Author: Matt

Pample the Moose: Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the Political and the Partisan

The story about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ decision to pull Professor Strong-Boag’s blog post about International Women’s Day has continued to evolve since my post on the weekend.  The Winnipeg Free Press has published additional correspondance between the Museum and Strong-Boag.  On their side, the museum indicated that they did not want blog posts that are “used as, or be perceived as, a platform for political positions or partisan statements”.  Strong-Boag replies that she considers this approach to be both “naive and pedagogically unsound for a museum supposedly dedicated to (the promotion of) Human Rights”.  It’s worth reading both statements in their entirety. 

In the public response to the CMHR’s statement, the museum has been called out by a wide array of historians for what they perceive as its desire to try to produce a museum which is not political at all.  As Franca Iacovetta and many others point out, “human rights are, by definition, political.”  I fully agree, and at least on the face of that letter, it seems that I might have given the museum too much credit if I thought they might have accepted a balanced political post that was not overtly partisan.  A museum of human rights cannot hope to be taken seriously if it pretends that the issues it discusses are not political.  There must be political content in their exhibits if they are to be able to educate their audiences.  On that issue, I’m fully onside with the critics of the museum – assuming that they are correct in taking the CMHR’s statement that they do not want the blogs to be “a platform for political positions or partisan statements” as a complete disavowal of all things political.

And now for my qualifier.  “Political” can mean a number of different things.  It can mean discussing issues that are politicized, and it can mean presenting a variety of political stances on a given issue.  It can mean taking one specific political stance or viewpoint.  Or it could mean taking one political stance or viewpoint and explicitly tying that to why a person should support or oppose a given political party.  “Political” is not the exact same thing as “partisan”, although there is overlap.  One can take a political stand on an issue – favouring government-funded childcare, for example – without explicitly endorsing or attacking a particular political party.  So while I fully endorse my colleagues in calling for a Canadian Human Rights Museum which engages with political and politicized issues, I do ask the genuine question of whether they also think or expect that the Museum should also be partisan in its communications.  Do they expect the Museum to engage in direct criticism of the current governing Conservative Party of Canada, calling the party out by name?  Would they expect the same if the governing party were Liberal or NDP?  Would they have considered it acceptable if the Canadian War Museum had explicitly criticized the Trudeau or Chrétien Liberal governments for cutbacks to the military?  Would it be acceptable for Quebec’s Musée de la civilisation to take an explicitly separatist approach to Quebec’s history and overtly celebrate the accomplishments of the PQ and criticize the PLQ for being federalist?  How will they feel if the Canadian Museum of History, in its new incarnation, explicitly celebrates past Conservative governments for their contributions to Canada’s development, and is critical of Liberal governments for supposed missteps or failures?  The parallels are not exact, but hopefully they illustrate my point.

My worry is that the debate over the issue of partisanship has got a bit lost in our haste to insist on the need for political content at this museum, and I think it would be useful to have a sense of where the line can or should be drawn.  Because if we call for a free-for-all on explicitly partisan material, then it becomes that much easier for a museum to be manipulated to serve the government of the day and to use them as a mouthpiece to trumpet the policies of the current administration.  In other words, how far do we expect museums to go, when we ask them to be “political”?

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Pample the Moose: Open Letter on the Fair Elections Act

Over the weekend, I was asked to sign an open letter regarding the proposed “Fair Elections Act”, a seriously-flawed piece of legislation with an Orwellian name.  I was happy to sign it, particularly as the recipient of a diversionary robocall in Guelph on voting day of the last federal election.  The open letter, signed by many Canadian professors, appeared in the National Post and Le Devoir today.  I encourage you to read the letter, which outlines a number of key concerns.

