andrewmcintyre.ca

…I truly don’t know of another area of public policy where relevant facts and salient debates are more divorced from the public discussion — where ignorance and fear have more currency — than is the case with tech policy. The unreality of the debate tends to work out fine for the defense contractors, industry consultants, and major corporations involved in tech policy. But that state of affairs leaves the public in the dark.

Nancy Scola, writing for The American Prospect blog on the INTERNET KILL SWITCH (!!!!1) and “The Trouble With Tech Reporting“

Saturday’s article about secondary suites in the Calgary Herald, “Basement suites hit brick walls – Homeowners leave city open houses frustrated by rules” does a good job pointing out the absurdity of Calgary’s land use bylaw.

To have city council hear individual land use re-designation applications, in a city of over a million people, doesn’t just hurt the people that need affordable housing, or the home owners looking to rent out their basements, it hurts council itself.

This isn’t just an issue of parking, or homelessness, or even of creating more urban density to combat Calgary’s urban sprawl; the secondary suites issue is one of governance – a recognition that city hall exists to serve the needs of Calgarians. With bylaws like these, it’s hardly surprising that many Calgarians are growing ever more cynical about the way our council works, or doesn’t work at all in their eyes. As Dan Gustafson is quoted as saying in the Herald article “it’s to the point of ridiculousness.”

The shameful admission that city council approved only four land use re-designations in the 10 months prior to the launch of their $25,000 secondary suites grant program for homeowners – a band-aid solution at best – is another glaring example of the paralysis gripping our council. This paralysis consistently prevents council from making the right decisions, look no further than today’s analysis that “backroom politics cost taxpayers $2 billion.”

It was hard not to laugh out loud reading Ald. Diane Colley-Urquhart’s absurd claim that “these illegal suites […] are destroying our neighbourhoods.” Even more disgusting was her call to ramp up enforcement to “hire the inspectors and get these people out of there” and straight onto the street in the middle of winter. But given her recent inept effort in the Calgary-Glenmore by-election, this kind of ignorance seems more and more commonplace amongst our many mediocre elected officials.

I hope they can prove us wrong by tackling the real problem, a land use bylaw that prevents honest homeowners from securing a legal source of additional income while thwarting the efforts of students and other lower income Calgarians to find a safe, affordable, and legal place to live.

To meet the Calgary Homeless Foundation’s call for 200 new, affordable and legal secondary suites every year (in line with their goal of ending homelessness in our city), it’s going to take vision and leadership on our city council. Sadly, these two things are about as scarce a legal basement suite.

Acting with the legal support of the BC Civil Liberties Association, this week two activists filed a lawsuit challenging a Vancouver bylaw that restricts the right to “distribute material critical of the Games during and around the events.”

BCCLA President Robert Holmes commented on the severity of the punishment for violating Olympics inspired bylaws in Vancouver, Richmond and Whistler that  give municiple workers the power to enter private property to remove “offensive” signs to protect the Olympic brand:

If you think through what people get thrown in jail for in this country, six months in jail is usually reserved for criminals who have a record of several convictions of breaking and entering, but now it’s the government that wants to break in and take down signs that should be part of people’s freedom of expression.

Collectively now: W. T. F. ?!?!

(link h/t cknw.com)

There’s a parade of “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED“  pronoucements about the recession being “over,” which – in case you missed it – includes the Bank of Canada’s very own Goldmach Sachs’ alumni: Mark Carney.  Only if he had made the annoucement on the deck of an aircraft carrier, could it be more farcical.

James Howard Kunstler‘s snarky response to the string of  “the recession is over” pronoucements made me laugh:

All this goes to show is how completely the people in charge of things in the USA have lost their minds.  They seem to think this mass exercise in pretend will resurrect the great march to the WalMarts, to the new car showrooms, and the cul-de-sac model houses, reignite another round of furious sprawl-building, salad-shooter importing [AM: I LOL'ed ], and no-doc liar-lending, not to mention the pawning off of innovative, securitized stinking-carp debt paper onto credulous pension funds in foreign lands where due diligence has never been heard of, renew the leveraged buying-out of zippy-looking businesses by smoothies who have no idea how to run them (and no real intention of doing it, anyway), resuscitate the construction of additional strip malls, new office park “capacity” and Big Box “power centers,” restart the trade in granite countertops and home theaters, and pack the turnstiles of Walt Disney world – all this while turning Afghanistan into a neighborhood that Beaver Cleaver would be proud to call home.

Link via @newres

While on one of my many bike rides of late (apologies for neglecting this blog in the summer!), I listened to this great interview with Robert Kenner on Food Inc., his documentary that opened in Calgary this weekend.

On the Media is one of my favourite podcasts. I never miss an episode. Ever.

So it did not surprise me at all that they followed the Kenner interview by unearthing some excellent background on Upton Sinclair‘s The Jungle to provide some context on the history of the muckracking  exposé versus the food industry.

Over 100 years later, we still exert too little control (or even thought) about what we eat. Myself included. But I hope we can change that.

