Dion Redux

So Michael Ignatieff and his “new” Liberals are going to make the Cons submit to giving a report card on their economic plans.  Given the problems that Iggy has with the budget, this simply isn’t sufficient.  Here’s part of Iggy’s response:

The budget introduced yesterday is far from perfect. It does not fix the employment insurance system for thousands of workers who have lost their jobs in the past several weeks. It still threatens pay equity for women. It breaks their promise to every province from only two years ago on equalization.

The Cons can’t report on what they’re not even going to try to do.  But heck, who cares about workers with insufficent employment insurance?  Who cares about equalization payments – they only provide for social services – we don’t need good social services anyway, right?  And for sure, who cares about women doing the same work as men for less pay?  Not the Cons.  Clearly not the Liberals either.

For some reason, the Harper budget lets Iggy wiggle away, just as Dion wiggled away from taking responsibility for the last four years.  More Iggy:

To say that action is long overdue is an understatement. Canadians deserve action.

We deserve action so what we get is a “report card” that will tell us what the Cons aren’t doing; that will tell us how badly they’re doing what they are doing; and that will tell us that they’re not doing enough.  Is that all the “action” we deserve?

New Democrat Leader Jack Layton and Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe swiftly condemned the budget as a failed “ideological” document that does not address the needs of the jobless and the most vulnerable, or move Canada toward a greener economy.

Their parties intend to vote to defeat the government on the budget, and Layton publicly pressured Ignatieff to do the same.

Layton said the budget fails on the very tests – helping the most vulnerable, protecting the jobs of today and creating jobs for tomorrow – that Ignatieff had set out.

“He has a choice to make,” Layton told reporters.

“It’s either to prop up the Harper government and allow it to continue in a fashion that is clearly wrong-headed, or to pursue the agenda laid out by the coalition, which would create jobs for the future and would transform our economy and would really protect the people who are suffering the most from the economic crisis.”

Well, Ignatieff has made his choice – a coalition with the Conservatives.  Dion all over again.

More on the big problems with this budget:

The federal budget contained more than $3 billion in spending to address the environment, but it fell short of markers set by those who had called on the Conservatives to deliver a “green” economic stimulus plan.

[...]

critics say the federal government’s plans fall far short of national public transit and other infrastructure needs while spending too much taxpayers’ money in Alberta’s oil sands and not enough on renewable energy.

Neither have the Cons paid sufficient attention to the crises in Canada’s cities.  Toronto for instance:

Mayor David Miller badly wanted to embrace the federal budget that tossed billions of dollars before municipal governments. Here was an opportunity to play nice with the Stephen Harper government for once. But Finance Minister Jim Flaherty had to spoil it all by wrapping the gift in familiar, stultifying red tape that left Miller crestfallen.

“We are looking for a partner that will invest in our priorities, not their own,” Miller said barely an hour after the budget was tabled.

It may seem like nitpicking from someone who doesn’t share Harper’s politics. It’s not.

Experience has taught us that the Building Canada Fund that is to deliver the budget infrastructure goodies is cumbersome, inflexible and too slow afoot. For example:

Through some miracle, Toronto, the province and York Region agreed in March 2006 to extend the Spadina subway line from its terminus at Downsview to Highway 7. All that remained was funding approval from the federal government.

The Harper government put money aside for the project in the Building Canada Fund, and it sat there, and sat there. It took more than two years before the federal government approved the spending last September. The first construction dollars will be spent in 2009.

Understandably, mayors get testy when they find out the new $4 billion infrastructure fund that is supposed to get projects going immediately is tied up in the same Building Canada Fund that is excruciatingly bound in red tape.

“I hope we can get the federal government to change their minds on this,” Miller said yesterday. “Placing rigid requirements on funds like this does not work. The dollars need to be invested, not written down on paper. This is full of red tape.”

Well the Cons aren’t going to change their plans if somebody doesn’t make them.  Iggy is not that person.

Thomas Walkom at The Star:

It almost certainly won’t stop Canada’s economy from going into recession (technically defined as six months of economic shrinkage). Even finance department officials acknowledge that.

