The Classroom Conservative

Getting The Nanny State To Say "Yes!"

Last weekend, Roy Green commented on his radio show that Canada's national slogan surely begins with "No." It might be "No Parking." It might be "No Smoking." It might be "No Littering." It might be in English or French, but it certainly begins with "No." Peter Shawn Taylor, Maclean's editor-at-large, published in the National Post this week a plea to "Bomb the Ban." Indeed, Canadian governments are addicted to them.

I am, by nature, a small government guy, but I understand why something as noxious as smoking, for example, should be banned from the public square. Having been successful in driving this sad habit underground, though, it seems that our leaders are using the same strategies to engender reform in all elements of our lives. It is likely that, by this time next year, I will have a lawn full of dandelions, and I will be unable to call home on my cell phone unless I park my car first. Insanity!

My objection to this government nuisance is that it implies that we have (or can imagine) an ideal state that needs to be protected. We could sustain our wellbeing simply by prohibiting a series of behaviors that erode what we have, and many people believe it is the role of government to point these sins out to us. People who do business in related industries (like, say, the people who make pesticides) must forgo their right to compete in an open marketplace where we can make choices based on our acceptance of risk.

But I believe that the main role government has in this area is in facilitating good behaviors, not rooting out bad. Look at the postal service: it costs the same amount of money to ship ten pounds of bricks as it does to ship ten pounds of books. Could the government interfere with a crown corporation to ensure that sharing reading materials was privileged somehow? Absolutely. Would they? No. And they would not because it might, they claim, interfere unfairly with the business models of brickmakers and publishers. They are happy to burden some enterprises they believe to be doing harm, but they seldom single out and help enterprises that are doing good for fear of having to take that stand.

Good is, sadly, more subjective than governments' increasingly broad understanding of bad. Taylor's article points out that governments ban because it is simpler; it represents lazy thought.  But leadership in public policy matters demands greater courage.

This goes back to what we need. When government meddles, if meddle it must, it should be to help us improve. It is not to preserve our imperfect selves but, instead, to challenge us to do more and do it better. I am ever for tax cuts and subsidies over levies and fines.

When Will Canada Student Loans Be Reformed?

All over the country, postsecondary students are preparing to return to college and university. They will be collecting tithes from their parents, counting the money they made in the summer, and cashing scholarship cheques. Then, many of them will be taking out Canada Student Loans. They will be successful only if they pass a fairly arbitrary means test, one that still fails to account for the complexities of parental contributions. After they leave school, they will be expected to pay back this money, and if they do not the Canadian taxpayer will do so. We are getting taxed at the end for the failure of governments to fund education properly.

Parents fret about how to pay for college and university. The National Post screamed this past weekend that, by 2025, the cost of a $38,000 program today will exceed $70,000. While no one wants to think about that kind of hit, the raw number obscures the fact that this assumption is based on a pretty conservative inflation assumption. Of course, the problem with trusting that your salary and your investments will keep up with inflation, the belief that if you are prudent education will never cost any more, relatively speaking, than it does now, is that you cannot account for paradigmatic shifts in how we view and fund education in the first place. If inflation alone was the only factor, the annual tuition I paid at Memorial University in Newfoundland in 1987 would translate to $2,100 today. We all know that students are paying much more than that! What this reveals is that governments do not fund education as they did in the 1980s, and costs in the postsecondary sector have increased more than than the level of inflation over the past twenty years.

I am not an economist, obviously, but it seems that talking about $70,000 tuition in 2025 does nothing more than panic people, and it is possible that this number is so inaccurate to be of any use. But this number does help the government encourage us to save, and it helps the private sector sell investment products designed to outperform inflation estimates. If we accept that we will not find any consensus as to how governments will fund education across the country now and into the future, we can still expect our leaders to further reform Canada Student Loans. At the end of the day, we should ensure that our citizens have access to borrowed money so that they can take greater responsibility for their educations when no one else will help them.

