Follow the money (the rich got richer)

(The graph above is given in constant 2000 dollars; it is based on a chart also available at StatsCan.)

The 1990s was a decade of fabulous riches. The Liberals -- with the help of free trade agreements negotiated by the Conservatives -- slashed government spending in 1995 by 19%, then slew the deficit, then ushered in a golden age of surpluses and tax cuts. The sun shone down on all of us.

Canada did so well during the 1990s, that the richest Canadians (the top tenth) saw their income go up by 15%! If only the rest of us were so blessed... With a rise in prices of 1.7% during the same period (UN Human Development Index), the bottom 60% of Canadians would see complete stagnation of their spending power, or worse.

The difference between the gains made by the best-off (in red) and everyone else (in green) is pretty incredible.

An online StatsCan report adds, "In 2000, the top 10% of families had incomes above $117,850. The combined income of these families accounted for 28% of the total income of all Canadian families. They accounted for 26% of the total income in 1990."

If this surprises you, that's because it's a story the media doesn't touch, for reasons best known to the owners and editors within the income group least eager to draw attention to its exceptional good luck.

Now, until the 2006 census, we won't have another study detailed enough to tell us how income groups in Canada have fared since 2000.

But, at least regarding the least fortunate Canadians, we can guess. In 2000, according to the Canadian Association of Food Banks, 726,902 people in Canada received emergency groceries from a food bank during the month of March 2000 (almost double the 1989 figure). This year, the 2005 report states that this number has grown to 823,856 -- of whom 40% are children. These numbers don't include users of soup kitchens -- the poorest of the poor.

I'll be blogging more about poverty soon. But for now, we should remember that whenever we're thinking about the Liberal record, we're talking about a federal government on whose watch only the wealthiest made substantial gains, the middle hasn't budged, and the poorest have gotten not just poorer -- but are going hungry in ever greater numbers.

--

Next up, what Michael Ignatieff really thinks. Not about Ukrainians, but about America's noble mission to spread Jeffersonion liberty like peanut butter over the entire world.

A teaser, from the professor himself:

"A liberal society cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us, but we had better make sure our meat-eaters hunt only on our orders."

Obviously, he's not a vegan.

--

My thanks to David Lizoain and Inaki Mondragon for their help in this research. As always, dear reader, if you come across information you think I'd find useful, please send it over to aldana@danielaldana.net.

This is not a horse race: a matchbook manifesto

In 2004, on the day of the federal election, The Globe and Mail printed a picture a lot like this one next to a poll showing the Liberals and Conservatives in a 'dead heat'.

This wasn't absurd journalism just because the poll was wrong and the Liberals won 36 more seats than the Conservatives. It was also a refreshing reminder of how the mainstream media covers politics in this country like a horse race.

Unfortunately, it isn't just to the benefit of time-starved, dumb, or otherwise incapacitated political reporters to treat politics as sport. This parody of free speech also benefits election specialists, public relations consultants, idea-less politicians and every other parasite who benefits from a national debate on politics that reads like the script surly commentators read from their booth at the hippodrome.

Substantial debate and social change driven by engaged citizens in diverse communities -- i.e. the whole point of democracy -- is impossible when the mainstream media routinely compare political parties to "large hoofed mammal[s] (Equus caballus) having a short-haired coat, a long mane, and a long tail, domesticated since ancient times and used for riding and for drawing or carrying loads" (dictionary.com).

Tragically, as I'm not currently running a newspaper, I can only try to provide an alternative up here in the blogosphere (yes, it is very windy up here, what with having to share so much thin air with so many blowhards.) I'll post my own analysis, as well as linking to the rare article of substance in the press, and I'm going to rely a lot on research done over the long-term on social, political and economic issues. (Also: jokes, both funny and unfunny, to grease the ol' wheels.)

What we'll find, I think, is that Paul Martin and the Liberals have taken advantage over these past twelve years of the amazing absence of decent media coverage to move government in Ottawa hard to the right. I'll be focusing on Paul Martin and the Liberals because there's a lot that isn't known about how they've governed this country, even though they've been both governing and the most popular horse -- I mean party -- in Canada for over a decade.

