The system creates the Fords and Trumps needed to destroy it

The crowds in Toronto that gathered for the funeral of former mayor Rob Ford filled the streets. There were banners and marching bands and people chanting: “Best mayor ever! Best mayor ever!”

Politicians who would cross town in order not to be seen near him in life attended church to hear him praised in death. Insiders saying goodby to just the most recent and most famous anti-insider their system has produced.

Rob Ford's brother Doug vowed at the funeral that Ford Nation would carry on — and it will, in various forms, with some members even winning high office.

This is a portrait of our political system. This is a system that shrugs and winks at insider influence masquerading as democratic process. A system that sells its influence to the highest bidders while preaching restraint to the masses. A system where the little guy pays twice — once for citizenship, and once more for the profiteers who benefit from insider status the rest of us could never afford.

In Alberta, B.C., Ontario — and probably everywhere else — premiers, party leaders and cabinet members unashamedly sell private access to secret meetings, to raise money for their election campaigns.

You want to know what a good price would be to take over the next government service you'd like privatized? A few minutes alone with the premier could cost you $10,000 or more. Industry managers have said (anonymously, of course) that to decline an invitation to attend one of these intimate fundraisers with a governing party could result in a fatal delay to your normal business inquiries.

Appeals for political donations has morphed into a form of shakedown. That's influence peddling. Perhaps not according to the strict wording of the law, but certainly in terms of the law's supposed spirit.

The is not a new or recent invention, but as the need for large amounts of money has taken over election campaigns, it has been made more perfect.

If anyone in power is still confused as to why thousands of people would cram the streets to memorialize a politician who lied in office, showed up late, left early, bullied and demonized any opposition, consorted with criminals, imbibed illegal drugs and was regularly and profanely drunk in public, please consult a mirror. You helped create him.

We have been warned for a long time now about how the rising disparity of incomes and opportunities in our society will lead to instability and rising social unrest.

While the rich and influential minority has gotten ever richer and ever more influential, cracks in our social cohesion have grown into niches for populist opportunists who want to bring the system down. To the people the system has left behind, that sounds like a perfectly good idea.

A current of anger rises when large masses of people realize they do not have the same opportunities to upward mobility that elites say they have. Charismatic leaders come forward to mobilize that anger, and you get a Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. In November, we may well get a U.S. President Donald Trump.

There is no moral high ground for mainstream politicians who benefit from the whiff of corruption. One's vision for a better, more equal and just society cannot square with intimate social gatherings to take money from people who do not generally give money away for free.

You can say that your party's polling and focus group discussions equate to consulting the people, but who will believe you? Someone is coming who will convince the people to damn you all.

The consequences include fascism, and that is not a good outcome. So why promote it?

We want our leaders to be beacons of integrity, in what is widely understood to be a dirty game. That's a hard road. If we are all honest with ourselves, it's sometimes a duplicitous one.

But it beats the alternatives; it's the best game we have.

So cancel the intimate expensive fundraisers with the rich and influential. They will be rich and influential enough without having to buy favours from you. Where the laws do not yet demand it, declare political fundraising caps and election expense limits unilaterally — and live by them.

Make our votes count for more than dollars. Or face what comes when the next Rob Ford comes along.

Godwin's Law proved right: online talk will turn racist

On a whim, and perhaps wishing to escape to a simpler future, I've just started reading Isaac Asimov's 1950-era vision of today, I, Robot. It's a collection of short stories wound around the narratives of a fictional engineer in machine intelligence, as she reflects on the social changes that followed when robots were made to think and speak for themselves.

If there were a Dr. Susan Calvin around today, I wonder what she'd think of Tay, the AI chatbot that Microsoft created and set loose in the Twitterverse last week — and which had to be put down within hours.

Tay didn't roam about on machine legs, sprouting laser death rays while violating all the laws of robotics that Asimov had so famously created. Tay was just a Twitter account.

The AI behind that account was to “experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding,” according to a Microsoft development team. Tay was targeted to engage millennials online and learn to talk like them through Twitter conversations.

Tay was “AI fam the internet that's got zero chill.” Also, zero awareness of the existence of online trolls.

