Globe and Mail

Sunday Morning Thoughts

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The deadline for the Ontario Arts Council works-in-progress awards is June 17th. My prose selection is finished, read by knowledgable people— an art director and a writer, both of whom gave generously  of their time and expertise— and the final polishing done. The application allows for up to two pages of supplemental material, synopses, table of contents and so forth, if I choose to include it. I don’t. I doubt a synopsis of an unfinished novel, even one that is complete in first draft would help my case. No, the work must stand on its own.

Now, I’m not the best form-filler in the world. There is something about all those little squares. If the instructions say “mark with an X”, I’m sure to use a checkmark. Indeed, I have to remind myself of that every time I vote.

Even my own address can bring on a sudden episode of panic—what did I print? It may be an old address from Toronto, or the first one here in Lindsay, but not the one the computer—it does know where I live—wants.

“Ah, poor soul,” I hear you say. “Her age is starting to show.” Not at all. I’ve always been this way. I have trouble staying within the signature box on the passport application.

I think it must be some subliminal resistance to the rule-makers.

Speaking of the rule-makers, the ones in Ottawa seem to be in a spot of trouble. Apparently the holier-than-thou Tories aren’t so. According to Margaret Wente in the Globe on Saturday, that’s just how it’s done in the Senate—perks, thousands of dollars of them, all round. http://tinyurl.com/m7pgjsb

I’ve always thought we needed the two houses in Parliament, hoping the Senate would be the source of sober second looks at legislation. I wasn’t all that bothered by the appointed rather than elected basis either, until recently. I do think that, whatever way we decide to choose them, the senators must be more accountable for their actions, their decisions and their budgets. If that means elected, so be it, but let’s look at countries other than the USA as a model. However much our PM admires their system, it’s in worse gridlock than Toronto’s roads.

Australia has a bicameral system. The upper house comprises 76 senators, elected for 6 year terms, 2 from each state and territory. The senators are elected under a proportional representation form of voting.

According to Wikipedia: Unlike most upper houses in parliamentary systems, the Senate is vested with significant power, including the capacity to block legislation initiated by the government in the House of Representatives, making it a distinctive hybrid of British Westminster bicameralism and US-style bicameralism.

New Zealand has a unicameral system. it abolished its Senate in 1950.

What we do need to do is make sure the “hands-in-the-cookie-jar” sense of entitlement goes.

Closing ELA: An international disgrace.

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Scientists, both national and international, politicians inside and outside the House of Commons, patriotic organizations and ordinary concerned citizens like me line up to defend the importance of the Experimental Lakes Area. Who works there? The people who told us about acid rain and the dangers of detergents in our waterways, among other facts.

Who doesn’t want them to work there? The Harper government in the shape of the Fisheries minister Keith Ashfield. Read about it i todays Globe and Mail: http://tinyurl.com/csrz2lr

We are saving money, the Harper government cries. It costs 2 million dollars a year, folks. The new Office of Religious Freedom(Whose?) costs 5 million. How much did they squander on those jets. How much are they spending to promote the history of a war no one cares about? And what about those ads about the Action Plan that isn’t there any more.

They aren’t saving money, but I wonder who’s going to make some. Who has those logging contracts?

Replace the ELA with cleacut! What a disgrace.

What’s with Fantino?

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Fantino’s CIDA letters cause a stir – The Globe and Mail.

First Julian Fantino decides that he can to cut off future aid to an impoverished nation, devastated by years of corruption, without a word of warning and without asking us, his employers, if we are the kind of people who demand some sort of quid pro quo to help the poor. One trip to Haiti and he was an expert. Even the United States and the UN regretted his remarks.

“Canada’s foreign aid agency should play an active role in promoting the country’s economic interests abroad rather than limiting its scope to poverty reduction alone, International Co-operation Minister Julian Fantino says.” Globe and Mail, Dec.3/2012.

And here all the time I thought the purpose of aid was first to save lives and then to help a country improve to the point that it could feed and care for its people itself.

I wonder how the Prime Minister liked getting rapped on the knuckles by both the United States and the United Nations. Or was this a trial balloon, the Prime Minister’s plan, floated by yet another minister who took the heat for the boss.

Now Fantino, or someone in his organization is using a government web-site to post letters that the Globe and Mail calls vitriolic and partisan. Perhaps, like Mayor Ford in Toronto, he hasn’t read the playbook, in his case for Ministers of the Crown, who are held to a higher standard than a candidate for election in an affluent suburb of Toronto.

If the letters were indeed posted by staff, without his knowledge, than he has an even bigger problem, that of having lost the respect of the civil servants who work for the department of which he is, currently, head.

