dollars in grants from the US government to study viruses with pandemic potential and had subcontracted some of that work to the Wuhan lab in question; the media bought this denial hook, line, and sinker, and “lab-leak hypothesis” was quickly synonymous with “conspiracy theory” in most people’s minds. Only the sheer weight of evidence pointing towards this as a real possibility for the origin of covid has pried the media’s willingness to seriously consider it back open in recent months. The credulous acceptance of anything uttered by a person with a PhD, regardless of their potential economic incentives, is part of the mistake establishment journalists keep making; another is letting ideology cloud rational thought: if Trump blamed China for covid, then any idea that might lend credence to that opinion must be wrong (even though the coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was funded by an American organization, making the US equally complicit).

All of this is to try to explain how a form of self-censorship groupthink played out in our supposedly open-media society. It would have been so much easier to explain the kind of top-down authoritarian censorship we are all familiar with. Some conservatives like to claim that this is what’s happening with the Canadian government-funded CBC, but it’s not that simplistic. Fortunately we do not live in that kind of 1984 world, and our version of censorship is less complete. But it does have a significant effect. Especially when you also consider how social media got on board.

After Facebook and its peers were accused of allowing Russian fake news to run rampant on their platforms, thus paving the way for the seemingly impossible election of Donald Trump (in the liberal worldview, it was unthinkable that someone such as him could have won without some form of massive foreign interference), social media got serious about moderation. The threat of government regulation was a pecuniary threat to big tech, and they wanted to remain in the legislators’ good books. So if the government wanted to push pro-mask and pro-vaccine messages, social media would be a loyal ally (see the Wall Street Journal’s The White House Covid Censorship Machine).

I personally had a run in with this form of censorship recently, when I posted to my Facebook feed an opinion piece from the New York Times about a new scientific report that basically concluded that mask mandates had been completely useless. My post was soon flagged by Facebook moderators as “lacking context” and that it could be misleading. While on the one hand I’m pleased that Facebook is encouraging its users to think more critically about what they read, the inconsistency of its application is a problem, targeting a small range of issues, mostly around covid policy, and only flagging posts from one side of that debate. And besides, of course it lacked context – it was an opinion piece. The point of opinion writing is to argue a certain position, not provide an airing of all points of view. When Facebook flags something that was published in the New York Times – probably the most prestigious media outlet in the world – we can only assume that free expression is in deep trouble on that platform.

Click here to keep reading Part 2.

The post Into the Political Wilderness – Part 1 first appeared on Sean Butler.

How can you see yourself, or humans in general, benefitting the natural world? How can we give back to the living order in some form of reciprocity for all the gifts of life it has bestowed upon us? Is this even possible in your opinion, or are humans doomed to be takers only, like some aberrant lifeform set loose on the natural world? Often we focus our efforts on minimizing our impact, with the tacit assumption that our impact can only be negative, therefore the less of it the better. But what if our impact could be positive?

And I’d like you to think beyond just repairing the damage already done; think about how we might go further and use our aptitudes for technology and understanding to make this planet an even more welcoming home for all of life. To reintegrate ourselves back into the ecosystem from which we emerged. To assume the responsibilities that come with being a keystone species. To figure out what humans’ unique contribution to life might be.

Other species do it. Earthworms aerate and fertilize the soil, legumes “fix” atmospheric nitrogen into the earth in a form that plants can utilize, beavers create rich wetlands, trees clean the air, predators manage prey populations, squirrels plant tree seeds, phytoplankton sequester carbon, ants provide grounds cleaning services, and fungi help break down wood into soil. The rest of the world seems engaged in a give-and-take ecological economy that if added up would balance out at zero – no one species taking more than it gives in the end.

Why do humans seem to stand outside this multi-billion year evolutionary dance? We take way more than our fair share of resources and create waste streams so impregnated with toxic chemicals that few of our Earthly co-habitants can do anything with it. Every year, we convert more and more of the Earth’s finite molecules into piles of useless garbage. We are actively de-enlivening the planet – taking a rich biosphere that evolved from lifeless minerals and rolling in back to its more inanimate origins. In its place grow our structures and machines, our sterile farmlands, our pavement, our landfills, and more and more of us.