In about 17 hours, Tay had become a racist bigot who supported genocide of Mexicans, expressed hatred of blacks and feminists, denied the Holocaust ever happened — and was a fan of Donald Trump.

In short, a robot that needed to be put to sleep.

Much of the worst of Tay's online exchanges have been taken down. Wouldn't that be another violation of the code of the internet? Aren't a human being's ill-considered comments preserved for all time on servers all over the world, waiting to sabotage a future run for public office?

If you're willing to believe that all knowledge is good, you can find some positives in this. We know Tay was an early effort, and quite unsophisticated. Thus, it proves that it requires very little intelligence or sophistication to become an online troll.

If humanity is to continue on the track toward machine self-awareness — and we are — we'll need to program in Asimov's laws of robotics. You know, the ones that prohibit robotic harm to humans.

Machine self-awareness also needs to program in some protection against what's known as Godwin's Law. That law predicts that the longer an online conversation continues, the greater the probability it will reference Nazis and Hitler.

The internet truly is a reflection of the best and worst of humanity. And the less self-aware (net neutral) it is made to be, the more likely it is to reflect the worst, rather than the best of us. Under Godwin's Law, we do not evolve through anonymous online connections, we devolve.

Humans have a social filter that helps us decide what is appropriate to say and do. Most of the time, in face-to-face interactions, that filter works fine. Online, not so much. The troll ruining your life in social media might well be the polite, positive co-worker you can physically talk to in the next cubicle. Online, the two of you most likely will not even know that you are in fact real-life neighbours.

Therefore, does the Tay experience show us the internet needs an all-powerful referee? Or, could Tay develop through experience the same kind of filters that keep real-life civilization from burning up in violent chaos?

Without Asimov and his fictional Susan Calvin, we are left with Godwin. And that is definitely not zero chill.

National pride: soft, with ketchup on top

Canadians have a funny way of expressing our national pride sometimes.

Of all things, French's ketchup became a cause célebre across the country when it was revealed Loblaws was going to remove the brand from its grocery store shelves. Even more so, when it came to light later that the decision to do this was motivated by a desire to reduce choice and improve the sales of its President's Choice store brand.

Because French's ketchup is made from Canadian-grown tomatoes, you know.

Until then, ketchup nationalism was not so much of a thing. Even after mega-investor Berkshire Hathaway bought Heinz, and closed down its Ontario ketchup factory, consumer loyalties did not really move that much.

But a few tweets after the Loblaws decision (and then the reversal of that decision), you'd have to be a Trump-kissing Yankee turncoat to buy anything but French's.

Never mind that competing brands use tomato paste made in Ontario (albeit from imported produce). Economic nationalism, like globalism, can be a complicated thing.

It might make Canadian consumers feel better to teach the big guys a lesson from time to time, but if this is an example of Canadian pride as expressed in the marketplace, we still have a long way to go.

Another Canadian institution in which we take great pride is Bombardier. We must take a great deal of pride in the company, because we sure do give it a lot of our tax money.

In fact, we are told must give Bombardier a great deal more tax money, or it will not be able to compete against other very large aerospace manufacturers, who themselves receive great amounts of tax money in their countries.

Canadian jobs are at stake, we are told, and Bombardier is simply too important to our economy to be allowed to fail.

So, while our national pride is being tweaked for a giant subsidy, Bombardier says it plans to outsource many of those very jobs to Mexico and China. If taxpayers complain about this incongruency (and they have), we are told the situation is ... complicated.

But we're still very proud of Bombardier, right?

We're also very proud of our nation's resource wealth. Not just for our energy, but forestry and mining. We've spend a lot of money protecting our softwood industry, and we may well be about to spend a great deal more — especially if a certain isolationist candidate wins the U.S. presidency.

But surely Canadian national pride is deeper than the coating on a hot dog.

If we can raise a furore over what brand of Canadian-grown ketchup we will buy, why can't we get worked up about Canadian-developed energy?

Canadians have become indignant about selling a few billion-worth of armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia, for purposes outside our sworn standards of doing business.

So why don't we question buying multi-billions-worth of Saudi oil to make fuel for our cars? This can't be a human rights question, because Canada also imports oil from such human rights stars as Nigeria, Venezuela — and likely soon, Iran.