And while it will slow the steady rise in this country’s jobless rate, it won’t reverse it.

Mike McCracken, of the economic forecasting firm Informetrica, calculates that even after some $35 billion in fiscal stimulus over the next two years, (and yes, the proper figure is $35 billion not $52 billion as the government insists) the national unemployment rate will continue to creep up.

Indeed, the most important element of the budget will probably receive the least attention. That’s a two-page section – first laid out in Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s aborted November economic update – that gives the government carte blanche to bail out any financial institution facing difficulty.

Unlike a similar $700 billion U.S. scheme, there is no upper dollar limit to the Canadian plan.

As for the rest of the budget, it’s a mish-mash of proposals – some sensible, some less so – calculated to appeal to key constituencies and to demonstrate that the Conservative government cares.

That’s what it’s all about – convincing people that you care while you’re busy not caring.  Ignatieff is going to sign on to this budget and he’ll have to bear the consequences for that.  It’s now his budget as much as it’s Harper’s.  I guess that is to be expected.  Chantal Hébert at The Star:

Ignatieff has no cause to reject Jim Flaherty’s latest budget on ideological grounds. On that score and in contrast with last fall’s fiscal update, the Conservative economic blueprint is almost painfully spineless.

If its authors are guilty of anything this time around, it is political plagiarism of the most craven kind.

In their quest for parliamentary survival, the Conservatives have cut and pasted a lot of old-style Liberal spending initiatives and spread them pretty much across the board.

It is hard to think of a constituency, friendly or hostile to the Conservatives, that will not get a piece of the multibillion-dollar stimulus package the government has cobbled together.

[...]

The odds that the budget will help the Conservatives buy their way out of a tight parliamentary corner are higher than the odds that it will allow Canada to spend its way out of a recession. In almost every instance, the government has gone for the quickest and most-likely-to-be-popular fix.

Take tax relief, the hill on which the Conservatives ultimately planted their tattered flag yesterday.

About 10 per cent of the total stimulus package is devoted to the kind of permanent, broad-based tax relief the Liberals had warned against in the days leading up to the budget. But the bulk of it is targeted to middle- and low-income Canadians, and the Conservatives are betting that Ignatieff will not risk defeating the government over a tax cut.

Canada needs courageous leadership during this economic/social/environmental crisis we are living through.  Clearly, we’re not going to get it.  Canadian voters are as responsible for this as our leaders.  We won’t get what we don’t demand.

I’m giving the last word on the budget, Ignatieff’s response and Jack Layton’s position to James Laxer:

Michael Ignatieff began his press conference in the National Press Theatre in Ottawa today by saying that the Harper government’s budget was deeply flawed. For a moment, I thought he was about to do something interesting, to propose serious and substantive amendments to the budget. But then he dropped the clunker. The Liberals, he said, will propose an amendment requiring the government to provide periodic updates on how the budget is working.

There you have it. Michael Ignatieff went away last night, laboured, and brought forth a mouse.

Explaining himself in answer to questions from the media, the Liberal leader was embarrassingly sophomoric. The Liberal-NDP coalition had been useful, he said, because it had forced the government to put many useful measures in the budget. On the other hand, he said the budget remained a “Conservative” budget that likely would not work. Nonetheless, he said he intended to vote for it. Provided, of course, that his “Mickey Mouse” amendment is acceptable to Stephen Harper. By turns, Ignatieff sounded like Demosthenes, thundering down condemnation on a government that has repeatedly failed Canadians, and then like an apple-polishing pupil asking for a report card from the head master. Rule number one in politics: you can’t have it every which way. If you vote for the Conservative budget, it becomes your budget Mr. Ignatieff, no matter what font the government uses to print its reports for you.

In answer to questions that suggested that perhaps he had thrown the game away, Ignatieff could have replied in the manner of Hamlet: “Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe.”

Having decided “not to be” as a serious opponent of the Harper government, Michael Ignatieff could consider a career on the stage.