But humans haven’t always been this way. In fact, in all of homo sapiens’ 300,000 year history, only the last few thousand have been problematic, particularly the last few hundred. As recently as 500 years ago, millions of our species lived in harmony with all the varied ecosystems of the 14,000 km stretch north to south of the Americas. The survivors of the genocide perpetrated on them by invading Europeans live here still today, and hold answers to the question I’m asking, as indigenous peoples do in other corners of the world, living in the shadows of colonialism.

But how many of the settler people, of whom I am one, can still even fathom how to be of service to the Earth? We seem to have totally forgotten.

I have some ideas of my own, but I’m keen to hear what other people have to say. This might be the most important question facing humanity, and the rest of life, today. I strongly suspect that we humans can’t keep living thinking of ourselves as outsiders to the natural world for much longer, and in our own demise we could set life back by millions of years. We will either realize we are intricately interconnected to this biosphere, or it will forcefully reassert that reality in ways our species will not like. Our illusion of disconnection is at best a temporary mirage.

And for a bonus question, if you’re up for it: what can we do to foster in humanity the will and ability to see our connection to nature and the desire to respect that bond? Because belief always precedes action. We’ve got the inertia of at least 2,500 years of the wrong kind of beliefs behind Western civilization, propelling us forward towards the cliff. It’s a big ship to turn around, but more and more people can now clearly see the cliff, so perhaps in the end the urge for self-preservation will prove stronger than the myth of freedom from nature.

Please make your voices heard below.

The post Perhaps the most important question facing humanity today first appeared on Sean Butler.

Macklem the Knife

In a society that kneels before the altar of economic growth, it is odd when the winds change and suddenly growth becomes a serious problem. When the Canadian economy added a surprising 108,000 jobs this past October, this good news story was tempered with concerns over an “overheating” economy.

With the Bank of Canada ramping up its key interest rate from 0.25% in March to 4.25% by year’s end – the fastest increase in Canadian history – it was hoped by Macklem and his ilk that the economy would be showing more signs of cooling by now. “Growth needs to slow,” said Macklem in a recent interview. Disappointingly, the economy seems surprisingly resilient. Maybe after two years of enforced idleness, people actually want to work and earn money.

Why does this central banker want to inflict suffering on Canadians, in the form of job losses and increased poverty? In a word: inflation. It simply means that prices are going up. Another way to look at it is that the purchasing power of the currency is going down – our money is losing value. It’s a simple concept, yet ideas about what causes it and how to remedy it vary widely. But one thing that everyone can agree on is that price instability – whether we’re talking about inflation or its even more devilish cousin, deflation (falling prices) – is a bad thing for almost everyone.

The people most hurt by rising prices are those with low or fixed incomes. Affording the essentials of life simply becomes harder. It also hurts anyone trying to save money for things like retirement or the down payment on a home. And while inflation may help those with large debts like mortgages – by eating away at the value of the money used to measure that debt – price instability eventually works its way into every nook and cranny of the market, distorting price signals everywhere. Once the expectation of inflation becomes entrenched, demands for higher wages inevitably follow suit, as workers understandably try to ensure their incomes keep up with rising prices. But rising wages add fuel to the inflationary fire, creating yet more inflation. This positive feedback loop is called the “wage-price spiral”, and it was the demon that central bankers saw fit to wrestle to the ground with sky-high interest rates in the 1970’s and ’80’s.

Tiff Macklem is determined to avoid repeating this history. In a speech he delivered to the Public Policy Forum in Toronto this November, he said:

Our priority at the Bank of Canada is to restore price stability. The overriding imperative is to ensure that high inflation does not become entrenched because, if that happens, nothing works well. This was the experience of the 1970s. The failure to control inflation resulted in high inflation and high unemployment. Labour strife increased as workers tried to cope with large increases in the cost of living. And ultimately it took much higher interest rates, and a severe recession with a large increase in unemployment, to rein in inflation and re-anchor inflation expectations. That is exactly what everyone wants to avoid.