I have always said that the problem with these loans in our country is that repayment is not tied to future income. If your eventual salary can be attributed, at least in part, to the training you get in college and university, why should that salary not be the basis for how you pay back what you have borrowed? If these kinds of loans were widely available, they would become part of the fundamental assumptions students make when planning as they come out of school. They could not be defaulted upon, and they would have to be factored into all kinds of financial decisions made by students and graduates. This might be the problem: the North American economy is rooted in personal debt. I fear, sometimes, that our governments would rather you default on your Canada Student Loan than delay getting your third and fourth credit card, delay taking out your first car loan or mortgage.

Some Good News From The Globe And Mail

I have received, at this hour, a response from the newsroom of The Globe and Mail reconfirming their position that the "Books" section is taking a two-week "pause" in advance of the autumn and reaffirming their commitment to their present level of books coverage.  I'd like to thank them publicly here.

I find this reassuring, but I still think it is important to recognize that we seldom speak out about the utilities we enjoy unless and until they are under threat.  If we take the Globe at its word and accept that this was not a testing of the waters, they still learned over these past few days just how much this section means to people.  I think that is an outstanding achievement.  The "Facebook" group devoted to this topic now has more than four hundred members.

Maybe other publications who have committed less to the coverage of books will notice.

Would The Globe and Mail Really Axe Its Books Section?

Write The Globe and Mail newsroom at newsroom@globeandmail.com and cc a note to books@globeandmail.com.

I enjoy the Saturday Globe and Mail. It carries the nation's best crossword puzzle. The columnists are excellent, and the longer pieces are fabulous. The "Review" section has nice television, movie, and even some music coverage. But the jewel is "Books." A stand-alone (fold-alone?) section, it provides Canada's most comprehensive discussion of international publishing. That is the key for me. While The New York Times Book Review (and related podcast, which I recommend heartily) is indispensable, there is little Canadian content, as you might expect. On the other hand, stand-alone Canadian publications of review appear less frequently and have no international content. "Books" in the Globe strikes a nice balance for me.

Now, full disclosure... When I first came home from Oxford, I had nothing but a little sessional teaching, and the Globe advertised for someone to run this section. With the hubris of a man in his mid-twenties with more letters after his name than in it, I applied; while I obviously did not get the post, I did get a genuine, personalized letter of encouragement that came at an important time for me. I have been unflinchingly loyal to the publication, and supportive of the direction of Martin Levin, ever since.

So, you can imagine my concern when, having retrieved the paper from the driveway on Saturday morning, there was no "Books" section. I checked, and I checked, and I checked some more. The delivery of the Globe is so bad in my part of town that I figured the paper had been improperly assembled, I went on the 'net to check the paper's website: no new content. I missed the little notice on the second page of the front section, and so I called. A nice, but frankly harried young woman answered and explained that "Books" was taking a two-week break.

It is reasonable to expect that columnists take a vacation, but it is odd to think that staggered vacations for anyone at the paper involved with "Books" could not be arranged. I have read that, essentially, the section is a two-person operation, and so perhaps - as Mr. Levin told Quill & Quire - this really is vacation time. But readers in Canada cannot afford to let this fortnight pass without comment. I think this would send the wrong message to the Globe. Throughout North America, books coverage has been cut back or eliminated. If no one misses "Books," perhaps we really will lose it. In retrospect, should we have been more concerned when Warren Clements decided to end his brilliant "Challenge" in "Books" last year? Was this writing on the wall?

I did two things on Saturday morning. First, I canceled next weekend's Globe subscription. If it does not have "Books," I don't want it. Second, I wrote a letter to the editor, published yesterday. There have been at least four blogs to pick up the issue: Bookninja, Lemon Hound, Quill & Quire, and That Shakespeherian Rag.  Subsequently, someone started a "Facebook" group in support of "Books" that has, at this writing, more than three hundred members. I would encourage everyone to make a little noise about this. If there is no issue, the Globe will still be certain that we are reading - and that we care about "Books." Finding relevant books in my field is an important part of my job; I am trained to do so. But I can tell you frankly that I could not do this as effectively without "Books." What about the casual reader who does not follow the publishing industry as closely as I do? Where else will this information be available?

