My life

My life is the sound of silence.




































I came to this conclusion this morning while sitting at the coffee shop reading. There I was sitting amongst several people yet alone. People were talking and sharing while I sat quietly in the corner reading my book anguishing over the fact that I had no one to share things with; nobody to talk to.

I think that this is part of the reason that I started this blog to begin with. I wanted a release, a way to say what was on my mind, to speak, to be heard, to show the world that I am somebody. Yet that feeling of self never seems sure or complete when all one is left with is the silence one finds in their mind.

I'm not saying that I'm depressed or anything like that just that those moments of connectivity are too few and far between. I can't say that I really understand how to go about changing this either. I talk with people, I go out and spend time in public places, I meet people all the time at school. There just seems to be something about me that keeps that distance in place.

Well hello there.

Well I finally did it.

I got myself a laptop computer.

I was always so ambivalent towards them. I mean what did I need a portable computer for?

Then a friend of mine got one and over time I kind of got enamored with the notion of having a computer I could take with me. So I did it. I bit the bullet and shelled out the cash (with the help of my overly generous parents) and got myself one.

It came in handy too. Two days after I got it blew out my knee (its being diagnosed at this stage as a torn ACL) which required me to be off my feet for a week. Having the ability to sit on the couch and still use my computer was a huge blessing. The week flew by.

Today, for the first time I’ve taken my computer on the road with me. As I write this I’m sitting in my favorite coffee shop watching the world pass by. I love it.

I’m in teachers college now, or as it was explained to me, the School of Education (it seems ‘teacher’s college’ refers to a time when teachers came directly out of high school and went to teacher’s college – that is no longer the case as all teacher’s require at least a BA). So I grabbed up my computer and headed down to the coffee shop to do some homework. There are just too may distractions at home. It’s just so nice being able to do my work on the computer here rather than having to hand write everything then having to transpose it all onto the computer later.

Wonderful.

***

Everything seems so strange right now.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. Its been a long time since I could say that. I’ve been going on now for five plus years struggling towards becoming a teacher and now the end is in sight. It feels good.

Of course this has simply brought on a new set of worries, such as actually teaching. I’m going to be in the classroom in November for three weeks. It seems like such a short time away that I’m concerned that I just won’t be able to learn what I need to learn between now and then.

***

Its been a long time since I’ve actually written anything here. It feels kind of weird. I’m not too sure what it is I should say.

***

I recently participated in an online discussion concerning the existence of God and the role of religion in politics. The discussion was mostly with Americans and I’m not all that sure what role that played in how the discussion played itself out. We (Canadians) often hear about such things as a Culture War and the Religious Right from America. While I knew what they were I’m not all that positive that I had truly experienced them before, or at least not the American version. Everyone seemed to be very angry.

I’ve worked hard over the past several years to become the kind of person who is able to discuss delicate issues (politics, economics, religion being the big three) without getting personal. Of course I’m not always successful at it but I try. You’d have to ask a friend of mine how well I really do at achieving these lofty aims, but I enjoy discussing such matters and in doing so I try to be polite, civil and attentive. This discussion made it hard to hold onto such values.

I guess because such discussions are so well tread that people start mid-stride. There are so many stereotypes, accusations, condemnations and insults flying around hat it seems that nothing is ever really discussed. It just seemed to be time where people were constantly poking each other in order to piss someone off rather than to truly have a discussion. I found it rather frustrating, especially when I kept being attacked (for lack of a better term) for things I had no part in.

I guess I’ve just been lucky to have had a friend with whom I could discuss such matters in a civil manner. I’ve learned a lot from such discussions; both about myself and my beliefs as well as differing viewpoints concerning such issues. However this was not one of those times.

Canada 2020: part 7

Roger Gibbins
Roger Gibbins is president and CEO of the Canada West Foundation, a public policy research group based in Calgary. Prior to assuming the leadership of the Canada West Foundation in 1998, Roger was a professor of political science at the University of Calgary, where he started his academic career in 1973 and served as department head from 1987 to 1996. Roger has authored, co-authored or edited 21 books and more than 100 articles and book chapters, most dealing with western Canadian themes and issues. In 1998 he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and was the president of the Canadian Political Science Association from 1999 to 2000.