Well, that's it for now. My next post will contain shocking statistics about who got rich and who didn't during a decade of Liberal rule.

Getting it right on the war of the Isms (and Boisclair's fatal flaw -- hint: it isn't cocaine)

Chantal Hébert recently pointed out on CBC news that the two most popular leaders of the federalist cause in Quebec in 1995 were Paul Martin and Jean Charest. As no one new has emerged alongside them, and both have seen their popularity plummet, the obvious implication is that Canada's fucked.

A closer look, though, shows that the battle between 'federalism' and 'le souverainisme' is not at all what most English-language commentary implies. The first thing to know about English commentary about Quebec is that it's usually ignorant or deliberately misleading. Edward Said said that one reason people get away with such distorted protraits of the Orient is that no one knows much about the region. Similarly, Enlglish Canadians outside Montreal (and most English students at McGill...) know shockingly little about Quebec.

The two things all English Canadians should know right now is that Quebec-based Anglophones are historically associated with an exploitative, capitalist upper class, and that Jean Charest's miserable approval ratings have nothing to do with federalism, and everything to do with his neoliberal economic policies, which Quebecers have continuously rejected since their 1960s quiet revolution.

Jean Charest, much like Paul Martin in fact, is more distinguished by his neoliberalism than his federalism. Each of the two men believes in restructuring the state to replace government programs with market forces. Charest promised to replace Quebec's social-democratic model and is now trying his best to do so -- which is why he will lose the next election.

Paul Martin, meanwhile, doesn't have much to offer Quebecers either. His 'Canada' has a budgetary surplus because he demolished social democratic social spending in his 1995 budget (a 19% cut in program spending) and has used the resulting surpluses to pay down debt and cut taxes. The "fiscal imbalance", which makes Quebecers furious, is basically the imbalance between the federal government's piggish surpluses and the provincial government's bare coffers - an imbalance directly related to Martin's spendthrift ideology.

"Stay in Canada," Charest and Martin implore, "it's such a fabulous country, we're shrinking its government as fast as we can! Come on, stay, we can all be a big happy family in which each sibling competes against the other to be in the top 15% of Canadian income earners -- because the bottom 85% have all gotten poorer since the early '90s, thanks to our reforms."

Now, given that Quebec is the most progressive (i.e. leftwing) province in the country, as shown by polls and popular government programs, does it really make sense for neoliberals -- the Canadian economic right -- to sell federalism to Quebec? Without a question, the longer Canadian neoliberalism and Canadian federalism are allowed to be interchangeable, the more likely Quebecers will be to abadon a country -- and an ideology -- they don't believe in.

(Keep in mind, the Bloc is not just a sovereigntist party, it also espouses social-democratic ideals almost identical to those of the NDP; Gilles Duceppe did not even vote in the 1980 referendum because as a Maoist, he believed that workers across Canada should unite.)

It doesn't have to be this way. Either the Quebec Liberals or the federal Liberals could adopt progressive policies more in tune with Canadian and Quebecer values. Or, more promising, with proportional representation, the NDP could gain a foothold in Quebec and take on the mantle of Canada's progressive federalist party. As it stands, though, the first-past-the-post system is a formidable barrier to entry for them.

Here's where Anré Boisclair comes in. Quebec has never had a truly leftwing party of its own, for reasons many Quebecers have been at a loss to explain. Recently, the Parti Quebecois has been the province's left-of-centre grouping, but in an ambiguous way. Lucien Bouchard was an old Mulroney cabinet minister, and has recently declared support for economic policies similar to Charest's.

National liberation movements have a history of coalitions that submerge all social and economic currents into a single nationalist river. Quebecers share responsibility for having a Premier who represents the federalism of many Quebecers -- in other words, a break from referendum mania -- but the economic and social views of hardly any. Strangely enough, if Boisclair is elected as Quebec's next premier, the situation could remain the same.