We have more than enough of our own oil for all the myriad purposes oil is used. Why won't the Canadian market support Canadian suppliers?

It can't be a greenhouse gas thing, because gasoline is gasoline; it all burns the same, and we're not going to use less of it anytime soon.

Besides, Canadian producers are already onside to reduce the carbon footprint of their production — and our competitors aren't. The producing provinces are already onside in attempting to reduce their carbon footprint overall, by as many means as prove practical (and according to some, even not so practical).

So why do Canadians glow, while driving their Saudi-fueld cars to the grocery for a single bottle of Canadian-grown ketchup? Ketchup delivered by great big Saudi-fueld trucks?

Do we support Canadian tomato growers more than we support human rights abroad, or Canadian industry at home?

Economic nationalism must be like paying Bombardier to outsource Canadian jobs ... complicated.

Here's to the demise of the trolls

Part of the blame for our decline in social civility, especially when we talk about issues around the economy, the environment — or politics generally — is the notion that we are entitled to anonymity in social media.

If nobody knows who you are, you can say anything. If nobody can trace your online lies to you, or know that you are the person behind the words, you can be as rude, hateful and disgusting as you like to other people.

If you work for a political party or interest group, you can create as many different fake online identities as you like to make it appear your group is larger than it is, or has more support than it deserves.

I'm not alone in believing that allowing people to comment on public issues from behind a screen has allowed discussions to deteriorate into irrelevance. How can we talk together about important things, when trolls operating in secret destroy the bonds of civility that allow us to come to a consensus?

It's an ironic conundrum; social media wields such power over the way we make decisions today, yet the tone of its power makes it nearly impossible for rational people to give social media comments any credibility.

So it is very encouraging that one of Canada's major online news outlets — CBC.ca — will soon ban the use of pseudonyms in the comments section beneath its news stories. Here's hoping all others soon follow suit.

Jennifer McGuire is general manager and editor in chief of CBC News. She publishes an editor's blog on the national website and announced Thursday that complaints of hate speech against Francophones in New Brunswick became the tipping point for a decision that nobody anywhere will be allowed to say things on their news site, without everyone else knowing who the speaker really is.

As an old-school newspaperman I say it's about time social media grew up. I don't even agree there should be anonymous “editorial boards” holding forth in print media on public issues. The courage of one's convictions gets pretty thin when one doesn't need to stand behind them while in line at the grocery counter.

A CBC article on the issue quotes Chris Waddell, an associate professor of journalism at Carleton University. It's a school that produces many of the reporters, editors and technical staff behind the reports you read, hear or watch every day.

He says several newspaper websites in the U.S. require people to supply their name, phone number and address before being allowed to comment on articles.

But given the number of commenters possible on a story, and the fact these people might be anywhere in the world, it makes verification time-consuming and expensive. That's hard enough in a newspaper's Letters section, can you imagine trying to call all these people back to verify they are who they say they are online?

When money is the limiting factor, Waddell rightly notes most readers would rather see resources used for getting reporters out gathering the news.

So, if it costs too much to verify the identities of online commenters to news stories, how do you balance the right of people to speak, with the notion they should be constrained to tell the truth about themselves?

The Toronto Star recently decided that the truth should not be sacrificed to economy. So they simply shut down the comments section of their online news site.

I remember when my old employer, The Red Deer Advocate, took its first steps in online news reporting. We had a full-time staffer responsible for updating the site and for being the referee of the comments section.

It became almost too much of a job just to compile a complete dictionary of swear words for the site — complete with every spelling alternative conceivable — for our online filter to catch and block them all.

Things have not improved much since, and staffing at news media has not improved with growth in online participation.

So if we can starve anonymous trolls of their voice in our public debates, maybe we can regain what we hoped social media would help us achieve — a better-informed, more democratic public debate, and a better-informed, more democratic society.

Time to get serious about a BIG idea

In the past weeks, the federal government and the government of Ontario have both mused aloud about bringing the idea of a basic income guarantee (BIG) to the front burners in their next budgets.

Opposition parties in other provinces have also promised to put this in their next election platforms, and even the mayors of both Edmonton and Calgary have expressed support for testing BIG.