The Bank of Canada’s main leverage point – like central banks around the world – is its overnight interest rate. This is the rate that banks charge each other as they move money between themselves on a daily basis. The Bank of Canada gets to set this rate, which sets the floor for interest rates the private banks charge their customers for loans. The higher the overnight rate, the more we pay in mortgages, car loans, business loans, credit cards, and other borrowing.

When interest rates rise, people borrow less, and overall spending declines. This reduces demand in the economy, exerting a downward pressure on prices. Since prices are basically set at the confluence of supply and demand, less demand for products translates into lower prices. This is how the Bank of Canada, with its hand on the lever of the overnight interest rate, hopes to control inflation.

Managing inflation has been the main job of the Bank of Canada since 1991, when it became only the second central bank, after New Zealand’s, to set itself that as its main goal. It aims for a 2% inflation rate – low enough that no one need pay it too much mind, yet high enough to give a cushion to the dreaded deflation. And since that time inflation has been remarkably stable, usually staying between 0 and 4%. We’ve had the luxury of being able to ignore it, for the most part.

That is, until the pandemic. The Covid shock initially sent inflation slightly below zero – into deflation territory – but when economies started to come back online in 2021, inflation began creeping up, pushing past 4% in mid-2021 and peaking in Canada at 8.1% in mid-2022. The latest data have it down slightly, at 6.3% – largely due to reduced gas prices.

Covid put an end to a 30 year golden age of price stability and low borrowing costs. Now, in addition to footing the bill for more expensive food, fuel and pretty much everything else, the average family will need to come up with an additional $1000 a month to meet increased mortgage payments, as interest rates climb to levels not seen in a generation.

And they’ll have to manage all this while more of them are thrown out of work. While Canada enjoyed record low unemployment this past summer, at 4.9%, rising interest rates will inevitably lead to job losses. Indeed, that is the whole intent. While record low unemployment “seems like a good thing,” said Macklem, “it is not sustainable.”

The idea is that a certain number of people – perhaps more than a million Canadians – need to be among the ranks of the unemployed at any one time, otherwise workers will be in too strong a position to bargain wages up, triggering the dreaded wage-price spiral of accelerating inflation. Karl Marx called this the “reserve army of labour”, and Milton Friedman the “natural rate of unemployment”. According to this outlook, “suppressing employment is the path to salvation” when it comes to taming inflation.

While reducing employment will naturally reduce spending and demand, bringing inflation down, some economists go further and believe that increasing wage pressures are a direct cause of inflation. They believe there is a shortage of workers – brought on by retiring boomers and restricted immigration during the pandemic – and that this has created a sellers’ market for workers. “Job vacancies,” points out Macklem, “exceeded one million in the second quarter—a new record.” All those unfilled jobs give workers unprecedented bargaining power, and they are using it – the thinking goes – to push wages higher, forcing companies to charge more for their products, thus fueling inflation.

But what is the tail, and what is the dog, and who is doing the wagging? While wages in the US have seen a 5.3% gain over the past year, prices have inflated more than 7%. Wages, far from driving inflation, appear to be playing catch-up at best.

According to economist Jim Stanford, central bankers pulled out “a 40-year-old hymnbook,” in 2022. “Developed after the wage-price spirals of the 1970s, that old-time gospel preaches that inflation is caused by overheated labour markets, greedy unions, and accelerating wages. The remedy is high interest rates to cool off spending, recreate a desirable cushion of unemployment, and restore enough fear and insecurity among workers to keep wages firmly in check.” He believes that workers are being sacrificed, not just to control inflation, “but more importantly to control workers.” In this view, inflation is being used as a smokescreen for class warfare, tamping down on worker power right at the moment they are seeing a glimpse of hope for the first time in 40 years of stagnant wages.