The press release accompanying the letter reads as follows:

FAIR ELECTIONS ACT WOULD HARM CANADIAN DEMOCRACY, SAY EXPERTS

An open letter from democracy experts challenging key proposals in the Fair Elections Act (Bill C-23) was sent to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Members of Parliament today. The letter is signed by over 150 professors at Canadian universities who teach and conduct research on the principles and practices of constitutional democracies, including 15 past presidents of the Canadian Political Science Association. It appeared in the National Post on Tuesday, March 11.  http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/03/11/dont-undermine-elections-canada/

The professors believe the Bill’s proposal to eliminate the vouching system and the use of voter information cards as ID in federal elections would decrease voter participation, especially among youth, senior citizens, and First Nations citizens. Elections Canada’s capacity to investigate electoral infractions and raise public awareness about the importance of voting would also be compromised. Also of concern are proposed reforms to campaign finance rules and expense reporting, which would allow political parties to dramatically increase their campaign coffers and spend more on political advertising. Giving money even greater influence on electoral outcomes undermines principles of political fairness and citizens’ equality, they say.

The letter’s authors are urging the Government to facilitate wider consultation on Bill C-23 at the committee level, allowing extensive testimony from both experts and ordinary Canadians.

MEDIA: for more information, contact Monique Deveaux 905-869-5599 mdeveaux@uoguelph.ca

Interviews:

Electoral law; voting rights; campaign finance:
Yasmin Dawood: Assistant Professor of Law, University of Toronto
Contact:yasmin.dawood@utoronto.ca  Phone: 416-819-9462  (cell) 416-946-7829 (office)

Democratic institutions, constitutional reform, citizen engagement:
Maxwell A. Cameron: Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia
Contact:Max.Cameron@ubc.caPhone: (011) 51-945-576-220 (cell) or by Skype: maxwellcameron

Democracy; political inequality:
Monique Deveaux: Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair, University of Guelph
Contact: mdeveaux@uoguelph.caPhone: 905-869-5599

Democracy; citizen engagement; political representation:
Melissa Williams: Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto
Contact:melissa.williams@utoronto.caPhone: 416-978-8220 (office) 647-991-5838 (cell)

Influence of money on politics; public trust; citizen engagement:
Patti Tamara Lenard: Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Public & International Affairs, University of Ottawa Contact: Patti.Lenard@uottawa.caPhone: 613-796-6647 (cell)

French media interviews: Daniel Weinstock, Professor of Law, McGill University: 514-952-3763

La Loi sur l’intégrité des élections menacerait la démocratie canadienne selon des experts

Des professeurs experts en démocratie ont envoyé aujourd’hui une lettre ouverte contestant des propositions clés de la Loi sur l’intégrité des élections (projet de loi C-23) au premier ministre Stephen Harper ainsi qu’aux membres du parlement. La lettre est signée par plus de 150 professeurs d’universités canadiennes qui enseignent et conduisent des recherches sur les principes et les pratiques des démocraties constitutionnelles, incluant 15 présidents passés de l’Association canadienne de science politique.

http://www.ledevoir.com/politique/canada/402209/loisurlintegritedeselections-lettre-ouverte-au-premier-ministre-stephen-harper-et-au-parlement-du-canada

Les professeurs croient que la proposition, contenue dans le projet de loi, visant à éliminer le système des répondants ainsi que l’utilisation de la carte d’information de l’électeur à titre de pièce d’identité pour voter lors des élections fédérales diminuerait la participation des électeurs, surtout parmi les jeunes, les aînés et les citoyens des Premières Nations. La capacité d’Élections Canada d’enquêter sur les infractions à la loi électorale et de promouvoir l’importance de voter serait également compromise. Une autre préoccupation des professeurs concerne les réformes proposées du processus de contrôle du financement des campagnes et des dépenses électorales. Ces réformes permettraient aux partis politiques d’augmenter de manière significative leur budget de campagne électorale et de dépenser davantage en publicité partisane. Selon les professeurs, donner à l’argent une influence encore plus grande sur les résultats des élections mine le principe d’égalité des chances électorales.

Les auteurs de la lettre demandent au gouvernement de rendre possible une consultation plus large sur le projet de loi C-23 au niveau du comité qui permettrait à la fois aux experts et aux citoyens de pouvoir témoigner et participer activement au processus consultatif.