I will be watching Food Inc. this week as it plays at The Uptown here in Calgary. (Showing: Nightly: 4:50, 7:00, 9:00 & Sat-Sun: 2:20, 4:50, 7:00, 9:00)

Reading talkingpointsmemo.com, one of my favorite American news and politics blogs, I came across both this controversial comment made by New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin discussing the General Motors bankruptcy on MSNBC’s Morning Joe: 

“Name a successful unionized company. Think. You’re going to go to [commercial] break before you come up with one. And that’s the problem.”

Perusing the instantly crowdsourced  long and obvious list of profitable unionized companies, I found this issue particularly thought provoking, especially in light of current economic and financial circumstances.

I have always been fairly luke warm in my support for unions. Although, I have long recognized their important historical role in raising the wages, living standards (even of non-union employees), and in addressing issues like health and safety concerns for your average Joe (or Josephine), I also grew up to have a healthy dose of skepticism regarding union leadership’s motives given their propensity towards corruption and their potential defense of lazy and/or incompetent “good ol’ boys,” (i.e. the very sort of conventional wisdom expressed by Sorkin). 

Given my nuanced “double edged sword” view of this issue, I was incredibly impressed with the insightfulness of a TPM reader’s response, eviscerating much of this conventional wisdom: 

Sorkin’s comments on media bias are one component of a reigning narrative about economic policy in America that we’ve been stuck with for a very long time that has always betrayed a very specific class bias among journalists. It’s a story that many of us have heard from our upper middle class baby boomer Dads over and over again and inevitably goes something like this:

Liberalism in the 60′s and ’70s were well-intentioned and of course the civil rights movement was necessary, but “interest groups” (read: unions and minorities) “went too far” and the government tried to do “too much.” Government over-regulated and over-taxed and spent too much on programs that didn’t work. Unions choked our competitiveness. Liberals didn’t properly account for unintended consequences of government programs and the degree to which the government would interfere with the free market and it screwed up the economy. Plus, the social programs alienated “mainstream Americans” (read: white Christians). It turned out we needed Reagan to cut taxes, break the unions (ie air traffic controllers), and deregulate to fix things again.

Whether some of that is true or not is beside the point (based on my recent reading of Matusow’s “Unraveling of America,” its not all untrue). But I was seven in 1980, Sorkin was three. This view of the world is frozen in an era that’s been gone for three decades. Its as if nothing has happened since, like a major opening in the wealth inequality gap, the rise in competition from heavily unionized Western Europe, the failure of supply side economics, or the shift in the economy from heavy manufacturing of goods to the provision of services.

To marry yourself to this narrative for all time no matter what happens in the world seems to be, well, pretty bad journalism for starters. It was kind of understandable, if not excusable, when it resulted from the fact that mainstream journalists themselves came of age through the era of the ’60s and ’70s that manifested this narrative. But when it results from their privileged children recycling the narrative, it makes me wonder why those children, who are supposed to be journalists, aren’t formulating their own views of the world based on the three decades since the ’70s in which they themselves have lived.

What does the New York Times pay Andrew Ross Sorkin for if he hasn’t formed a view of unions in America based on events that have occurred in his lifetime? Couldn’t we just keep paying Cokie Roberts to come on morning shows if all we wanted was recycled, conventional baby boomers wisdom devoid of any observation or original thought?

We’re in the midst of a vicious war of ideas on many issues. With politics, finance, business, media, the environment and climate change, it is the positions advanced by camps defending the conventional wisdom that often seem to be holding back real change and progress needed to create the type sustainable, permanent future we need. And it looks like we have just stumbled across another clear articulation of a piece of conventional wisdom destined for the scrap heap… that is, until these worn out ideas are recycled by future generations.

On that  note, perhaps my own jaded cynicism needs some rethinking too.

As noted by the Inside the CBC blog, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has taken out their big black marker and begun heavily redacting their transcripts of supposedly public hearings related to the fate of the private broadcasters. How on earth does this “Independent Public Authority” justify these secretive practices? How can deliberately hiding this information “ensure that both the broadcasting and telecommunications systems serve the Canadian public” as is the CRTC’s stated mandate? The CRTC website states: “As an independent organization, the CRTC works to serve the needs and interests of citizens, industries, interest groups and the government.” When will the CRTC remember which group is at the top of that list?

On the other side of the coin, today I heard of a federal government bureaucracy getting it right. Canada’s National Film Board has opened up their archives & put hundreds of their films online. Check out www.nfb.ca/explore-by/ and make sure to share any gems you find using your favorite social networking platform. 

On the topic of sharing cool stuff using social media, my friend Doug Lacombe has written up an engaging examination on the etiquette of using twitter during events and presentations in “Live tweeting; bird–brained or brilliant?”

Lastly, Duncan Kinney, another buddy of mine and recent journalism grad, has been hard at work on two impressive local Calgary web community initiatives. YYCblogs.com is an opt-in Calgary blog aggregator that crowdsources its content from Calgary bloggers. It is an excellent way of discovering new local blogs and what topics are important to the Calgary blogging community. yycPHOTOBOOK.com is the other project Duncan is involved in organizing. The website explains its raison d’etre with a simple rhetorical question:

If you could show someone only one picture that displayed the most important part of Calgary, what would you show? Now take that idea with 32 different Calgary-based photographers and what kind of book would you get? That’s what we’re going to find out with this project.

I’m looking forward to the results.