THE CENTRAL BANKERS OF THE WORLD – the Fed in the US, the European Central Bank, and our own Bank of Canada among them – see excess consumer demand, possibly coupled with a tight labour market juicing wages, as the cause of this inflation spike. In other words, too much spending and too few workers. Some argue that the over half a trillion dollars that the Canadian government injected into the economy to keep out of work people afloat during the dog days of the pandemic has stimulated demand beyond what the market can produce (although central banks have been injecting trillions through “quantitative easing” since the Great Recession without causing inflation). High interest rates are supposed to create less spending, which will in turn mean companies hire less, and more unemployment will force workers to accept lower wages, both of which should lower prices. Tiff Macklem calls this “the Plan“.

But others see the causes of this bout of inflation as not caused by excess demand, but by restricted supplies brought on by Covid and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Prices can go up either when demand increases relative to supply, or when supply falls relative to demand. If there’s more demand than supply for any given product, the end result is that people will be willing to pay more in order to secure their slice of the pie. Think of real estate prices in desirable neighbourhoods.

Suez canal blockage

Dissident economists of this school of thought see interest rate hikes as misplaced. “Eight months of rising interest rates have not yet noticeably cooled Canadian inflation,” wrote Stanford in November. “This isn’t surprising, since post-pandemic inflation has little to do with things the Bank of Canada can control. It’s mostly caused by global and supply-side problems (pandemic lockdowns, droughts and floods, war in Ukraine) — things which aren’t affected by interest rates. But the Bank of Canada persists with its tightening, hoping to shrink domestic demand enough to offset inflation from those supply shocks.”

Economist Armine Yalnizyan thinks that the 20th century approach to combating inflation through interest rate hikes is, in the 21st century, “more of a gamble because the modern-day problem is not enough supply, not too much demand.”

Robert Reich (Labour Secretary under Clinton, professor, and prolific writer/commentator) believes it’s a healthy dose of both, writing that “inflation has broken out all over the world. It’s happened because of pent-up demand from more than two years of pandemic. And limited supplies of everything from computer chips to wheat, due to difficulties in getting the world economy up and running, along with Putin’s war in Ukraine driving up world energy and food prices, and China’s lockdowns against COVID.”

Both supply and demand are constantly changing, and it’s hard to say which one is having a larger effect on prices at any point in time. In a recent talk, Dr. Fadhel Kaboub, an Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, talked of “a member of the Fed, this is from a couple of years ago, this is pre-pandemic, essentially admitting that for ten years after 2008, we’ve tried everything to target inflation at 2%, and we just realized that we have no reliable theory of inflation. Translation in plain English, we have no idea what causes inflation. This is the mainstream essentially accepting this.”

We know that prices have something to do with supply and demand, and we think that interest rates can sometimes influence these forces, but the economy is an unwieldy beast, and Tiff is pushing a panic button that a previous generation pushed nearly 50 years ago, and hoping for the same result.

MUCH AS MAINSTREAM ECONOMISTS see demand and wages working hand in hand to drive inflation upwards, heterodox economists tie together supply and profits as the real culprits. Referring to Tiff Macklem’s speech to the Public Policy Forum, Stanford wrote “that there’s no evidence wages are fuelling inflation: real wages have been falling, and workers’ share of GDP has shrunk. It’s profits that have surged to record levels, not wages. But the word ‘profit’ didn’t appear once in Macklem’s 3750-word speech.” (The word “wage” appears eight times.) And yet, “as a share of Canada’s gross domestic product, after-tax corporate profits have reached a 60-year high.”

According to a report from the non-profit Canadians for Tax Fairness, in 2021 “large corporations in all major sectors of the economy saw their profit margins substantially exceed 20 year averages, with many hitting record levels.” The report goes on to state that:

the key contributor to the jump in corporate profits is increasing prices. This report indicates that in 2021 corporations brought in unprecedented levels of profit largely by increasing what they charge for their goods and services. This allowed corporations to almost double profit margins in 2021 to 16%, compared to the 9% average for 2002 to 2019.

When corporations choose to raise their prices in order to boost their profit margins, they drive up inflation. While much emphasis is put on inflation being caused by government spending, the corporate pursuit of higher profits through price increases is a much simpler explanation, though more poorly understood and less discussed.

This misunderstanding plays into the hands of individuals, organizations and lobby groups pushing an austerity agenda. Such an agenda would have a range of negative repercussions on the Canadian economy, while benefiting only the very rich.