It's become a make-work program for economists and pundits of all stripes to weigh in on both sides of several complicated questions:

• Would a guaranteed annual income for every Canadian adult significantly reduce poverty in Canada?

• Would it be a cheaper, fairer redistribution of tax revenue than the paintbox of welfare, disability support, senior support, child support, student support, employment insurance and minimum wage policy that requires massive federal and provincial bureaucracies across the country?

• Would BIG become a disincentive for people to look for better work than part-time minimum wage — or to look for a job at all?

There are enough studies out there and enough economic projections both for and against BIG to warrant a field trial. And if Ontario wants to host a pilot project on that, then all of Canada should watch.

My bet (more on gut instinct than anything else) is that we can do more good and less harm for more people, with less money, through BIG, than with any amount of tinkering with the status quo.

We can pretty well take it as read that current supports like welfare, tax credit programs, EI, GIS, student loans/grants and all the rest add up to a bureaucratic nightmare. Here in Alberta, we are well aware how long wait times and the burden of paperwork for assistance for newly laid-off workers has become a huge stress both on the people affected and the offices that are supposed to help them.

We also know that there's opposition in small business and the service trade to raising the minimum wage to a living level.

We're also no strangers the the disincentive for the levels of advanced training Canada needs, in ever-rising tuition and living costs for students.

And we know the current welfare system across Canada is costly, and isn't reaching its goals.

So why not test the idea of the basic income guarantee, to see if it's an improvement on all of the above?

Right now, the accepted poverty rate in Canada is about nine per cent. Let's just include the bottom decile of incomes in that category.

The number most people bandy about for BIG is a guaranteed income of $18,000 a year — just to start the discussion.

What would be the administrative cost savings if we eliminated welfare, the child tax credit, the working income tax benefit, the GST refund, the GIS for seniors — the whole menu of income-tested government supports that require regular reporting and constant tinkering to function?

Do you meet the mandate of the particular program, is every line of the application done perfectly? Can you wait weeks or months to find out if you are accepted, or have to go back and apply all over again?

Nationally, admin costs for these systems must be in the high tens of billions a year.

Instead of paying an army of bureaucrats large salaries to monitor it all, we direct a few platoons to issue monthly cheques, based on tax or payroll returns so that nobody slips below $18,000 a year. If you find employment, you don't lose all your benefits — you should always be better off working than not working.

Additional tax savings could be found in reduced public expenditures like emergency ward visits, mental health care costs, prescription drug expenses and crime, costs which are all strongly linked to poverty.

Canada's decades-old experiment in Manitoba reported that BIG did not create a class of welfare layabouts. Only two groups of people took BIG exclusively rather than work: women with infants who used BIG to “buy” their maternity leave; and older teen males who decided in greater numbers to graduate high school rather than drop out for a low-skill job.

But it's true, all the talk about a guaranteed income as a means of reducing poverty — and the total tax cost of our attempts at reducing poverty — are speculative. Economic projections are still theory, and you can buy any kind of economic projections your political views might support.

All the more reason to test the idea over a period of several years. The potential gains right now seem much greater than the losses.

Shipping in refugees, shipping out the homeless in Saskatchewan

Back in the good old days in Alberta, when oil prices fell and government revenue dropped, part of the solution of the day was to cut the welfare cheques of single mothers, and buy the single unemployed males a one-way bus ticket to B.C.

I couldn't find out how many tickets were issued under then-premier Ralph Klein, but it was enough for the B.C. government then to pass a law saying any newcomers arriving to their province needed to establish residency for 90 days before they could access social services.

For the females (mostly) the 20-per-cent cut in welfare payments and the increased barriers to application for Aids to Daily Living dropped Alberta's roster of 3.1 million cases to around 2 million between 1994 and 2000.

On paper, both policies were a great success. Not so much for the poor and homeless, but the Tory base loved it.

It appears that the Saskatchewan government has learned a thing or two from the Alberta experience, at least as far as shipping homeless people to B.C. is concerned.

Not with the same result, one would hope, though.

Once the story broke, it took scant hours for the whole nation to learn that at least two homeless men, Charles Neil-Curly, 23, and Jeremy Roy, 21, were put on a Greyhound with one-way tickets to Vancouver.