CONTACT PRESSE: média francais:
Daniel Weinstock, Professeur, Faculté de droit, McGill: 514-952-3763/danielweins@gmail.com;
André Blais, CRC en études électorales, U de Montréal: 514-343-6111 x40564

Influence of money on politics; public trust; citizen engagement:
Patti Tamara Lenard: Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Public & International Affairs, University of Ottawa Contact: Patti.Lenard@uottawa.caPhone: 613-796-6647 (cell)

Electoral law; voting rights; campaign finance:
Yasmin Dawood: Assistant Professor of Law, University of Toronto
Contact:yasmin.dawood@utoronto.ca Phone: 416-819-9462  (cell) 416-946-7829 (office)

Democratic institutions, constitutional reform, citizen engagement:
Maxwell A. Cameron: Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia
Contact:Max.Cameron@ubc.caPhone: (011) 51-945-576-220 (cell)
or by Skype: maxwellcameron [Dr. Cameron is abroad but happy to field media calls]

Democracy and political inequality:
Monique Deveaux: Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair, University of Guelph
Contact: mdeveaux@uoguelph.caPhone: 905-869-5599

Democracy; citizen engagement; political representation:
Melissa Williams: Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto
Contact:melissa.williams@utoronto.caPhone: 416-978-8220 (office) 647-991-5838 (cell)

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Pample the Moose: Silencing or Strategic Manoeuvring? Professor Strong-Boag, International Women’s Day and the Canadian Museum of Human Rights

For the past three days, my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been filled with a series of re-posts and re-tweets related to Professor Veronica Strong-Boag’s blogpost about International Women’s Day (IWD) for the (still-to-be-opened) Canadian Museum of Human Rights.  According to the detailed report on ActiveHistory.ca, containing Strong-Boag’s post and

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Pample the Moose: Silencing or Strategic Manoeuvring? Professor Strong-Boag, International Women’s Day and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

For the past three days, my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been filled with a series of re-posts and re-tweets related to Professor Veronica Strong-Boag’s blogpost about International Women’s Day (IWD) for the (still-to-be-opened) Canadian Museum for Human Rights.  According to the detailed report on ActiveHistory.ca, containing Strong-Boag’s post and commentary about the story, she had been commissioned by the Museum to write a post about IWD for their collective blog.  When she submitted the blogpost, it was initially approved, and then withdrawn when the communications department expressed concern over her comment on the current Conservative government.  As a result, historians from coast to coast have been decrying the “censorship” and “silencing” of Strong-Boag by the museum (and speculating that the current federal government might have had a hand in this).  

Shortly after the ActiveHistory piece was published, Franca Iacovetta, professor of Canadian history at the University of Toronto, and the current president of the International Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, published a condemnation of “the effort to silence Canada’s leading women’s historian” on the Berks website.  Since that time, PressProgress has added their voice into the mix, commenting on the irony of a human rights museum censoring a commissioned blog.  Both of these pieces have also received extensive coverage on Facebook and Twitter.

I have a somewhat different take on these events from many of my historian colleagues, and would posit a working theory.  I suspect that Prof. Strong-Boag might have known full well (or at least strongly suspected) that her blogpost for International Women’s Day, which only includes one reference to Canadian governments past or present and does so to highlight the “anti-woman record” of “Canada’s Conservative government”, was never going to be approved by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The museum has been mired in controversies and funding crises for years – even before it has opened to the public.  The people who commissioned the post probably were hoping for a broad overview of the history of International Women’s Day, or perhaps a post that included some discussion of how Canada’s governments (past and present) have dealt with women’s issues.  This is not what they received, and someone probably balked at the fact that the sole reference in the post to Canada’s governments was a partisan attack on the current Conservative administration.  An offer to add more detail to support the assessment of the current government as “anti-woman” was probably even less welcomed. 