One thing I have read consistently is the concern that "Books" does not attract sufficient advertising revenue. Indeed, if Chapters, Canada's big box bric-a-brac retailer, did not take out a page, and if Amazon, its main internet books competition, turned its back, there might be precious little advertising at all. But, as one blog commentator has written, why would other retailers not advertise in this section? People who buy books also buy a lot of other things, and they even buy some things that are quite expensive. Moreover, while I quickly recycle the rest of the paper, I keep "Books" around for a week or more. Surely, this too must be valuable to someone in the business world.

America Wins, Canada Places, Coronation Street Does Not Show

This will not be your granny's post. You know her complaint: she enjoys watching soap operas, and she cannot endure it when they are pre-empted. I am not your granny, but I do share her concern. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's wall-to-wall-to-wall-to-wall coverage of our eighth consecutive eighth place finish in some Olympic sport none of the rest of us has ever played or before watched has smothered, once again, airings of Coronation Street, something many of us do watch faithfully. Is this any way to treat your loyal viewers?

It is not bad enough that episodes do not screen here for more than six months after they are first shown in England? It is not bad enough that nightly episodes of the program never see the light of day during the hockey playoffs so that fans have, for months on end, to watch them all at once in a Sunday omnibus? While the Olympics dominate CBC programming, Coronation Street is not shown at all.

There was a time when the program was aired on weekday afternoons, and I can only assume that its shuffle to prime time was an acknowledgment by CBC brass that Coronation Street pulls in viewers. Why, then, does the network - a network, after all, that exhibits all kinds of strange behavior to attract viewers, including wedging in sports programming we have all watched already on American HD channels - go out of its way to ostracize some of its most loyal viewers? I must conclude that it is because they can. Pure and simple.

If Coronation Street was aired in the middle of the night, they know we would watch it then. They have absolutely no fear that, if ill-treated, we will go elsewhere. There is nowhere else to go because we have to have our Corrie. Well, CBC, let me tell you: there is something very sick about abusing your power in a relationship in this way. If there was any way that I could go without, I would. I have tried everything. I have tried to follow screen captures and read summaries on the internet. This will not do. Oh, CBC I wish I could quit you. I cannot.

Why can you not preempt What's For Dinner? How about Steven and Chris? Does anyone watch that, anyway? Oh, I have an idea. How about showing us an occasional Corrie rather than air yet another repeat of one of the thirty or forty episodes of Arrested Development ever filmed?

Sure, I am bitter. But I will be watching, like the passive partner I am, the eastern feed of the CBC on August 25 to see, at the very first moment possible, if Violet takes Jaime back, even though he once left her for his own step-mother.  I am no less the doormat than is she.

Cheers To A Nation Of Readers

I am just back from a week in England, my first visit since 2001. When I attended school there and visited home regularly, I was struck by the interesting differences between Europe and North America. I noticed the differences again this time, but there was no difference more noteworthy than the difference in reading habits.

To an outsider, at least, England seems to be a nation of readers in a way that we are not.

Everywhere I went, I saw people people with books. They were reading books on the subway; they were reading books on the train. When people were waiting around, they were reading books. I saw people with books in the parks, in the restaurants. Sure, people were reading magazines and newspapers, and reading is reading, at some profound level. But it is significant that people were reading books, had embraced this longer form, had committed to their stories.

I don't want anyone to think that everyone had cracked open Ulysses; some of the novels were obviously light reading, if not out-and-out junk. People still had cellphones and iPods; there were people loitering who seemed more likely to be carrying a knife than a library card. But the point is still valid: reading books is embraced as a pastime in England in a way it is no longer embraced here. When did this happen, exactly? What does it mean? I recall marveling when I first sought real estate upon moving to Lethbridge: house after house had no evidence of books. Has eschewing books been going on long? How did it happen without my notice?