Meanwhile, Jack Layton has become the real leader of the opposition. He showed courage when he reached out to the Liberals to form a progressive coalition that could provide Canadians with the leadership they need to cope with the economic crisis. He tried the option of working with the Liberals. Michael Ignatieff has walked away from that option. Layton has retained his integrity and his clear understanding of what the country needs. Progressives now have one party and one party only available to them: the NDP.

 Exactly.

UPDATE:  From the YWCA via Antonia Zerbisias via mattt -

 “The government has set up some very inclusive spending with this budget for First Nations, seniors and people with disabilities, but we don’t see an awareness that Canadian women are very vulnerable in hard times,” says YWCA Canada CEO Paulette Senior. “Two-thirds of Canadians working for minimum wage are women, many taking any work they can find to hold family and community together.  Government stimulus spending must take this into account.”

More from the YWCA at Broadsides here

And, I’m watching The National – Keith Boag just called Jack Layton “too bitter” to compromise with Ignatieff and said he’d been “jilted”.  So now Jack is the scorned woman.  What if Jack is simply the only one who has any scruples in Ottawa?  Ignatieff is so smug he makes me barf.

QotD

… so influential are those in the financial elite – and their hangers-on in think-tanks and economics departments – that they continue to appear on our TV screens, confidently providing us with economic advice, as if they’d played no role whatsoever in shaping our economic system for the past quarter century.

Of course, we’re told there’s been a major change in their thinking, in that many of them are now willing to accept large deficits in today’s federal budget, in the name of stimulating the economy.

While this does seem like a sharp departure from the deficit hysteria of the 1990s, a closer look reveals the change may not be that significant.

In fact, financial types have always accepted deficits – when they liked the cause. Hence their lack of protest over George W. Bush’s enormous deficits, which were caused by his large tax cuts for the rich and his extravagant foreign wars.

What they don’t like is governments going into deficit to help ordinary citizens – either by creating jobs or providing much unemployment relief.

Linda McQuaig at The Star

The Usual from the MSM

From The Globe and Mail:

A father apparently distraught over job problems shot and killed his wife and five young children and then committed suicide at their home Tuesday, police said. The victims included two sets of twins.

The bodies were found when police responded to a report of a shooting in progress in the Wilmington area shortly before 8:30 a.m., Officer Sam Park said. The bodies were found throughout the family’s house.

The victims were not immediately identified.

Deputy Chief Kenneth Garner said the man killed his wife, an 8-year-old girl, twin 5-year-old daughters and twin 2-year-old sons. He then killed himself.

“He was despondent, clearly, over his job situation,” Deputy Chief Garner said.   [more]

Ah well, that explains it then.  The guy lost his job and killed his wife and children … makes sense, doesn’t it?  I know it won’t happen in my lifetime, but it will be a great thing when reporters actually start to make some sense.  When’s the last time you heard of a woman losing her job and killing her husband and family?

Garbage Man

Garbage Man. 1985. Houston and Elizabeth streets, N.Y.C., from a series of human garbage sculptures seen in 1984 and 85

via The Lower Half

Flannery

From a review of Flannery: A Life of Flanner O’Connor by Brad Gooch and Collected Works by Flannery O’Connor by Wendy Lesser at bookforum:

Even then, it was obvious she was a genius,” said Miss Katherine Scott, Flannery O’Connor’s freshman-composition teacher, speaking to a reporter many years later about her most famous student—“warped, but a genius all the same.” The teacher no doubt focused on the warped part when the seventeen-year-old Catholic girl with the spectacles and the searing wit took her writing class at Milledgeville’s Georgia State College for Women in the summer of 1942; and it was the warped part she noticed some ten years later, when she read O’Connor’s first book, Wise Blood, and flung it across the room. “I thought to myself that character who dies in the last chapter could have done the world a great favor by dying in the first chapter instead,” she told the same reporter.