Despite claims of solidarity with front-line workers early in the pandemic, and soaring profits, top North American companies “spent five times more on dividends and stock buybacks than on all additional pay for workers,” according to a Brookings Institute report.

Robert Hockett, a professor of law and finance, believes that there was an initial transitory price inflation caused by pandemic-induced supply blockages, but that firms with “abusive market power” then hopped aboard the price-raising bandwagon and engaged in opportunistic profiteering, catalysing inflation for the longer term. A survey of retailers by Digital.com bears this out; a staggering 56% admitted that “inflation has given them the ability to raise prices beyond what’s required to offset higher costs.” How many more did so but didn’t admit to it on this survey?

In an opinion piece in the Financial Times, the Chief Economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, Paul Donovan, writes that “today’s price inflation is more a product of profits than wages.” He goes on to argue that “wages have been rising but prices have been rising faster, so real wage growth is catastrophically negative. This is far removed from the 1970s-style wage price spiral [when] US real average earnings rose for much of the decade.”

Some commentators even question the received wisdom that the 1970’s inflation crisis was caused by a wage-price spiral, and that high interest rates were what eventually tamed it. Dr. Kaboub claims that the true cause of inflation in the 70’s was the OAPEC price shock, when, in 1973, the Arab oil producing countries, enraged at considerable Nixon-led US military support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, placed an embargo on oil exports to the US and its allies, and instituted production cuts, causing the global price of oil to triple in a mere five months. In 1974 the new president Gerald Ford declared inflation, then at 12%, “Public Enemy No. 1”. But it was Jimmy Carter’s Camp David Accords, four years later, along with his deregulation of the natural gas industry, that brought inflation under control, not high interest rates and austerity.

1973 oil embargo

Identifying the true sources of inflation can be as contentious as how to deal with it. In a Levy Economics Institute paper, authors L. Randall Wray and Yeva Nersisyan argue that interest rate hikes are targeting the wrong things. Transport and housing accounted for about 4% of the 7.4% inflation in the US in the winter of 2022, yet “people do not usually borrow to buy fuel for their cars, purchase groceries, or pay rent—the categories currently driving inflation. Indeed, raising rates can even be perverse by reducing home purchases and pushing up rents.” High interest rates can also be counter-productive by “cutting interest-sensitive spending, such as investment, [which] would work to constrain our capacity to produce (i.e., supply) in the future.” If a lack of supply is the real cause of inflation, then anything that acts to reduce that supply further, such as high interest rates, could exacerbate the problem; unemployed workforces produce less. Higher borrowing costs are also inherently inflationary. They warn that the Fed’s policy could produce stagflation – that lethal combination of high unemployment and high inflation, last seen in the 1970’s.

Dr. Kaboub thinks that “the focus should be on the actual sources of inflation pressure points… you target your strategy to tame the sources of inflation rather than just manipulate interest rates and blindly implement austerity across the board in a kind of collective punishment for the whole economy.” Raising interest rates is like chemotherapy for inflation; it’s a broad spectrum medicine, suppressing both supply and demand, when what is needed is a more targeted supply-side stimulus. He believes that targeted government investments that boost the real productive capacity of the economy can actually be anti-inflationary, because they boost supply – an idea he admits would “short circuit” the brains of most mainstream economists.

As the pandemic brought into sharp relief, our “just-in-time” supply chains are quite vulnerable to small supply interruptions. Many are now advocating a shift to “just-in-case” supply – a more resilient approach that moves away from globalization’s obsession with off-shoring production and relies on “on-shoring” (making it yourself) or “friend-shoring” (getting it from friendly neighbours) – which should cause less supply-push inflation when the next global crisis hits. Governments could also stockpile critical supplies, as they do already with some commodities, and release them slowly when supplies are low, thus modulating inflationary pressures.