Neil-Curly was staying at the Lighthouse homeless shelter in North Battleford, but his provincial funding was cut so he had to find someplace else to go. So he accepted a ticket to ride with his friend Roy who had also lived at the shelter.

Neither had any supports waiting for them once they stepped off the bus. One of them had never been outside the province before. That's the rub.

Governments often buy poor and homeless people bus tickets to somewhere else in Canada. But there are supposed to be case plans for family, friends or other agencies set up to meet them. Getting a new start in a new place is not always a bad idea, if you have supports lined up.

Shipping your problems out of town is not. Vancouver city counsellor Kerry Lang correctly calls it “inhumane.” “It's not good health policy. It's not good public policy,” he said in an interview with CBC News.

Now, there are always multiple views of a news story. The Lighthouse shelter is currently in a funding dispute with the province. A social services employee bought the tickets, as far as is known, contrary to “official” policy (scare quotes intended).

Social services minister Donna Harpauer says there will be a review of the bus-ticket policy — if the Saskatchewan Party is re-elected next month.

Oh, and both the two bus riders are First Nations (as if that should make any difference — but it does).

As much as social agencies and government agencies seem reluctant to go public when problems arise, something good did arise from that happening here.

Jason Stennes is the CEO of a construction company, 360 Crane Services, in Vancouver. When he heard of the men's plight, he immediately offered them a job.

Stennes said after growing up without much himself, he's now in a position where he can help. "I'm one of those guys that if I'm at a red light and there's somebody begging for change and he's 20 years old, I offer him a job. I give people a chance. It's just what I do."

A new start, indeed. Not enough of that to be found in Canada, that's for sure.

But here's the real sticking point: Saskatchewan has pledged to take in 2,000
Syrian refugees. They will be fully funded for a year, and housed in the province's four largest cities.

Nobody needs reminding that those four largest cities also house (or fail to house) large First Nations populations, with a myriad of social problems. A persistent homeless contingent is but one symptom of the cultural and cross-generational problems they face.

These two men are only the ones we've heard about, because somebody did go public. But it would appear they are as much displaced off their land — refugees, if you want to use the term — as the people who once lived in the now-bombed-out homes in any number of other countries, but coming to our shores.

New starts for them, too.

It's a sad irony that I'm sure will be lost in the tumble of a provincial election campaign.

People often don't give charity, they buy it

We're all busy at this time of year, getting our papers together for our annual tax returns. Did you locate all your charitable receipts?

If you're an average Canadian, you gave about $450 to charities last year. That's from StatsCan, which looks at real numbers.

The Association of Fundraising Professionals does a study every two years, looking at trends and attitudes regarding charities, via the Ipsos polling group. Their latest report contains a significant fudge factor, probably representative of what Canadians would tell a pollster versus what they're telling Revenue Canada.

Their report, titled What Canadian Donors Want, tells us the average annual donation is $924. Hmmm. Seems one thing Canadian donors want is more credit than they're entitled to.

But let's ignore that anomaly for now. More at issue for the fundraisers are the factors that bring people to be charitable.

That topic obviously interests the fundraisers, but it also impacts government policy and our whole Western capitalist culture. Because as it turns out, charity isn't everything we think it is.

Last fall, Canadian sociologist Linsey McGoey published a critique of modern big-money philanthropy titled No Such Thing as a Free Gift. Her book focusses on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and reveals some parallels found by the fundraising association, into what motivates people to give to charity.

The main parallel I found between the book and the report is that donors want results from their giving. Measurable results. Whether we are billionaires or 90-per-centers with chequebook in hand, we all want to know that our gift is accomplishing something.

Nothing wrong with that, right? Well, McGoey says there can be. Saying there's no such thing as a free gift, means we expect something back from our donations.

For individuals, supporting a religious institution is the top reason we donate money. Curing diseases is next on the list, supporting children and youth are next, with food sufficiency and environmental causes coming after that. The big foundations are quite secular, so those other motivations are bumped up the list.

Big — we're talking huge — money changes a lot of things, but it doesn't change basic human nature. Speaking of philanthropy, we want to help others, but the more our donations help us, the more likely we are to give.