Western separation, the time has come
Roger Gibbins Aug. 21, 2006

It should never have come to this. Tomorrow Albertans will go to the polls to vote on leaving Canada, and any doubt as to the outcome was removed last month when the British Columbia legislature resolved to hold a similar referendum within six months. It is likely that Saskatchewan will soon follow suit.

The legal technicalities are straightforward. Back in the late 1990s, when the Quebec sovereignty movement was still alive and well, the Supreme Court and later Parliament through the Clarity Act recognized that the Government of Canada had an obligation to enter into negotiations if there was "a clear expression of the will of the population of a province on whether the province should cease to be a part of Canada and become an independent state." Those negotiations could begin as early as next week.

Back in the 1990s, no one imagined that this option would be exercised by a province other than Quebec. The critical question, therefore, is how did we get to this sorry state of affairs? What went so wrong along the way?

Although there has always a small smattering of separatist support in Alberta, usually a very small smattering, the origins of our current mess date back to 2006 when oil prices first passed $70 a barrel. The Alberta government, having paid off its provincial debt, was then generating larger surpluses than the federal government.

At the same time, the Ontario economy was beginning to falter in the face of both intensifying international competition and weakening U.S. markets. A rising Canadian dollar, driven upwards by robust international markets for natural resources in western provinces, squeezed the vise even tighter on the traditional manufacturing sector.

For a while the growing regional divide was masked. On average, the Canadian economy was doing well, and thus regional disparities within the context of more general national prosperity attracted less attention. Unemployment rates were at record lows, and Canadians across the country were enjoying growing real-estate wealth.

It was also assumed by most Canadians that the regional disparities being generated by Alberta's energy wealth, and for that matter by the general wealth of the resource-based western Canadian economy, would largely disappear once resource markets returned to normal levels. The western boom was seen as a temporary blip, a one-off windfall analogous to a lottery win. As Ralph Klein, then premier of Alberta, noted when asked about high-energy prices, "What goes up must come down," which indeed had been the historical experience of Alberta's volatile boom-and-bust economy.

Thus Canadians waited patiently, or in some cases impatiently, for energy prices to return to normal, and for the natural order of things to reassert itself. Over time, however, it began to sink in that the new normal was $70 a barrel for oil, and then $80, and then $90. The good old days of cheap energy, and with them the older model of the Canadian economy, were gone along with hot airline meals.

Now of course the Canadian economy was not alone in being hit by higher energy prices, and indeed in some ways was better off than most given that Canada was a net exporter of oil, natural gas, uranium and hydroelectric power. The problem and the political crisis came from the unequal regional distribution of those resources.

Slowly it became clear that the accumulation of wealth in Alberta, and to a lesser degree across the West, was the new reality. At the same time, the Ontario economy continued to be squeezed by competitors from China and India, by U.S. protectionism in the face of the same competition, and by weakening American markets as Washington grappled unsuccessfully with growing debt, a deteriorating balance of payments and international obligations that could not be shed.

In response, the western provinces were scrambling to find ways by which regional wealth could be used to positive national effect. The Alberta government, for example, generously endowed the Canadian Scholarship Fund to the point where it dwarfed the Rhodes and Woodrow Wilson funds, and where it was attracting the best and the brightest international students to universities across the country.

Similar endowments for medical research, wellness programs, clean coal and sustainable energy research were pushing Canada to the forefront of the international research community. Canada, led by the western provinces, was shedding its historical underperformance in the commercialization of university research. Furthermore, the western provinces collaborated to strengthen transportation linkages between Canada and the booming Asia Pacific economies, with positive effects that rippled across the country from sea to sea to sea.

And, in Alberta, the onslaught of prosperity gave residents both the opportunity and the luxury to manage the impact of energy developments on an increasingly stressed provincial land base. The pace of development was brought within the carrying capacity of the physical environment, and the province's vast energy endowment was not being exploited at the expense of its natural capital.