Boosting domestic productive capacity is a great positive solution to inflation – rather than knee-capping the economy through interest rate hikes, it seeks to build it up. But it is a longer term solution. What can we do right now to deal with the acute crisis? Robert Reich, who once wrote a book called Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, proposes “a temporary windfall profits tax on oil and food companies, temporary price controls on pharmaceuticals, bolder antitrust enforcement, a tax on stock buybacks, and higher taxes on the wealthy.” If high interest rates are in a sense a flat tax on everyone, rich or poor, wouldn’t it be better to just tax those who can afford it? Any tax pulls money out of the economy, and is therefore anti-inflationary; it’s just a question of whom we tax.

Jim Stanford doesn’t think we really need to do anything about inflation, because it is “already coming down, as the global disruptions that pushed prices skyward reverse themselves. Shipping costs, energy prices, and many minerals and agricultural prices have fallen steeply in recent months.” Just tame the monopolistic pricing of the corporations causing inflation, and stop making the cure worse than the disease with rate hikes.

BUT THE GOLDEN AGE of low and stable inflation may be over. Several factors conspired over the past 30 years to keep prices low: a plentiful supply of cheap goods from China, a large workforce of baby boomers, and a climate less prone to extreme weather events. But all those factors are changing, as more Chinese enter the middle class and cheap factory labour dries up, baby boomers retire in droves and labour markets tighten, and an unhinged climate wreaks havoc on transportation networks and food production. We could be in for a protracted period of steadily rising prices.

If this is the case, central banks, and the governments that ultimately stand behind them, are going to have to come up with more plays in their playbook than Tiff Macklem’s “Plan”. The Plan may work – probably will work if carried on long enough and with enough determination – but at what cost to people’s lives? Just because one approach works doesn’t mean that others wouldn’t work better, with less collateral damage. Why must labour be made the sacrificial victim, again, instead of excess profits? Why try to tamp down demand when you could increase supply instead? We need a Plan B.

Henry Ford, despite his many failings, did understand that it was in his own self-interest to pay his workers enough to afford his products, and to give them the time off to enjoy them. We now live in an economy where the success of a business is directly tied to people’s ability to buy its products. Business prosperity and worker prosperity are two sides of the same coin. Economies are not some force of nature beyond our control – they are constructs of the laws and policies that shape them. We can either choose to live in an economy that increasingly concentrates wealth at the top, or we can live in one where everyone has enough money to enjoy a good life – and the wealthy will be even richer because there will be more people who can afford their products.

Conventional economic thinking, mired in neo-liberal worldviews passed down from 19th century Anglo philosophers, sees things as zero-sum, prides itself on being a “dismal science” saddled with the responsibility of making hard trade-offs, and is fond of saying things like “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” (they even have an acronym for it: TNSTAAFL).

But free lunches abound. One example is the unemployed. Are they idle because all of society’s needs are already being met? No, we have no work for them because we are lacking enough numbers on a screen with a dollar sign in front of them. It’s like saying we can’t measure a piece of lumber because we don’t have enough inches. The government could put these people to work doing useful things, either through a centralized job guarantee program, by giving grants or zero-interest loans to entrepreneurs to create the needed jobs in a more decentralized manner, or in many other creative ways.

To this the old economic thinkers will scream, “But government spending is inflationary!” But it is not, so long as the money goes towards creating more productive capacity. One way inflation can happen – the monetarist view – is that too many dollars are chasing too few goods. It’s another way of saying that demand is outpacing supply. But if those new dollars spent by the government into the economy (and they create them out of nothing, by the way – see Modern Monetary Theory) create a concurrent rise in supply, then there’s no inflation. This is how we can break out of the “wage-price trap“. Forget the “spiral” – the “trap” is the orthodoxy that tells us we can’t have full employment or good wages because the economy will get all flustered and (oh my!) overheat, and will have to go take a cold shower.

As long as we have an economy where rising wages and spending creates inflation that can only be fought by suppressing wages and spending, we will be stuck in this trap. We need to re-envision collective provision – what we call the economy – from an old story in which some need to suffer in order for others to succeed, to one where individual and collective well-being are one and the same. When that other person, other community, other nation does well, I/we benefit too. Together, we can lift ourselves so much higher. Forget about class warfare – this is a battle between humanity’s best and worst selves. How we choose to deal with inflation going forward will say a lot about which self has won out.

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