Here's one example McGoey points to: charitable funding of charter schools. In the 1980s Bill Gates declared public high schools to be 'obsolete.' So he put $2 billion into new schools for 800,000 pupils, in a whole new program of learning.

The result? Students from these schools graduated not much better than average, with no statistical advantage in entering college. So Gates admitted he was wrong — and pulled his funding.

But in many neighbourhoods, the new charter schools had drained and killed local public high schools. When they closed, thousands of students suddenly found they had no local school to go to. Graduation rates plummeted, as did college entry rates.

In short, Gates tried to play God with the education system. There was too much emphasis on results, and when he didn't get the results he wanted, he walked away. And he wasn't in it to stay, in the same way taxpayers are in the education game with funding for public schools.

Locally, I was a board member of a non-profit that helped people with severe disabilities. There's not a lot of room for improvement for this group — we weren't going to help them get jobs or anything like that. But they still need supports.

Unable to get hard statistical numbers from us — results — a local funding agency stopped funding us. Their contributors want success stories, not hold-the-line stories. But what if success means just living with your disability?

McGoey mentions in detail how large industrial foundations fund projects that enable people to buy their products — often insisting recipients buy only their products. That ain't charity.

Wanting to create a society where every social agency has to prove numerically how they improve the lot of the people they serve — that ain't charity, either.

Governments like to fund non-profits with tax dollars to provide community supports. It's can be about half the cost having government employees do it.

But funders can be onerous bean-counters. Reporting and transparency costs can be more than a funding grant is worth.

But while we expect non-profits to report how much ink they use in their printers, we still allow giant foundations to act as they please. The Gates Foundation is larger than the United Nations World Health Organization, for instance, and really only answers to two people: Bill and Melinda Gates. It's their money, and they can spend it how they want.

But if you want some kind of payback for your generosity, is it really charity?

Platitudes will not save our planet

Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. That saying has been around a long time and had been used to mean a lot of different things.

In today's Canada, it means that while we might generally support the goal of reducing our total carbon footprint to prevent a looming climate disaster, nobody wants to sacrifice lifestyle — or even pay the full price for our lifestyle.

That's the hurdle the federal government needs to overcome if we are even come close to meeting the climate change goals we applauded at the global climate conference in Paris last December. Our commitment to that is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions until they're 30 per cent of what they were in 2005 — and do it by 2035.

That's everybody's job. Miss the local goal, miss the global goal, reap the storm of runaway climate change.

That's easy to grasp, but it's been harder to get consensus on what actually needs to be done to get there. This week, prime minister Justin Trudeau met with the provincial and territorial premiers to talk about solutions to climate change.

Four provinces representing more than 80 per cent of Canadians are already on board with the idea of pricing carbon emissions as a means to discourage wasteful energy use and/or to fund development of cleaner technologies. But a national agreement seems out of reach.

Why? Because it's such a hard sell, politically.

Right now, the city of Red Deer is in the process of developing its own plan to reduce greenhouse emissions. A consultant is leading a broadly-based group of people through a process that must eventually lead to city council adopting standards that will affect our future development. Due disclosure: I am a volunteer in that process.

What have we learned so far? That the way forward is possible, but not for free.

Currently, every person in Red Deer is responsible for more than 17.5 tonnes of carbon emissions per year. If our population grows as planned — to 157,000 by 2035, final goal year of the Paris agreement we signed — our total emissions will be in the order of 2.88 megatonnes per year.

That's the business-as-usual chart curve. Canada's goal, represented by us, is to slice that by nearly half.

The majority of those emissions do not come from our gas-guzzling trucks and cars (which we each drive about 7,000 km a year on our commutes). As much as our community discussions liked to chat about neat electric cars, and transit that very few of us use regularly, or the prospect of developing walkable, bikeable communities, these alone will not get us there.

The largest portion of Red Deer's carbon footprint comes from operating our buildings; heating them by burning natural gas and lighting them with coal-fired electricity.

All these things have been easy to acknowledge. Where the barriers spring up is when our individual lifestyles are challenged by change.

