What Did Loyola Really Decide?

Posted by on | Canada, education, multiculturalism, Quebec, Supreme Court (Canada)

My first serious engagement in public policy matters occurred in 1997 when I was asked to join the Groupe de travail sur la place de la religion à l’école publique du Québec. Our mandate was to reflect on the place that religious teaching should have in Quebec’s public schools. Quebec was already in the process of eliminating religious school boards, but that administrative measure left untouched the content of religious teaching in Quebec’s public schools. Parents of a certain age will remember that for a number of years, they were required to tick off a box when signing their kids up for school indicating whether they wanted them to receive Catholic religious teaching, Protestant religious teaching, or non-confessional moral education.

That situation was clearly unstable. First, now that schools in the public system were no longer Catholic or Protestant, it required of each school that it provide three different kinds of course, a logistical nightmare for resource-strapped public schools.… Continue reading

Kymlicka on interculturalism vs. multiculturalism

Posted by on | multiculturalism, political philosophy

We’ve had some discussions on this blog about whether there are any real differences between so-called “interculturalism” policies and “multiculturalism,” correctly understood. Now Will Kymlicka weighs in with a very good paper on the topic:

Defending Diversity in an Era of Populism: Multiculturalism and Interculturalism Compared

One of the things that I’ve always admired about Will’s work is that, not only does he have an unparalleled mastery of both normative theory and empirical detail, but he also has very good political and rhetorical instincts. He is not interested in doing “ideal theory” in this area, but is concerned to develop normative theories that can directly guide the practice of nation-states, right here and now.

I was reminded of the importance of this the other day, in the department, chatting with a few colleagues about current debates in just war theory. One of them, who has made rather substantial contributions to this literature, said “well of course, the problem is that the mainstream position in the philosophical literature is so far removed from the actual practice of any nation-state ever, that nothing anyone says has any relevance to the real world.” At which point I said, “yeah, the environmental ethics literature is exactly the same,” and another colleague chimed in and said, “yeah, the global justice literature is exactly the same… actually come to think of it, the whole egalitarianism literature is the same.” Thinking about it, I realized that this list could be extended quite considerably — of areas where philosophers have simply written themselves out of any and all policy discussions, by abstracting away so many features of the real world that there is nothing left to prevent the adoption of extremist views.… Continue reading

Shaughnessy Cohen prize

Posted by on | self-promotion

As some of you have heard, I wound up winning the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for Political Writing last night in Ottawa. Which was exciting!

And no, I won’t be reviewing my own book here. You see though why I wanted to get my reviews/reaction pieces on the other books done before the announcement was made — whether I won or lost, it would have seemed weird to write about them afterwards.

For those who are looking for a review of Enlightenment 2.0, I would recommend this one by Ivor Tossell — on the grounds that there was nothing in it that I disagreed with (and the criticisms were I thought spot on). When that review came out, I laughed at the line “Reading Enlightenment 2.0 feels a bit like arriving in a professor’s lecture in the third week of a course, and being left to piece together what we missed,” because in fact the original first chapter of the book was cut out during the editorial process.… Continue reading

Chantal Hébert: The Morning After: the 1995 Quebec Referendum and the Day that Almost Was

Posted by on | politics, Quebec

Running out of time on this one. Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading all the books that have been selected as finalists for the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing (not including my own), and writing up my reactions — mainly to promote conversation. Today we have Chantal Hébert (with Jean Lapierre) The Morning After: the 1995 Quebec Referendum and the Day that Almost Was.

This book is a series of “behind-the-scenes” interviews with politicians involved in the events surrounding the 1995 Quebec referendum. It was widely reviewed in the press when it came out, so I won’t repeat elements of that discussion. It should be noted that these reviews contained a lot of “spoilers,” so a lot of the interesting revelations I already knew before reading the book (e.g. that Jacques Parizeau wouldn’t take Lucien Bouchard’s phone calls, and so the two of them didn’t speak on the day of the vote – there was no coordination between the two on what they were going to say).… Continue reading

Naomi Klein: This Changes Everything

Posted by on | economy, environment, politics

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading all the books that have been selected as finalists for the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing (not including my own), and writing up my reactions — mainly to promote conversation. Today we have Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.