This was the sort of understanding and encouragement that surrounded Mary Flannery O’Connor from her earliest years in Savannah to her death at the age of thirty-nine in the Milledgeville area. But we should not be entirely sorry about that. Familial and social disapproval evidently spurred this writer on, enabling her to form a pearl around each painful speck of grit. That O’Connor’s pearls are among the most luminous and valuable we have in all of American literature does not detract in any way from their strangeness and hardness. Indeed, their value lies precisely in that hardness, that strangeness. However many times you read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Artificial Nigger,” and “Good Country People,” you will not be able to figure out the source of their enormous power; in fact, they will become increasingly mysterious to you as the years go by.

Read the rest here

Towards Trangression

From Vision, Violence, and Voice: A journey from liminal to transgressive spaces by Stephanie Urso Spina:

What one does first and foremost is survive the trauma — to persist in spite of it. Then one works (perhaps for a lifetime) to process it, often in uniquely personal ways. Thus, it remains a part of one’s history, one’s self. Some after-effects of trauma will always be with me but I suspect that most of these are common, although possibly in a lesser degree, to the fortuity of having been born female. For example, I startle more than most at loud noises or sudden movements. Until a few years ago, I went to great lengths to avoid traveling alone at night, even if just a short drive to the local grocery store. I remain hyper-vigilant, but given the proclivities of the society we live in, that is more likely prudence than psychogenic pathology.

 The point is that the goal is not to transcend trauma but to endure — and not without cost. Proteanism recognizes that the pain and despair never completely disappear. It is not an effort to “fix people,” but to understand them in all of their complexity so that we may demystify the role of society and better understand the practices that construct our sense of self, other, and “reality,” and thereby fix our inappropriate social structures instead. In order to do this, we must challenge the legitimacy of the hegemonic order. We must create “becoming spaces” (Derrida, 1981, p. 27) where we can think, speak, and act in ways that both mark and transgress imposed limits; where we can disrupt the dominant discourse and so reconstruct it. Sexual abuse is not an isolated phenomenon or private event. It is woven into our social fabric. It is a public issue. It is our anger and our outrage, not our silence, that will hold society accountable and provoke change.

Read the whole article here at Radical Psychology

John Updike

US writer John Updike died today of lung cancer.  He was 76.  Sad.  I’m sad to lose him. 

From an obituary at the Times Online:

John Hoyer Updike was brought up in the Pennsylvanian town of Shillington (transformed into “Ollinger” in his stories) and educated at the high school where his father taught mathematics. A talented draughtsman, he initially harboured ambitions to be an artist, and later spent a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford.

His acute eye for cumulative detail was to find expression in his fiction. Throughout his life he tended to view himself as a craftsman rather than Olympian artist. The mechanics of turning memory into prose — typefaces, fonts and proofs — apparently fascinated him as much as the intellectual process.

His love affair with The New Yorker began when he was only 12, after an aunt gave him a subscription to William Shawn’s magazine as a Christmas present. John Cheever’s stories, printed in the magazine at regular intervals, were later to exert a strong influence on his work. Bookish by nature, Updike’s introverted personality was also shaped by his experience of the chronic skin complaint psoriasis (an affliction he shared with the British playwright Dennis Potter).

He first had a short story accepted by The New Yorker in 1954, the year he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard. The following year, after his sojourn in Oxford on a Knox Fellowship, he began a two-year stint on The New Yorker, based in the “Talk of the Town” section.

The job gave Updike an entrée into the life of the city, but in 1957 he took the decisive step of leaving Manhattan to live in the relatively conventional surroundings of the coastal mill town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. In those innocent, pre-inflationary days, he calculated that a writer could make a satisfactory living from selling a handful of stories to The New Yorker each year.

As he later wrote of his departure from New York, he was glad to escape “the literary demi-monde of agents and would-bes and with-it non-participants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering . . . When I write, I aim in my mind not towards New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a country-ish teen-aged boy finding them and having them speak to him.”

Read the whole thing here

‘Parental Alienation’, Father’s Rights, Women’s Inequality

Last week, many Canadian newspapers reported on an Ontario child custody case decided in mid-January wherein a judge of the Ontario Superior Court decided that a mother had alienated her children from their father over a period of fourteen years and granted custody of the children to their father.  Here’s a report at The Star.