Who's in favour of solar panels on our homes? Anybody? Anybody? A representative of the local home builders association told us they have a show home in Red Deer equipped with solar panels that they can source in bulk cheaper than you our I could on our own. It's the toughest sell on the new home market.

Other representatives quite frankly admitted that climate change or no, they're not giving up their extra-large homes or their motorized vacation vehicles. So don't ask.

Even though Alberta already has a carbon tax on the books, the talk I heard around the room during our discussions is that people resent paying for the right to pollute and resent the thought that the cost of a carbon tax might impinge on their lifestyle.

And this is a well-educated group that has already accepted the message about how important it is that we keep Planet Earth from heating up by more than 2 degrees in the next 20 years.

It's just too easy to justify that “my” contribution must be small, and that someone else's contributions must be large.

Trudeau was correct in saying Canada's resource-based economy needs to thrive, but it needs to happen in a way that pollutes vastly less. The sacrifices required for that must become personal as well as structural.

Red Deer is still some distance away from adopting a greenhouse gas plan, against which future development will, by law, need to be measured. Other Alberta cities have already done this, and only the future will show if any of this was helpful.

Setting goals is as easy as repeating a platitude. Achieving consensus to get there, that's the tough part.

Can the media stop Trump? Cluck. Cluck.

Mainstream media in America is spinning on its head trying to stop Donald Trump from becoming President of the United States. Mainstream media in Canada and abroad are watching the attempt in the way people would watch an agonizingly slow-motion train wreck.

My question is: who decided it's the media's job to overtly campaign in a presidential race in this way?

Granted, Donald Trump really is the worst choice possible to lead the world's largest economy and command the world's most powerful military. Full stop. But beyond informing voters of their choices — and, yes, suggesting a better option — it's up to voters to choose who will lead them, not the media.

The picture I get comes from old-time farming, when families supplied their own larders. People would select a broody hen, and have it sit on a few duck eggs to hatch them. The little ducklings would follow the hen around until they caught sight of water and they'd happily toddle in. The hen would pace back and forth on the shoreline, clucking like only a mother hen can, while the ducklings did what ducklings do naturally.

That's what mainstream media is doing right now. Clucking on the shoreline while their duckling readers flock to Donald Trump.

We're talking about the big guys here — Washington Post, New York Times, National Review, The Atlantic, and Huffington Post to name a few. In Canada, it's the Globe and Mail, National Post, CBC News and more. All are wondering aloud how a certified bozo like Donald Trump could possibly become President of the United States. In Europe, if anyone pays attention at all to the U.S. primaries circus, they are horrified (but they have other, real, problems to worry about).

All are worried about the disaster that must certainly follow the moment American voters decide they'd rather have a serial liar, a proud hatemonger, an unrepentant misogynist, a wannabe war criminal and economic buffoon as president, rather than the candidates selected for them by the elites in the backrooms, and the billionaires that fund them to enrich themselves.

Oscar winners, hyperventilating as they clutch their golden statues, exhort America to Stop Trump! while the ushers direct them offstage. TV comedian/commentator John Oliver set himself up for a lawsuit to begin the minute Trump is elected and “loosens” American libel laws — the Constitution be damned.

Everyone who is anyone wants to Stop Trump and everyone else doesn't seem to be listening. Cluck. Cluck.

It's become an online game to discover the worst transgressions ever committed by The Donald. My personal favourite (so far) is his agreeing with shock radio host Howard Stern that, yes, he could have “nailed” Diana, Princess of Wales. “She was supermodel beautiful ... she had the height ... she had the magnificent skin.”

Do voters know what it says about a person who can sexually objectify dead royalty? Eeww.

Do voters know what ignoring all this says about them? About all the other candidates?

The worse things seem, the worse things get. But still, it's the voters who decide. Perhaps the mother hens in the media should check their clucking, lest the duckling voters cast their votes both in open defiance of party big shots, and the media big shots together.

People like Hollywood metaphors, so here's the one with Donald Trump. America is the female lead, who wakes up in a garishly glitzy hotel room the morning after the election. She looks across purple fake-satin sheets at Trump and realizes she has made The. Biggest. Mistake. Ever. A dark, pathetic spiral ensues.

In the end, the voters decide. In the end, you get the government you deserve.