Readers of this blog may know that I’ve been having an entirely one-sided argument with Naomi Klein for over 10 years now (since the publication of the book that I co-wrote with Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell, which despite having only 5 pages or so criticizing Klein, was widely seen as a “response” to No Logo). It is certainly the case that I have spent years of my life trying to get the left in Canada to stop writing books like the ones that Klein writes. As a result, the success of This Changes Everything represents, in a very real sense, the failure of one of my more important life projects.… Continue reading

Against ranked ballot electoral systems

Posted by on | elections

One of the things that I’ve never succeeded in doing is figuring out how to do a popular or accessible presentation of some of the major findings in “voting theory.” The academic literature gets pretty complicated pretty quickly, but it has a single, unequivocal conclusion: of the basic family of voting procedures, none is intrinsically superior. If you start by working out a list of desirable, intuitively plausible criteria that you want a voting system to satisfy, you will find that no system satisfies them all. As a result, the best way to evaluate a system, in my view, is pragmatically – in terms of its likely consequences, which is to say, by the type of government and political dynamics that it is likely to generate.

There are, however, a huge number of organizations and activists pushing for various types of electoral reform – almost always claiming virtues for these systems that they do not possess.… Continue reading

In due cake

Posted by on | self-promotion

Today is the one-year anniversary of the creation of this blog. 49,374 visitors and 156,981 pageviews later, I would like to mark the occasion in two ways.

First, I thought I might provide a list of our top five most popular posts of the year, ranked by number of readers:

  1. Joseph Heath: Thoughts on Rob Ford, vol. 2 (6,223)
  2. Joseph Heath: Why people hate economics, in one lesson (4,570)
  3. Daniel Weinstock: On Israel, Gaza and double standards (3,138)
  4. Jocelyn Maclure: Le multiculturalism, un despotisme? réplique à Mathieu Bock-Côté (3,108)
  5. Joseph Heath: Abject economic illiteracy at the Globe and Mail (2,126)

You see why journalists are all missing Rob Ford?

Overall I have no idea if this is good traffic or not, I’ve never had a blog before. But I’ll take it!

Second I’d like to acknowledge the contribution of a few people who work behind the scenes: Timothy Walker (from timeanddesire) for the initial site and logo design, and Jeremy Davis for regular comment moderation and technical troubleshooting.… Continue reading

John Ralston Saul: The Comeback

Posted by on | aboriginal affairs, Canada, politics

Over the next few weeks I’m reading all the books that have been selected as finalists for the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing (not including my own), and writing up my reactions — mainly to promote conversation. Today we have John Ralston Saul’s The Comeback: How Aboriginals are Reclaiming Power and Influence.

I must admit that I have always struggled with John Ralston Saul’s books. I own several. My biggest problem is that I never know what the hell he’s talking about. It could be him, or it could be me, but something tells me it’s him. I’m constantly getting pulled up short. He’ll be writing along, and he’ll say something like “you know how whenever you do blah-blah, someone will come up to you and say blah-blah,” and I’ll be like, “um, er, no actually, that never happens to me.” It’s always like that.

Reading Saul reminds me of the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where a transporter malfunction leaves Geordi and Ensign Ro “out of phase” with everyone else on the ship.… Continue reading

I drove 78 miles to the 100-mile store

Posted by on | Uncategorized

This could be the title of a country song. I have lots of friends who love to shop at The Hundred Mile Store in Creemore, which is kind of a locavore paradise. I love to bug them about it, just because, you see, they’re all from Toronto. So they drive to The Hundred Mile Store — which is 78 miles from downtown Toronto. Okay, that’s not entirely true, they’re usually up in the country anyhow, skiing or whatever, and they pop in — so they drive more like 10 or 20 miles to get there. The point is that in doing so they violate the most important rule of socially-conscious food consumption, which is the “last mile” principle. If you look at carbon impact in particular, what matters most is the last mile — how the food gets from the store to your home, because that’s the inefficient link in the chain, where the big environmental impact is felt (mainly because the food is no longer being bulk delivered, it is disaggregated, so the social cost of transportation skyrockets).… Continue reading

Graham Steele: What I Learned About Politics

Posted by on | politics

Since Canadian political writing is a cause near and dear to my own heart – and since I think that, in general, we do not produce or consume enough of it – I’m writing up a set of short reviews of the books that have been selected as finalists for the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing. (Which I gather is a big deal in Ottawa, but no one else in Canada seems to pay much attention to – which is, incidentally, also the problem with Canadian political writing as a whole.) Maybe “review” is not the right word, but perhaps “reaction pieces”…

So first up is Graham Steele, he of the prosaic title: What I Learned about Politics.

I hope I’m not tipping my hand too much in saying that this book was my favourite, and certainly one that I’ll be recommending to my students, particularly grad students working on democratic theory.… Continue reading