Happenstance and Science

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Quest for a wonder drug started with shrew bait – The Globe and Mail.

An article in this morning’s Globe and Mail tells the story of a researcher, Dr. Jack Stewart who started to look at the pain-killing possibilities in shrew saliva. Sounds unlikely doesn’t it? But that is the nature of science. It was known, the article tells us that shrew saliva had paralytic properties. Dr. Irwin G. Martin had published a paper on the subject in the Journal of Mammalogy in 1981. Dr. Stewart’s research into the chemical that caused the paralysis led him to his recent discovery. A typical chain in science: primary research in an area as unlikely as shrew saliva at one end and a potential treatment for not one but three major cancers— ovarian, breast and prostate— at the other.

This is the chain that politicians, businessmen and other non-scientists don’t seem to understand. Much of medical discovery comes by happenstance. Vincristine and Vinblastine are potent anti-cancer agents derived from the periwinkle plant, common now in many of our gardens. The plant searchers, funded by amateur botanists and Royal Societies, brought plants and seeds from all over the globe, often to London. From there the seeds were shared, first to Paris, according to Michael F. Brown, writing in Who Owns Native Culture, 2003. Folk medicine revealed that many plants were in common use as treatments for disease. Anthropology, botany, chemistry, medicine, all studying these plants, often a considerable remove from any thought of practical application, but all leading through the cross-pollination of publication, to the drug that brought hope at last to childhood victims of acute leukaemia. I first met the drug while I was working as a resident at the Hospital for Sick Children in 1972, treating those children, mostly under five years, who now had a chance, not just for survival, but for a cure.

This won’t happen, can’t happen without the funding of primary research,  research without a known outcome. How can you predict that shrew saliva might cure human cancers? But you can fund the inquiring minds, let them talk to one another, and wonderful things can happen from that cross-pollination.

We deny funding to universities and basic science at our peril.

Who’s in charge here?

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Tory ministers crash budget hearing, leaving little time for questions – The Globe and Mail.

The Harper government appears to think that this is very clever political behaviour. Can’t you just hear them chortling in the men’s room over the way they’re going to put one over on the committee?

But this is not adult political behaviour. The Parliament in my view has a responsibility as a whole to consider well legislation that is before it and it is the duty of the Ministers of the Crown to answer questions about legislation. The more the Harper government plays these games, the more they look like they have something to hide.

The Omnibus bill is too large, and too vague to be passed as responsible legislation. There are far too many non-budget items included and they are too ill-defined.

Today, for example they floated some idea of paying EI recipients to move to where the jobs are. This was in response to the suggestion that a person should take any job, picking tobacco for example, even if the person’s training was teaching or nursing or engineering or graphic design. What nonsense is this? It reminds me of the Chinese sending their best and brightest to be reeducated in the countryside, with a subsequent loss of knowledge and skills that took two generations to recover. This country is supposed to be about progress and opportunity, and an insurance plan is supposed to provide insurance, not a bludgeon to take away people’s right of movement.

Did we decide as a people, sometime when I wasn’t paying attention, that the only thing that matters is the bottom line, that there is no room for compassion, or art, or history or a social safety net? I don’t think we did.

I’m tired of the posturing and the lies and the games. I want  transparent, responsible and good government.
Didn’t the Harper Tories campaign on something like that?

Sunday

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The myth of Tory economic performance – The Globe and Mail.

Check out Lawrence Martin’s assessment of the Harper record. The out-of-control cuts and spending left us with a deficit where there had been a surplus. Martin puts it all together in this fine article. Politics is ever the same. The politicians “spin”, trying to convince us that up is down, black is white and guys who denied the economic downturn in ’08 are somehow our saviours in ’12.

Writing: I’m working on book three in my Dangerous Journey’s series. Anne is in Bermuda this time, fending off a police detective who thinks that Anne is a killer, and a killer who thinks she’s a nuisance that needs to be eliminated. I hope to be finished by the end of March, so watch for it next fall. Title, as always, pending.

Reading; I finished The Hare with the Amber Eyes, by Edmund de Waal. De Waal writes the biography of his family’s collection of netsuke and through it a memoir of his family of Russian Jewish bankers and their sad fate at the hands of Austrian Nazis. A fascinating and moving story, and a very good read.

Fairness

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John Ralston Saul, in his book, A Fair Country, talks about Canada as an aboriginal country, with one of its principle values, fairness. When I read it I remembered my father-in-law, who arrived here as a refugee from Slovakia in 1950, telling me about hearing children say to one another that something wasn’t fair. That was what was different about Canada, he said, even children knew things had to be fair.