I’ve seen a lot of conversations going on in response to this decision and they follow the usual pattern – many men, some of them Men’s Rights and Father’s Rights advocates – but by no means all – see this case as an example of the terrible abuse that some men suffer at the hands of vindictive women.  These men engage in a fight with women who have often been abused by husbands or partners or had difficulties with children.  Everyone has an anecdote that’s supposed to be determinative.  Shit gets flung.  The conversation accomplishes little but for providing people with an opportunity to vent.  Often the men and women involved in the conversation are people who have been badly hurt in their interactions with family law, I don’t dispute that and, also, I’ve been there.

It would be good, though, if these conversations could be based on knowledge rather than opinion.  Besides having a personal experience with family law in Ontario, I’ve also practiced family law and done academic research and teaching in family law.  So, I’m going to offer a few thoughts on this case and the issues involved in hopes that it might inspire some readers to dig a little deeper before offering their expertise – a bit of snark – sorry!

One of the problems with the PAS (“parental alienation syndrome”) deal, even if it really is a syndrome (and there’s more evidence that it isn’t than that it is)  is that it makes it almost impossibly difficult  for women who experience emotional, physical, sexual and economic abuse in a marriage or with a partner who is the father or in loco parentis to a child or children to have her allegations believed.  It’s already notoriously difficult to prove these allegations and it’s aways been common that abuse is disregarded or put down to women/mothers being vindictive.  Now, of course, it’s not impossibe that some women have used such allegations in a purely manipulative way.  Similarly, women who have been victims of rape often have their cases “unfounded” by police and possibly there have been women who have concocted allegations for one reason or another.  The problem is that the very possibility of that happening often, much too often, leads to law enforcement personnel “unfounding” rape charges because they’ve fallen into rape myth traps.

One of the problems I see, in both cases, is how easily the dominant “meme” or rhetoric or discourse or conversation , the one which characterizes the woman as lying, manipulative bitch, is accepted as the most likely truth of the situation.  We fall into this pattern so easily –  so much of the culture reinforces and reproduces the dominant memes, that it makes these ways of stereotyping women very easy and dangerous – the meme becomes one more tool in the toolbox for men and their lawyers.  If it’s so easy to believe that a mother could be a lying manipulative bitch, why is it not similarly believable that a man might lie and deny abuse and use his power, his money and the patriarchal power vested in the “justice system” to get what he wants?  IMHO, that’s actually the most likely result, given women’s inequality.  NOT saying this is the fault of every individual man – it’s systemic and sometimes, men are the victims of it as well.  The feminist points don’t go away just because patriarchy sometimes victimizes men.
 
Mediation and “collaborative justice” are also problemmatic for women.  In fact, I did my Master’s Degree thesis on the use of mediation in the context of family law.  I looked at the entire Canadian history of child custody decision making, attempting to document the specific, concrete ways in which dominant ways of thinking about marriage and mothers and children and fathers shifted over time, always put women at a disadvantage, even when granting women custody - and how those shifts still work to women’s disadvantage.  There’s really good scholarship out there that demonstrates how even the ideas of gender neutrality introduced into Canadian family law in the ’80s works to obscure the unfairness of many decisions [for instance, google Susan B. Boyd].  What we’re looking for is a pattern.  Everyone has an anecdote that falls outside the pattern.  We tend to pay much more attention to the heartrending anecdotes than we do to the pattern.  One anecdote from a man or his mother tends to trump several thousand of them from women.  My colleagues and I have been talking lately about how much more attention the tropes about “women” and “mothers”  get – those lying, manipulative, hysterical, spurned women – and how incredibly easily they are accepted as “truth”.  Especially as compared to the stories of men which “we” (including the lawmakers and law enforcers) seem to find so much moe credible, most of the time. 