There's been so much talk of his cocaine use, his homosexuality, the moderation of his sovereignism, and the fact that he's under ninety, there's been little discussion of how he would actually run a province, never mind a country. Well, a little story in the Globe and Mail gives us a hint:

But the more old-fashioned Péquistes and some younger restless tenants of independence are wary of him, seeing him as a smooth-talking neo-Liberal with a tepid commitment to sovereignty and a tin ear for their social-democratic ideals.

[...]

As minister of social solidarity in 1998, Mr. Boisclair tackled the issue of government spending cuts with the ruthlessness of an entrepreneur.

One controversial instance occurred with the demutualization of the Canadian insurance industry, the process where life insurers converted from mutual enterprises owned by their policy holders to publicly traded companies owned by shareholders.

Welfare recipients who were policy owners became eligible to receive shares worth thousands of dollars.

Mr. Boisclair's department was criticized for making no efforts to explain to welfare recipients that their new assets had to be declared and that they would lose their benefits and have their money seized by the government.

In one high-profile case, a single mother of two who got off welfare and opened a hair salon was left on the brink of bankruptcy after the government insisted she reimburse back taxes. That move and other cost-cutting initiatives angered anti-poverty groups that were lobbying the government for concrete steps to help the poor.

"[Mr. Boisclair] wasn't very receptive to our concerns," social activist Vivian Labrie recalled.

Most of this Globe story focuses on other things, but already we can see trouble brewing in paradise. How would Boisclair, who just got an MBA from Harvard, react to the Supreme Court ruling authorizing private health care in Quebec if he were in power? If the Liberals pass this law, would he repeal it and fortify the public system before holding a referendum?

There's a saying in Quebec that there will never be sovereignty because only the PQ would call a referendum; and because governments in power tend to annoy people, the population would express their anger at the government by voting 'no' in a referendum. Well, imagine the PQ governing with policies reminiscent of the hated Liberals. Not exactly winning conditions.

Boisclair knows this too. (Let's leave aside the conspirace theory that he doesn't even want to win the referendum.) Already cagey about his love for the white lady, he'll probably try to keep his economic cards to his chest until after a referendum. In other words, he'll call English Canada's bluff, betting that all we can come up with is more of the same. We should force him to show his hand, and we should make sure that when the chips fall, ours looks very different than it does now.

Paul Martin: Santa Claus ... or The Penguin!

So Paul Martin has decided to shower the Canadian people with tax cuts. Mmm, I love hot water -- I mean, tax cuts. Apparently, the reasoning in the PMO is that the old scheme for buying votes, in which various middlemen -- I mean, party bag-men -- sponge up tons of the money is too expensive. So the good people in Ottawa decided: Fuck that, let's cut out the middle man and just buy 'em wholesale.

But does Paul Martin really make a convincing Santa Claus? Consider these four photos:
















Isn't the following a little more convincing?

Did somebody say 'poppy-talitarianism'?

So someone in our government has decided that the Canadian poppy must be trade-marked, otherwise the terrorists -- I mean fascists -- will win (note that the British gov't is encouraging anyone to download and use the poppy symbol):

...the poppy is a trademark of the Legion and anyone who wants to use it has to apply. Otherwise it would be all over the place. There are numeorus [sic] examples where it has been used for sales and other purposes. As it is not in the public domain and because it is a registered trademark of the Legion the organization is taking every step it can to protect it (and I do mean every step). All this can be avoided in the future if you ask to use it on your site and you get the proper approval. Sorry, I know your heart and many others are in the right place. Unfortunately we have to protect this image or lose its use as a symbol of Remembrance. -Bob Butt, Director of Communications for the Canadian Legion, writing to Pierre Bourque

(I got this from colbycosh.com and confirmed it on Bourque; you'll find it on other blogs, too.)