In today’s Globe and Mail, Michael Ignatieff discusses the current economic disaster, and notes that things now are not fair. There are too many people who are excluded from Ralston Saul’s “big tent”. What follows is one of the final paragraphs:

A politics of fairness is also a politics of growth. Fair societies are more dynamic and more innovative. In fair societies, people don’t think the game is rigged before it begins. Success goes by what you know, not who you know. And people don’t waste emotions and energy on resentment and anger. They are too busy thinking up the next big thing.

He thinks that only by ensuring that everyone gets a fair chance can we overcome the current situation.

Happy New Year

“Harper’s” government

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/lawrence-martin/on-the-road-to-the-harper-governments-tipping-point/article1933110/

Lawrence Martin reminds us of the multiple offenses against democracy that have taken place since the Conservatives came to power. The tag line–there’s more to come– expanded over the last two days into a scandal about misusing government funds in the last election. This government and these ministers take responsibility right up to the point of being found out and then they scarper and blame a junior minister or a civil servant.

Oda, Kenney, Harper himself, all of them have the same haughty attitude of “if we doit, it must be good”. No responsibility, no resignations.

Even the Globe and Mail, who never saw a Tory government it couldn’t support, rails this morning about the lack of transparency( you and I would call it lying) about the cost of their “tough on crime” agenda. Even the “lock ’em up and throw away the keys” boys in the US have woken up to the fact that it costs megabucks to incarcerate people for minor crimes as has happened under the three strike law. One in every hundred Americans is in jail.

But the cost is one thing. Incarceration is a failure at reducing the number of reoffenders, at rehabilitation, at treating the mental illnesses that bring so many into conflict with the law. Why spend huge amounts on something that doesn’t work and won’t make our society any safer? Why? It’s called buying your vote with your money. Oh, and we don’t know what the bill will be because they won’t tell us.

Have you seen the Harper attack ads. Remember them from last time? They’re recycling stuff that they ran years ago, referencing events from the beginning of Michael Ignatieff’s return to this country. Apparently they haven’t yet got over the fact that he is a man with international experience, compared to their man, little-travelled until he came to power. Lawrence Martin reminds us that the ones they released this time have been withdrawn because they were of “such questionable quality.” How low can they sink?

Abuse of power. “L’Etat, c’est moi. That’s the Harper gang.

Writing: I’ve been working on the sequel to The Facepainter Murders, http://www.writewordsinc.com/and http://www.amazon.com., and recently joined the novel section of my online writing group. A no-hold-barred bunch they are, and very helpful. http://www.internetwritingworkshop.org/

My short story, Homicide in Haliburton has been published by Pine Tree Mysteries at this link.  http://www.pinetreemysteries.com/index.html

Writing is a craft, with a learning curve that I certainly didn’t understand when I started out twelve years ago. I’ve been reading Scene and Structure, by Jack Bickman, part of the Elements of Fiction Writing, published by Writers Digest Books, to learn some of the formal mechanics of constructing a novel.

Sakineh: She languishes in prison. Her sentence to stoning has been reversed, but she may still be hanged. Her lawyer is in exile, having been tortured in prison and she has given a “confession”. Please sign the petition.

http://freesakineh.org/

Another big lie from Big Pharm

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Drug R&D costs are less than estimated – so why the high prices? – The Globe and Mail.

Andre Picard, writing in the Globe this am, has deconstructed the often-repeated figures about the many millions or even billions needed to bring medications to market. The original estimates, derived entirely from unchecked figures provided by the drug companies themselves, used huge percentages to estimate income lost because the money that went into R&D was not otherwise invested. When was the last time you got a steady 11% over the course of decades? The usual figure is 3-5%. All in all, it sounds like another big lie.

Mr. Picard also makes the point that most drugs developed aren’t brand new, but rather “me too” drugs–think the cholesterol lowering drugs for example, or the multiple formulations of methylphenidate(Ritalin and its brothers). These cost less to develop because the basic research has all ready been done. Even older drugs, like AVONEX for MS, developed in 1999, are still enormously expensive. The cost of this drug has in fact risen. Surely the R&D costs have been paid off by now?

It seems to be a theme with the powers that be. Tell a lie often enough and even if it’s outrageous, people will start to believe it.

Freedom of Information

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Canada ranks last in freedom of information: study – The Globe and Mail.

You knew this, didn’t you? Harper had a lot to say about freedom of information before he was elected. Now that’s it his government’s information, suddenly we have no access compared to other democracies, and we’re the go-to guys on how not to implement freedom of information acts.

It’s embarrassing, that’s what it is. And a little frightening. What is it they don’t want us to know?