Here’s where I think the story gets interesting. By being “censored”, Strong-Boag has ensured that her message gets diffused to a much wider readership than the original blogpost itself likely would have been.  It is a fairly standard social movement tactic to try to create a situation (a “grievance” to use the social movement scholarly jargon) that will lend itself to media exposure, with the movement able to cast itself as the aggrieved party.  This helps to generate broader-based support for the movement, which is crucial to resource mobilization.  I very strongly suspect that the vast majority of people who have commented and re-posted this story have never before read the blog of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and would not have seen the post had it simply been posted there.  I had to scroll back to August 2013 to find a post on the CMHR blog that had a comment on it.  It also isn’t a blog with a rich history of guest postings – only six names of guest bloggers appear on their contributors roll.  The ActiveHistory.ca website, on the other hand, has a widespread readership among Canadian historians and engenders a lot of commentary.  The Berks is the main conference on women’s history in North America.  Far from being silenced, the decision by the CMHR to remove the post as written from their site has meant that Strong-Boag got a series of major platforms to attack the Harper government’s record on women’s rights, and along the way to damage the CMHR’s reputation and cast suspicion (possibly warranted, although this is unproven) of a sinister federal hand behind the removal of the blogpost.  Meanwhile, there is no post for International Women’s Day on the CMHR blog.

To be perfectly clear, I don’t disagree with Strong-Boag’s stance on the Harper government’s policy record.  But nor am I surprised that the museum would have shied away from her post.  Strong-Boag  engaged in a direct partisan attack. A paragraph discussing past-and-present Canadian governments’ decidedly mixed record on women’s issues (perhaps including Trudeau-era restrictions on the National Action Committee on the Status of Women’s lobbying efforts that were linked to their government funding, or the successive failures of a series of federal governments to make any meaningful progress on the childcare agenda) might possibly have made it past the communications officers at the CMHR.  At the very least, it would have been harder for a communications officer to defend the removal of a blogpost that presented a more balanced critique of the less-than-stellar record of Canada’s federal governments (Liberal and Conservative) on women’s issues that placed the current claw-backs in their historical context.  But to me, the section on the current government in the post as currently written reads as an isolated (if deserved) swipe at the government of the day and explicitly partisan.

If this was a deliberate strategic move on Strong-Boag’s part, it has worked beautifully, so kudos to her for getting her message disseminated.  Far more people have read her account of IWD than likely would have ever seen it on the CMHR blog.  I just find it a little bit disingenuous to speak of silencing and censorship in what appears to me to be a case of a museum trying not to appear to be overtly partisan in its public communications.  Even if it could have been claimed that this was a “guest post”, the museum would have been held accountable in the media, and with their various funders, for the content that appeared.

UPDATE (March 9, 3:10 PM): The story is now on the CBC website, with additional commentary from Strong-Boag, and a reply from the museum’s blog editor. 

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Pample the Moose: Silencing or Strategic Manoeuvring? Professor Strong-Boag, International Women’s Day and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

For the past three days, my Facebook and Twitter feeds have been filled with a series of re-posts and re-tweets related to Professor Veronica Strong-Boag’s blogpost about International Women’s Day (IWD) for the (still-to-be-opened) Canadian Museum for Human Rights.  According to the detailed report on ActiveHistory.ca, containing Strong-Boag’s post and

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On Wrestling, Politics and Other Musings of the Mind's Eye: Best News of the Day (and something that sane, logical people figured out decades ago)

Today the Toronto Star ran a story written by the Canadian Press about the IMF saying it’s good for the economy of a country to tax the rich fairly. This really made my day and made me think that there might be hope for humanity after all.

How are conservatives and anti-tax idealogues going to defend themselves now that a study by the bloody IMF no less has shown that more wealth redistribution, higher taxes on the wealthy and a smaller income gap are highly beneficial to the long-term health of an economy? My only question is: how did it take the IMF so damn long to figure out something so freakin’ obvious to any sane, logical human being?

Maybe this is the first step on the path back to more sensible, progressive, balanced economic plans that will get countries afloat again and make the bailout a thing o the past! Or am I just dreaming in technicolour?