Pace my statism, but that's really a little much. The Russian people defeated fascism by piling up 18 million or so bodies in lieu of a real wall, with help from Allies who stormed a beach with - also their bodies. Not government garble but real human lives. Those people didn't die so that a concrete beachhead disguised as a bureaucrat could regulate popular memory from his cubicle. Milan Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, astutely pointed out that "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." He also noticed, from his enclave in Prague then suffering under a Soviet regime, that they who control the past control the present.

Walter Benjamin, a German critic who died fleing the Nazis, spent a lot of his life writing about the revolutionary power of memory objects -- so long as they're free from authoritarian control. He also famously (in academic circles, that is) wrote that "there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."

The problem with state-controlled memories is that they impoverish memory. War is a complicated and terrible thing. The poppy, as a representative of individuals caught up in war, should be free to conjure up memories that would make a pacifist out of anyone (or any other memories for that matter). This isn't useful for a state that's pitching in soldiers to an end-less (pun intended) 'War on Terror' in Afghanistan (oh the irony! so many poppies...) right now, but it sure is useful for the rest of us.

Bob Butt says, "Unfortunately we have to protect this image or lose its use as a symbol of Remembrance." The opposite is true. So long as the image of the poppy is monopolized by 'people' like him, remembrance, in its richest and most dangerous sense, can never be possible.

Terrorism: all in the word (it's got nothing on killism)

So here I am listening to an educated person on the CBC saying infectious diseases are so much less dangerous than *insert scary sounds* bio-terrorism. Which makes sense, since terrorists aren't actually good at killing people - lightening, car crashes, cigarettes, and rotten love affairs are way more effective. What terrorists are good at is scaring people - hence the irony of beyond-the-pale-media-fear-mongering that does the terrorist's work for him (or her). A million times scarier than terrorism is KILLISM, an as-yet uninvented practice (unless you count war) that really scares the shit out of me.

Star Paris reporting

Good reports on French riots in the Toronto Star today. This pretty good story is a concise and necessary take on immigration history, which acknowledges the previous success of France's model before fucking it all up with the North and sub-Saharan African immigrants. But it also refers to an intifada, which completely misses the point.

Object lesson: buzzwords, which are often misleading, should be handled with care. Obviously.

For a corrective, which points to the primary economic aspects of integration, see Haroon Siddiqui's excellent piece - tightly argued.

Also, a classic wire story on the predictable barbarism of the resurgent extreme right - Le Pen et al.

And, most challenging, a longer, older piece about the misery of living in the suburbs that wasn't whipped up in 4 hours go next to a picture of burning cars.

A modest torture proposal - and more on French madness

Toronto Star humour writer Linwood Barclay, less sharp than in the old days, nonetheless has a brilliant column this week:

Here's an idea, and I can't believe I'm the first to come up with this modest proposal, but why doesn't the U.S. government just go ahead and torture Lewis "Scooter" Libby? And not just for that ridiculous name.

Sure, the point's a bit obvious, but someone had to give it a go, and this one's pretty good.

Meanwhile, France is bathing in the glory of its hideous, underground, fascist aquifers - or some such metaphor. De Villepin's evoked a 1955 law that permits the state to impose curfews on towns and police to conduct raids without warrants. Surely there's some historical irony here!

Indeed, there is. The law was initially written to broaden the legal capabilities of French forces suppressing the Algerian revolution when Algeria was still a colony. And now, the children/grandchildren of the cheap Algerian labourers (themselves survivors of the first instance of the 1955 law) that France imported, are facing the repression under the exact same law.

(In fact, one might even notice a further irony, that perhaps there wouldn't be so many desperate immigrant families in France today from that part of the world if the Hexagon hadn't fucked Algeria so badly during its century of colonization that by the time it left, there were only two engineers in the whole goddamn newly-independent country [1].)