These steps, however, could moderate but not bridge the growing regional divide in the national economy. As oil prices crept past $100 a barrel, and then past $110, and then $120, the divide became even deeper. Every escalation brought more wealth to the West, and more cost-pressure to central Canadian firms. As energy prices continued their inexorable climb, the regional imbalance grew in step and all this took place against the backdrop of a troubled U.S. economy.

The growing divide

There was no question that the regional concentration of energy wealth was a source of strain for the federation as Ontario and Quebec faced significant out-migration of people and head offices, and had a harder time attracting immigrants. Not surprisingly, therefore, a political reaction was inevitable.

Although the western-led national government argued gamely that what was good for the Alberta economy was also good for the Canadian economy, it lost the election to a coalition of opposition parties running under the banner "Canadian resources for Canadians."

The equalization formula, funded as it was by federal taxpayers – the great bulk of whom lived outside Alberta and even outside the West – provided little counterweight for the public wealth piling up in Alberta. The province's Heritage Savings and Trust Fund, now worth well more than $150 billion, made Alberta an easy target.

Shortly before the pivotal election, renewed military conflict in the Middle East, nuclear weapons testing by Iran, and an outbreak of civil war in the Russian Caucuses drove oil prices close to $200 a barrel. Despite a surge of migration into the West, the majority of the national electorate still lived in Ontario and Quebec and swept into power a new government determined to arrest and even turn back the energy-led tide of prosperity in Western Canada.

Many in the West, particularly those with relatives, friends and business colleagues living in other parts of the country, had some sympathy for "Canadian resources for Canadians." Western Canadians, after all, were enjoying a great deal of prosperity, and thus the change in the national government alone was not enough to push them over the national unity edge.

Unfortunately, things did not go well politically. The new federal government, led by Ontario's first prime minister in more than 50 years, introduced a draconian series of tax measures to channel energy wealth into the national treasury. The need to address global warming was used as the rationale for sweeping carbon taxes, but the regional redistribution of wealth was the real driver.

Constitutional niceties were put aside as the federal government's responsibility for peace, order and good government was expanded to include the responsibility to reduce regional disparities. Energy resources, it turned out – although not hydro resources – were now in the national interest and under the jurisdictional umbrella of the federal government.

Even then, Albertans were not pushed to the breaking point. The straw that finally broke the province's back was the environmental disaster unleashed by federal management of Alberta's resource endowment. The province was quite literally out of sight and out of mind, and as the price of oil approached $200 a barrel, the focus of the national government shifted to more and more production. The collapse of an increasing fragile environment and the destruction of iconic landscapes were seen as an unfortunate but unavoidable price to pay as the rest of the country used petrodollars as a shield to protect their economies from ever intensifying international competition.

In short, Alberta became the Canadian cash cow, the bulwark against the economic effects of international competition and weak U.S. markets. Energy revenues were used to prop up an increasingly unproductive manufacturing economy, with petrodollars becoming the new tariff wall. In the near term, Canadians were therefore able to avoid the painful economic adjustments that other countries had to endure in the face of high energy prices, but in the long term the national economy was further weakened.

It turned out, of course, that while the concentration of energy wealth in one province had dramatic effects, the distribution of that wealth across a much larger national population had correspondingly more limited effects. The expectations held by supporters of "Canadian resources for Canadians' could only be met if energy production was pushed higher and higher, and pushed beyond the carrying capacity of Alberta's environment.

The call for environmental protection comes first and foremost from those who can taste, see, touch and breathe environmental degradation, and not from distant bureaucrats or voters. This meant that as control of Alberta's resource endowment shifted from provincial to national hands, concerns about environmental damage weakened. The standards of environmental stewardship and intergenerational equity that had come to shape the provincial policy architecture were abandoned by a national government intent on maximizing energy revenues.