Anyway, here is the CP article that was posted on the Toronto Star website (thestar.com):

Taxing the rich not bad for the economy finds IMF researchers

 

Study incorporates recently compiled figures comparing data from a large number of countries and shows lowering inequality boosts growth.
By: Julian Beltrame The Canadian Press, Published on Wed Feb 26 2014

OTTAWA—A new paper by researchers at the International Monetary Fund appears to debunk a tenet of conservative economic ideology — that taxing the rich to give to the poor is bad for the economy.
The paper by IMF researchers Jonathan Ostry, Andrew Berg and Charalambos Tsangarides will be applauded by politicians and economists who regard high levels of income inequality as not only a moral stain on society but also economically unsound.
Labelled as the first study to incorporate recently compiled figures comparing pre- and post-tax data from a large number of countries, the authors say there is convincing evidence that lower net inequality is good economics, boosting growth and leading to longer-lasting periods of expansion.

In the most controversial finding, the study concludes that redistributing wealth, largely through taxation, does not significantly impact growth unless the intervention is extreme.
In fact, because redistributing wealth through taxation has the positive impact of reducing inequality, the overall affect on the economy is to boost growth, the researchers conclude.
“We find that higher inequality seems to lower growth. Redistribution, in contrast, has a tiny and statistically insignificant (slightly negative) effect,” the paper states.
“This implies that, rather than a trade-off, the average result across the sample is a win-win situation, in which redistribution has an overall pro-growth effect.”
While the paper is heavy on the economics, there is no mistaking the political implications in the findings.
In Canada, the Liberal party led by Justin Trudeau is set to make supporting the middle class a key plank in the upcoming election and the NDP has also stressed the importance of tackling income inequality.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have boasted that tax cuts, particularly deep reductions in corporate taxation, are at least partly responsible for why the Canadian economy outperformed other G7 countries both during and after the 2008-09 recession.
In the Commons on Tuesday, Employment Minister Jason Kenney said the many tax cuts his government has introduced since 2006, including a two-percentage-point trim of the GST, has helped most Canadians.
Speaking on a Statistics Canada report showing net median family wealth had increased by 44.5 per cent since 2005, he added:
“It is no coincidence because, with the more than 160 tax cuts by this government, Canadian families, on average, have seen their after-tax disposable income increase by 10 per cent across all income categories. We are continuing to lead the world on economic growth and opportunity for working families.”

The authors concede that their conclusions tend to contradict some well-accepted orthodoxy, which holds that taxation is a job killer.
But they say that many previous studies failed to make a distinction between pre-tax inequality and post-tax inequality, and so often compared apples to oranges, among other shortcomings.
The data they looked at showed almost no negative impact from redistribution policies and that economies where incomes are more equally distributed tend to grow faster and have growth cycles that last longer.
Meanwhile, they say the data is not crystal clear that even large redistributions have a direct negative impact, although “from history and first principles . . . after some point redistribution will be destructive of growth.”
Still, they also stop short of saying their conclusions definitively settle the issue, acknowledging it is a complex area of economic theory with many variables at play and a scarcity of hard data.
Instead, they urge more rigorous study and say their findings “highlight the urgency of this agenda.”
The Washington-based institution released the study Wednesday morning but, perhaps due to the controversial nature of the conclusions, calls it a “staff discussion note” that does “not necessarily” represent the IMF views or policy. It was authorized for distribution by Olivier Blanchard, the IMF’s chief economist.
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Pample the Moose: Jacques Henripin, demographer and public intellectual, 1926-2013

It’s sad that it took a death of a very notable figure in my research field to jump-start my blogging for the fall term, but I didn’t want to let this pass without comment.

Jacques Henripin passed away earlier this week.  He was an incredibly influential scholar and demographer whose work had a tremendous impact on the political face of Quebec.  In the 1960s and 1970s, his studies of Quebec’s birth rate, immigration trends, and linguistic assimilation trends predicted that if patterns continued as they were, by the year 2000 less than half of Montreal’s population would be francophone.  I think it is fair to say that in many respects, his work was highly influential in shaping the recommendations of the Gendron Commission of the early 1970s, and the language legislation of both the Liberal Party of Quebec and the Parti Québécois. 

Although I was not a tremendous fan of all of his politics, I do have great respect for a scholar who played such an influential role in shaping the public life of Quebec, and whose work had such an impact on my own field of study.  May he rest in peace.

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