As for the “new” process of “collaborative justice” now so popular in family law, there’s lots of critical work on that too.  It seems to work for some people, but imagine how it can be used against a woman who is in a relatively powerless position considering how prone “we” are to setting women’s views of reality aside.  Some truly terrible things result.  Formal legal processes are often critisized, especially in the context of family law – another thing I looked at in my thesis.  Thing is, formal legal processes have at their heart, supposedly, the protection of the rights of the parties.  Sometimes, we get rights “right” and actually protect relatively powerless people.  But “rights” aren’t first and foremost with mediation and collaborative law – an agreement, sometimes any agreement, is understood to be ”in the best interests” of children.  Sounds good?  Sounds “right”?  That too depends on point of view.  Where agreements reinforce the relative powerlessness of mothers and formalize abuse, as they often do, the harm to the mother becomes harm to the children as well – though there still seem to be few people who “get” that.   There is still a view that a man can be almost as abusive as they come to his wife; as long as he hasn’t directly abused his children in a way that can be proved, he is almost always deemed to be a fit father, at the very least for the purposes of access to children which almost always necessitates an ongoing relationship with their mother.  The emotional damage experienced by children whose mother’s are abused is ignored, though it seems just intuitively true to me.  It’s not that I want to pay attention to mothers at the expense of children; I just have a broader concept of what’s good for children.  Or at least children who have mothers as primary caregivers.
 
Hmmm.  As always, I get back to how complicated it is, how much work it takes to understand it and how unlikely it is that most people can or will take the time or trouble to figure it out.  Everyone seems to think they’re an expert in family law, certainly everyone who’s been through the system and lots of other people as well.  Most people also think that when they read a case, or about it, everything they read ”true” or the judge wouldn’t say it.  This despite the fact that judge-made law is known to be as gender biased as any other form of law.  I’m being honest when I say, in family law, as with so many other things, it’s one step forward and two steps back for women.
 
One last note:  it’s often said that “joint custody” works best for children and so it’s an inviolable “good thing”.  As usual, for every study that says it’s best, there are a few more that show the flaws in those studies and more studies that show less glowing results.  Again, the big concern is that joint custody regimes so easily reinforce the previous status quo in the relationship where the mother does all the work and the father has all the control.  That’s what joint custody often means.  Stats Can has some numbers that show that in by far and away the greater number of Canadian cases, joint custody means the mother has de facto custody and the father can intervene with regard to major (or minor) decision making.  Those are situations in which the parties have come to an agreement.  And clearly, it’s not custody or even shared time that many fathers want.  It’s ongoing control. 

I’m not saying all fathers, so don’t bug me!  I’m sure there are plenty of engaged and involved and loving fathers and I wish them no harm.  But an engaged and involved and loving father respects the mother of his children.

I’ve not included many links here because I just needed to get this off my chest.  If anyone wants sources, ask me in comments and I’ll try to provide them.

And by the way, the three children in the case reported at The Star lived with their mother and her family for fourteen years, with almost no contact with their father.  Even if that lack of contact was no fault of his and even if it was entirely the fault of their mother, I wonder how we can possibly say that it’s in the best interests of these children to be sent from the home of their mother to a courhouse to be handed over to the patriarch without the mother’s presence and to be entirely cut off from contact with her for the foreseeable future.  Maybe this is justice for this father.  It’s neither justice for the children nor good for them.  If the situation was reversed, if the father had abused these children in this way, I can tell you almost for sure, they wouldn’t be handed over to their mother with no access for Dad.  It doesn’t happen.

UPDATE:  I’ve bounced the uglier comments.  And I forgot one trope about women, specifically feminists:  we’re all aching to “claim our victimhood”.  No matter how uppity we get.

Jane

The Blue Bowl

Like primitives we buried the cat
with his bowl. Bare-handed
we scraped sand and gravel
back into the hole.
                               They fell with a hiss
and thud on his side,
on his long red fur, the white feathers
between his toes, and his
long, not to say aquiline, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.
There are sorrows keener than these.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked,
ate, stared, and slept. It stormed
all night; now it clears, and a robin
burbles from a dripping bush
like the neighbor who means well
but always says the wrong thing.

Jane Kenyon

Joan

It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

Joan Baez