The result was the emergence of a new and powerful political coalition in Alberta determined to lead the province out of Canada. Environmentalists locked arms with energy producers in defence of the province; ideologically moderate urbanities joined forces with ranchers and farmers as both the urban and rural environments became even more stressed. "Canadian resources for Canadians" came to be seen as environmental degradation for Alberta, and thus the fight was joined to save both the province's economy and environment.

And now, in 2020, where do we stand as Albertans prepare to go to the polls, and to strike out on their own? The nation's energy wealth has been dispersed and dissipated without strategic impact; there is no legacy except for unsustainable regional transfers and social programming. Canada is trailing rather than leading the technological race to wean the global economy from its dependence on hydrocarbons. Alberta's population has shrunk as people fled a growing ecological disaster. And, ironically, the rest of the Canadian economy, buffered by energy revenues, is now even less able to compete globally.

The Alberta Camelot that began to emerge in 2006 has come and gone. It was the Canadian curse that the Camelot created by high energy prices was located "in the regions," that it came to be seen as a national threat rather than a national asset.

What, then, could we have done differently? We could have recognized that regional swings in the national economy are inevitable and should be accommodated rather than resisted by public policies. We could have accelerated the transition to new energy sources instead of shielding Canadian industries and consumers from high energy prices. We could have built on the wisdom of "think globally, act locally" and recognized that the delicate balance between economic growth and environmental protection is better struck provincially rather than nationally. We could have built protections for regional interests and aspirations into the institutional architecture of the national government.

We could have done a lot, and instead we stand on the verge of losing so much. It should never have come to this.

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Canada 2020: part 6

Jennifer Welsh
Jennifer Welsh, one of Canada's most brilliant and accomplished young minds, has a provocative plan to remedy our diminishing international status and our lack of coherent direction for the future. She is the author of At Home in the World: Canada's Global Vision for the 21st Century. Welsh holds a master's and doctorate in international relations from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and is currently a university lecturer in international relations and a fellow of Somerville College at the University of Oxford.

Reviving the spirit of San Francisco?
Jennifer Welsh Aug. 1, 2006

July 17, 2020 (New York) – Canada's Ambassador to the United Nations, Jasmine Basran, is taping up the last of her boxes as the movers empty out her large office on Manhattan's Second Avenue.

"We just couldn't justify such a large space, when our mission to the UN has been so reduced."

There was barely a whimper in Canada when the Department of Foreign Affairs announced in 2018 that staffing for Canada's Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York would be cut from over 30 to just fewer than 10.

"Our diplomatic presence now needs to be concentrated elsewhere, particularly at the Canadian mission to NATO in Brussels," Basran explained.

Earlier in the day, the ambassador gave us a tour of the UN Security Council chamber, which looks more like a museum than a forum for active diplomacy. The council hasn't met formally in over a year due to the deadlock over Syria's testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Ever since the U.S. campaign to give newly independent Taiwan a non-permanent seat on the security council, there has been virtually no possibility of the permanent members agreeing to collective action. China, backed by Russia, vetoes most of the resolutions proposed by the United States and the European Union. Japan and India, the two new semi-permanent members of the council (added during the reform conference of 2012) also tend to be divided on U.S.-inspired initiatives.

Basran, however, seems philosophical about the council's lack of activity.

"The council was also marginalized during the Cold War. The 1990s were in many ways the exception rather than the rule. Really, for the past decade, the action has been happening elsewhere. NATO is now the primary focus of Canada's international diplomacy."

What a dramatic change from 30 years ago, when commentators everywhere were proclaiming the death of NATO after the fall of Communism. NATO's original purpose, as a diplomat once quipped, had been to "keep the U.S. in, the Germans down, and the Russians out."

But without the Soviet bloc to serve as an external enemy for the Western alliance, NATO was expected to crumble and give way to a revitalized United Nations.

Today, this prediction looks like a quaint piece of history. NATO has continued its process of expansion, which began in 1999 with the admission of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, and continued with the addition of 10 countries over the following decade. The latest successful applicants — Bosnia, Georgia, and Ukraine — have brought the total number in the alliance up to 32. Throughout the process, the United States has pursued its objective of transforming NATO into a global forum for democracies, which can act collectively to promote democratic values among and beyond its members.