PETA Crosses The Line

Please do not think that this condemnation of PETA is rooted in the fact that I live in Alberta. It is not. It is rooted in the fact that I am fortunate enough to be a person, a sentient human being with judgment and discretion.

I wish only the people at PETA could claim the same.

It has on its website this morning at peta.org an advertisement comparing the slaughtering of animals to the murder of Tim McLean on that Greyhound Bus last week. It does not name Mr. McLean, thankfully, but the friends and family of that young man, people who have already suffered unspeakably, will understand the reference clearly. I include the link to the ad here because, at this moment, the comment section on the PETA website has no strong condemnation of this action: perhaps someone reading this post will feel that they should write one.

I give great credit to the media outlets, operations that rely on advertising revenue in a tight economy, that have refused to take this ghoulish business. I can give no such credit to PETA. I will not bother to mention how sympathetic I am to the broad aims of animal rights groups; I will not bother to argue the obvious point that, while deserving our protection, animals are not humans and do not warrant the comparison PETA seeks to make here. I will only say that this advertisement is perhaps the most offensive thing I have ever seen, and I am not easily offended.

The Newfoundland Government Has No Practical Role In Choosing A University President

After all these years, I still think of Memorial in St. John's as my "home" university. I could not tell you whether they think of me as a lost son, of course! I spent five years there as an undergraduate, from September 1987 to June 1992, and it was an award managed from Memorial that sent me to Oxford. I am aware that I owe my career to Memorial, and I remain protective of the institution's reputation. It is a jewel.

But I am shocked by what the public has been told about the university's current search for a President. By all accounts, an eighteen-member search committee has been undermined in its work by the government of Newfoundland and Labrador.

The issue is whether a provincial government has any practical role in the selection of a university president, and I say it does not. The search committee is, invariably, composed of a broad range of people. There are professors, certainly, but there are also individuals representing university employees and students. I have read that other Newfoundland citizens also sit on Memorial's search committee, giving it even broader representation. These searches are run by external firms who track the careers and qualifications of potential administrators years before searches are even called. Finalists are vetted exhaustively; in the case of one search with which I am familiar, staff with which candidates had worked since the beginning of their careers were polled.

In the end, the search committee makes a recommendation based on the mission of a university and how it feels a candidate will lead the institution. This recommendation goes for ratification to the university's governing body, a group over whose membership a provincial government will have had influence. The outrage in Memorial's case is that Education Minister Joan Burke has admitted to having interviewed, and rejected, two finalists in the search. "We have never told people what to teach or how to teach nor have we suppressed opinion," the minister says. "We are very simply saying we will exercise our legal obligation... which clearly states that cabinet has an approval role as an oversight, and I can assure everyone that we take that role seriously and will exercise our responsibility."

Ms Burke, a graduate of Memorial and the University of Toronto, cannot be so naive. Provincial governments, with their macroeconomic control of university finances, must be vigilant in curtailing any further influence they have over the details of programming. Handpicking, essentially, a university president is going much further than deciding, for example, to provide funding to a university so as to help meet what the government has set as its priorities. A president can, and sometimes should, be a daily influence over the tiniest details of a postsecondary institution, and provincial governments must keep their hands off. Universities develop continuities longer than any provincial administration, and Memorial must be free to fulfill its obligation to the province without worrying about the specific values of its current leaders.

Boards, in whatever form institutions configure their governing bodies, have an obligation on behalf of taxpayers to ensure that presidential searches are properly executed. If, in Newfoundland and Labrador, the provincial cabinet does this work - even if it is duplicating checks done before - I have no quarrel. But there is no reason why the people of my home province should abide any politician interviewing presidential candidates. To do so is a tremendous act of hubris.