Also very precious, the leader of the Socialist Party in the French National Assembly, Mr. Ayrault, has refused to "play politics" - i.e., to criticize - this approach, out of Republican solidarity. Like President Chirac, who said that "by definition" the Republic is stronger than its enemies, Mr. Ayrault, as reported in Le Figaro, swears by tautology. He said:

"Cela fait partie des dispositions législatives qui n'ont jamais été abrogées depuis qu'elles ont été votées. Si elles étaient inacceptables, la gauche au gouvernement les auraient déjà abrogées depuis longtemps."
Trans: "[The law] is one of the legislative options that have never been abrogated since they were approved. If they were unnacceptable, the left when it was in government would have abrogated them a long time ago."

In other words, all laws passed before 2002, when the Socialists were most recently booted from power, are by definition good laws, since the Socialists, well, are-and-have-always-been perfect. Or, perhaps Mr. Ayrault is obliquely - subconsciously even - admitting that the Socialists share responsibility for the desperate conditions of France's slum-dwellers... Hmm, doesn't seem likely.

__________

1. Richard Lawless, "Algeria: The contradictions of Rapid Industrialisation," IN North Africa: Contemporary Politics and Economic Development, eds. Richard Lawless and Allan Findlay, (New York: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 153. (Yes, I wrote a long paper on the subject in university.)

Aimless autumn

Life's a letdown when you're not published once a week. Somehow harder to remember shit when you're not mining it for material. Then again, a little peace and quit is nice - for about FIVE minutes.

Jane

ps, Daniel, your discussion of France is very interesting but a little *whisper* BORING. I suggest a little more humour, a little more relevance, and a few more flapper references. Thanks honey...

NY Times okay analysis

This NY Times story (free registration required) does a decent job of summing up various parts of the story. Note Chirac's creepy quote about the 'Republic' needing to show who's boss. That's de Gaulle language which, becuase this is not a war against German fascism, is bad news.

French rioting in context

Table of contents:

1. The current riots in historical context

2. A discussion of the political implications for France right now

3. A good friend's intelligent response, with more on the political implications

1. HISTORICAL CONTEXT

There's a period in French history called 'les trente glorieuses.' It's not a sarcastic euphamism for the depression, but rather refers to the thirty years of economic prosperity that followed WW2, a period that ground to a halt with the oil shocks of the early 1970s. During this time, in France as in most of W Europe and N America, there was virtually full employment - that is, almost anyone could get a job without a problem. In fact, there were even shortages of cheap labour, so France imported an impressive amount from its former colonies, where there was a significant surplus of cheap labour. (This was especially true of Algeria, whose economic development policies were founded on high-tech, capital-intensive industrialization.)

How to house all these people was a big question. The solution was to build high-rises in the suburbs surrounding the major metropolises. These are called 'cités', and the poorest agglomeration of this type of his housing is in the North East of Paris, where the riots are now taking place. The model has been reproduced in smaller towns throughout France.

After the world went into recession in the 1970s (it's a little discussed fact that the entire globe, with maybe the exception of SE Asia, has suffered lower econ growth in the past 30 years than in the three decades previous; neoliberalism obviously looks pretty bad in this analysis...), unemployment rates began to rise. In countries lie France, where social protections enjoyed by the indiginous majority (read, white workers) made the labour market inflexible, umeployment rose even more dramatically. For over a decade unemployment has been over 10% in France, and has long been considered the major problem of that country. (It's worse, I believe, in Germany now, but this probably because of the integration of the Eastern half of the country.) Culturally, there was a lack of concerted effort to integrate immigrant populations, which were already physically isolated and which were excluded from the traditional structures of labour mobilization. The ZEP is an example of a French program that tried to isolate underperforming 'ghetto schools' to provide them with more funds and younger teachers in an effort to improve education there. ZEP, like its sister programs, has in fact completely failed to attain its objectives. The result is geographically concentrated areas of destitute immigrant population, though we're talking less about fresh immigrants than second-, and third-generation communities that have found themselves on the periphery of the French economy. That said, there are now many disenfranchised white working class people who, feeling abandoned by socialist and communist politicians, have veered to the extreme right.