NATO has also proved that it can intervene more quickly in trouble spots around the globe. Its Council for Peace and Security, created in 2012, has at its disposal a contingent of troops from each member state that can be sent abroad for humanitarian missions. The most successful operation of this kind occurred in 2015, when violence broke out in Zimbabwe following the death of Robert Mugabe. Close to 1,000 Canadian troops — taken from our new Standing Contingency Task Force — were deployed in Zimbabwe as part of the NATO mission.

For Canadians, the transition to this new world has been difficult and confusing. In a 2004 poll conducted by The Dominion Institute, just after the breakdown in diplomacy over the Iraq War, almost three-quarters of Canadians said that the UN was still a better venue in which Canada could make a difference in the world than alternative, regional organizations. Far from being a sign of the UN's failure, Canadians believed the crisis over Iraq demonstrated the pitfalls that would face countries if they acted without UN support.

A long-time supporter of UN

For 70 years, Canada was a staunch and consistent supporter of the UN's multilateral mechanisms, and was at one time the seventh-largest donor to the UN and one of the major troop-contributing countries to UN peacekeeping. Indeed, this last area of activity was a dominant component of the Canadian national identity during the second half of the 20th century. But this self-image has undergone significant evolution.

Long used to thinking of themselves as the "world's peacekeepers," who rarely fire a gun, Canadians over the past two decades have watched their men and women in uniform engage in direct and fierce combat in the countryside and towns of Afghanistan. (In fact, as a third of Canadians predicted back in 2006, there is still a small contingent of Canadian troops on the ground helping with security efforts in southern Afghanistan today.)

At the same time, the country's participation in UN peacekeeping operations continued to decline after 2000 — partly as a result of a shortage of Canadian human resources but also due to the fact that more developing countries (particularly from Asia and Africa) provide the horsepower for peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions.

To be sure, it has taken some time for Canadians to relinquish their hopes and dreams for the UN. In 2010, the vast majority still would have agreed with the words of their former Prime Minister Lester Pearson, who described the UN as "our best, and perhaps our last, hope of bringing about a creative peace if mankind is to end a savage tradition that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

But these dreams were already beginning to look unrealistic in September of 2005, when leaders from around the globe converged at the 60th Anniversary Summit of the UN in New York.

Despite some positive changes to the workings of the organization, the summit failed to reinvigorate the UN after its painful experiences during the Iraq War and the scandals associated with the Oil-for-Food Program. This failure was mainly a consequence of unreasonably high expectations — raised in particular by former Secretary General Kofi Annan's reform rhetoric prior to the summit. Annan heralded the gathering of leaders as a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity to transform the UN from a body established out of the ashes of the Second World War into a forum that could manage the threats and challenges of the 21st century.

Leaders salvaged some kind of agreement, and posed smiling for the cameras outside the UN's headquarters. Then prime minister Paul Martin proclaimed at the time that: "Canada cannot conceive of a world succeeding without the United Nations."

In the end, however, the negotiations did not succeed in building a consensus on a new conception of collective security — one that could encapsulate both the threats from weapons proliferation and the human catastrophe of underdevelopment. The summit's outcome only deepened the divisions between the developing world and the developed world (particularly the U.S.), and made ongoing discussions about the UN's role in the world even more fractious.
Powerful developed states continued to fear that the UN would not act decisively on the threats that concern them (terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and trans-national crime), while developing countries continued to insist that the greatest threats to their security reside elsewhere — in poverty, infectious disease, and collapsing state structures.

The first sign of malaise for the UN came with the failure to agree on a budget in 2007. This left the new secretary general, Sri Lankan diplomat Jayantha Dhanapala, without the resources needed to support ongoing UN peacekeeping missions in Liberia, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Burundi and Sudan. (Close to 90,000 military personnel and civilian police were serving in these missions, with an annual budget of over $5 billion US.)