As you all know from reading my previous writing, the last decade has been a strange one in French politics, culminating in the French right coming to power and the ultra-repressive Sarkozy leading the charge for the forces of rage. A lot of rioters are screaming out Sarko as they fight the police, and many youth in these neighbourhoods have offered up his name to explain the recent riots. But they are not spontaneous, in the traditional sense of the word. It's been years since the French police have been able to safely patrol the neighbourhoods that are now on fire. For one who is even dimly aware of the conditions in these neighbourhoods, the current violence is no surprise.

The current mess could also be compared to the LA race riots, where you have a simmering tension explode after a supposed act of police malfeasance. (In this case, two youth died and a third was nearly killed while running away from police - who, apparently, were in fact chasing a different band of hooligans...) Young men, as in American black ghettos, are the worst off.

2. POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS TODAY

In terms of the political implications, it looks like the war between centrist PM De Villepin (who is a Chirac loyalist; the two are from the 'Gaullist' tradition, which is like an authoritarian version of Canadian red toryism) and neo-liberal, police-state-loving Sarkozy. De Villepin and to a greater extent the rightwing (but also Arab ethnicity) minister of equal opportunities are urging community building and some form of compassion as a response - plus, of course, police-kept law and order. Sarko insists that we must call a spade a spade, or a trouble-making immigrant (or child of an immigrant) a scum. I haven't taken the time to examine in detail the socialist response, though no doubt it will be varied since in France, repressive racists are sprinkled throughout the political spectrum.

Anyway, Sarko, who is rumoured to be gay and whose wife recently left him for a publicist has clearly decided to run for President under the tough-guy banner, and Villepin to try as a more centrist, conciliatory candidate. Both will seek the nomination of their party, the UMP. Sarko is supported by about 90% of party members, whereas Villepin has more or less caught up on national ratings from the entire French populous. But unless Villepin can win over his own party, Sarko is still the most likely, at this moment, to be the right's presidential candidate.

I believe the socialists have more soft support in general, but lack a unifying, compelling personality on the order of Sarko or Villepin, which will make it hard for them to run a stellar presidential campaign. For instance, the socialist party membership was pro-constitution, but the socialist party voting base (much, much larger) was anti-. The most likely presidential candidates, Francois Hollande (former Jospin loyalist) and Dominique Strauss Khan (former finance minister and a Mitterand, Jospin loyalist), both belong to the socialist leadership that was fucked by Le Pen in 2002. Meanwhile, Fabius, lord of the constitutional no vote, has struggled to build popularity among the public or coalition partners within the socialist party. If these riots persist, however, they could displace Europe as a central political question and revive the fortunes of Le Pen and the extreme right. We may now see the socialists settle on a social policy in response that could reframe the debate.

3. AN INTELLIGENT EXTENSION OF THE DISCUSSION FROM A MAN ON THE SCENE

Inaki Mondragon (see blog roll), currently living in Paris, emailed me this response, which clarifies matters enormously.

Aldana,

Your analysis has been great for thinking about the unrest in the banlieu. What is most stunning to me right now is how minimal the impact has been on life here in Paris proper. The suburbs might be burning, and the government might be facing a crisis, but everything seems normal. Marseille and Lyon may have both sparked up, but these speculations feel remote from reality.

The socialists, at the moment, have no answer. Neither to the banlieu nor for France's problems in general. They seem unwilling to host primaries, and there's already talk of de Villepin facing Sarkozy in a presidential run-off.

Now, the Greens and the Commmunists have both called for Sarkozy's head, which is logical since he's seen as having intentionally provoked the outbursts. The socialists are getting ready to stage demonstrations this coming week, but are sounding as though they acutely sense their impotence. There's speculation of measures as extreme as the army being sent in. Sarko, it is thought, will let the situation escalate so he can win credit as the man who imposed order on the rabble.

Sarko, for his part, agrees with you and me when he notes that the French model has not worked for the past thirty years. His solution is fascism. But the socialists, for their part, will be stuck until they break decisively with Mitterand. The socialists can't march in the banlieu against Sarkozy because they also share some of the blame for the problem. I listened to a young socialist tonight insist that all the 5th Republic needs is a charismatic and strong leader. This sentiment is more intense in the senior party.

Ideally, this surge of outrage will transform into mass action by the left and the fall of the entire right-wing French Establishment. It has been pointed out to me that this is highly unlikely since no one's offering a positive alternative. So in the meanwhile, I must hope de Villepin can smooth the situation and buy the Left time to get its act together. But more likely is the depressing outcome that this is only the beginning, and that both the excluded immigrants, and more alarmingly, the Right, will escalate their rhetoric and their tactics.

Objective White Male to the rescue

Although Judge Gomery is an old man, he’s still vibrant and in good health – it wouldn’t be fair, just yet, to call him a Dead White Man (DWM).

Nonetheless, he is acting out an ancient, and hopefully dying, role. Gomery has been charged with providing an objective, final account of a Liberal corruption scandal. The public inquiry he led will end up costing close to $100 million dollars. As is frequently noted, he wrote every word of the first report, which came out this week.

But how can anyone believe that what a single man says represents the objective truth?

Jean Chrétien will accuse Gomery of bias before the courts because he didn’t like what Gomery said. But in the arguments he and his lawyer outlined on television on Tuesday, there was no broader questioning of the system: a judicial matter of the highest stakes resting on the judgment of a single human being.

Let’s forget for a moment what exactly Gomery’s first report actually says, and think instead about the kind of knowledge that it represents. In theory, the Gomery report is meant to provide an objective – you could say impartial – account of various facts. It is meant, and understood to be, true.

Maybe the broadest reason this kind of knowledge is valued is that it comes from what we consider the least corrupt branch of government – the judiciary. And if local courts and small-time judges are often held to be corrupt, at least at the highest levels, and compared to politicians, judges tend to be pretty well respected. This is obvious when it comes to Supreme Court justices, with whom we may or may not disagree, but who are treated with a hell of a lot more respect than most government ministers.

We also value judicial knowledge because it’s the closest to a clear understanding of morals and basic societal principles – like the freedoms enshrined in our constitutions. Some political decisions are moral and accessible, such as when deciding whether to go to war, but many others we call would political or bureaucratic, like how to plan a road system. The justice system, meanwhile, and let’s remember that crime TV always does better than political TV, hits close to home. We all feel closely affected by the motives and consequences of crime; and the ideas of guilt and innocence are absolutely central both to our society and to our inner sense of fair play.

So we feel we can trust judges, especially if the procedure is public, and we pay attention to them, because what they tell us is dear to our hearts. And because what they rule on is so important, there is usually an element of democracy built into the highest levels of judicial decision-making. Most criminal cases involve juries, which is the most direct involvement most citizens can have in public life these days. Then, at provincial and appeals courts there is often a panel of judges, reaching nine at the Supreme level.

The Gomery inquiry has no such structure – the conclusions he comes to are his own, and while he’s got a team, he is the undisputed leader. He’s not the first among equals, he’s the first, period.

Whose interests does this serve? On the surface, nobody’s, since presumably everyone would want the fairest possible process, and a more democratic structure would seem to be better than the current one. But there has also been a desire to get as clear an answer as possible to the questions raised by the Sponsorship scandal. As there has been no public outcry over the decision to have a single, omnipotent, and eventually, presumably, omniscient judge, we might even assume that people accept this logic.

I find it disturbing that we still chose, at moments such as this, to throw a living DWM, in all his glory, at a system buckling from the pressure of so many white male elites living out their years in power exactly as one would expect. Irrespective of whether Gomery, on balance, was right or wrong on the details, the fact that a single man has been empowered to find out, and that anyone will take such knowledge seriously as either a form of truth or even some kind of remedy, suggests a scandal completely different from the one described in the headlines. It suggests a structural gullibility of astonishing magnitude at a time when we all agree, at least superficially, that what is needed is the exact opposite.