Anyone reading the tea-leaves in 2006 could have predicted this impending train wreck. In May of that year, a majority of developing countries (led by the G77 and China) set up a roadblock to much-needed management reforms of the UN by refusing to approve the secretary general's reform proposals. But the United States had linked its backing for the budget to progress on these improvements in the UN's management and administration. The stage was set for a confrontation.

Things got worse

The crisis intensified in 2008, with the disastrous end to the UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur. It had taken two years for the secretary general to persuade the Sudanese government to accept 10,000 UN personnel on its territory to replace the mission of the African Union. By the time the UN finally took over, in the spring of 2007, a total of 300,000 civilians had died and close to three million were forced from their homes. In addition, the slow lead-up to an international deployment allowed Islamic militants in the region to mobilize, creating an environment of extreme danger for foreign troops. After a disastrous show down in which over 1,000 peacekeepers were killed, troop-donating countries airlifted their soldiers out of the country.

The final blow came in 2010, when Dhanapala's term of office was not renewed, due to diplomatic confrontation between the United States and China. That left the secretary general's office unfilled for two years, while an interim official headed up the secretariat. Hopes were raised when a candidate who could garner universal support was nominated, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But only four months after he was installed, in 2012, he was assassinated by Taliban terrorists.

That year saw the UN descend into an existential crisis. For a time it appeared as though its member states might rally. Encouragingly, states such as Germany, Brazil, and South Africa set aside their ambitions for security council membership, and allowed a more modest proposal for council reform (which added two new semi-permanent members and five new non-permanent members) to be endorsed by the General Assembly. But the UN has never really recovered from the events of 2008-2012, and the frontal assault on its vocation as a force for global peace and dialogue.

For so long, the biggest factor working in favour of the UN was the lack of alternatives. Defenders of the organization, when faced with criticism, would commonly reply: "If the United Nations didn't exist, it would have to be invented." After 2012, this rationale began to lose its punch.

Even in the realm of poverty reduction and health, alternative organizations and actors - whether the Gates Foundation or the Global Fund for HIV/Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis — began to outstrip the UN in terms of both funding and effectiveness. Without commitment, leadership, and new ideas from its member states, the UN could not maintain its status at the top of the global multilateral hierarchy.

Meanwhile, regional bodies were growing in strength and finding faster, more effective ways to engage in collective action. The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the African Union (AU), and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) followed NATO's lead in developing co-operative approaches to security and defence. Today, an ad hoc body has been established to facilitate dialogue among these regional organizations on global crises. On the economic, health, and environmental fronts, the new "L20" (an expansion on the old G8) has taken centre-stage as a forum for managing global financial matters, threats to the environment, and potential outbreaks of infectious disease. Canada has been particularly active in this innovative body, and is playing a constructive bridging role between developed and developing countries.

All of these organizations operate with a lighter "footprint" than the UN, and have thus far been able to avoid the failures of management and oversight which dogged the UN during the first decade of this century. But then again, none of these regional alternatives is driven by the ambition and hope that characterized the founding fathers of the United Nations.

The more historically minded among us still think back wistfully to 1945, and the "spirit of San Francisco." Could such a spirit be revived again, to breathe new life into the United Nations?
Before we could hope for a new "San Francisco," we would need a new "Dumbarton Oaks" — the meeting at which the Allied Powers came together to agree upon a global vision and to lead the process of change. But this looks unlikely today. The scheme for the UN worked, according to the great historian Paul Kennedy, because the bigger and wealthier powers realized that they had to be "providers" of international security for others.

At the moment, this leadership and engagement from the great powers is lacking. So too is a collective sense of responsibility, or a consensus among them about the most important security challenges facing the international community. The United States, as so many predicted 15 years ago, is no longer the unrivalled superpower. And the new great powers, China, India, and Brazil, have yet to define their global vision.

So, in the meantime, the government of Canada is decorating its new suite of offices on the Rue de la Regence in Brussels, and sending the high profile Justin Trudeau to serve as Canada's new ambassador to NATO.

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