Be wary of trade deals with China

Of all the coverage I've seen about prime minister Justin Trudeau's recent visit to China, and the return visit of Chinese premier Li Keqiang, the Globe and Mail stands out for being openly skeptical of our signing a comprehensive trade deal with the economic giant.

Thank goodness somebody is.

My question has long been: why are we tripping over ourselves to do business with these guys?

Set aside for a moment our concerns over China's record on human rights, its arbitrary application of its own laws, or its disregard of the laws of other nations — it's a tough world, and we trade with nations with corrupt regimes that have bad records on these issues all the time.

The bottom line is that China simply is not a reliable trade partner. Their history is rife with production of shoddy goods, of adulterated food products and their lack of standards of business accountability. They bring the maxim caveat emptor to a whole new level.

Just days ago, Canada announced a new trade deal with China on agricultural goods (canola and beef products) said to be worth $5.6 billion. The federal release noted our exports to China of canola for crushing is worth $2 billion a year, and beef is worth $255 million, set to grow by another $10 million a year.

Prior to premier Li's visit, the Canadian canola industry was set in a tailspin when China announced an intention to restrict our canola imports, using a bogus claim of too high a content of foreign materials in the grain.

This from a country with no significant inspection or enforcement system for its own food exports. The list of suspect food products from China is as long as your Google search; reports of suspect or even toxic shipments of fresh vegetables, gluten, beef, chicken, pet foods, honey — even infant formula — have been in the news.

But eight per cent of plant stems and such in a shipload of canola seeds from Canada can result in an import ban? Clearly, the announcement was a ruse to obtain concessions in a trade deal. And, apparently, the ruse worked. Only we are left to ask: what did Canada give up to obtain the deal?

That brings up the matter of human rights. Just as premier Li was coming to Canada, China released a Canadian prisoner, held without charge, held without access to legal assistance, accused but never proven as a spy: Kevin Garrat, a missionary worker.

Canadian media have widely reported that China routinely — and illegally — spies on our businesses, and have even been linked to high-level internet hacks of our Finance, Treasury Board, Defence Research and Development Canada departments.

But a lonely Canadian missionary in a nowhere town in China is an espionage threat?

Wealthy Chinese nationals in Canada accused of corruption at home have seen their families arrested and their assets seized, while being given false promises of leniency by government agents (who entered Canada as tourists) to pressure them to return home to face trial.

China wants Canada to sign an extradition treaty to speed up the return of these people. Reports of negotiations toward such a treaty have split the governing Liberal caucus, and even the cabinet. Are we negotiating extradition of people who have essentially been tried in absentia by a country that executes more people every year than any other? Where rule of law is arbitrary and politically influenced?

How do we know? That's the problem of relations with China.

Earlier this year, I was privileged to lead a public discussion on the documentary The Human Harvest, made by Vancouver filmmaker Leon Lee. The documentary featured the work of Canadian Nobel Peace Prize nominees David Matas and David Kilgour, who uncovered and made public China's ongoing mass detention, torture and murder of Falun Gong practitioners, for the country's trade in organ transplants.

The film was shown at Red Deer College, just before Trudeau's first visit to China as prime minister.

In essence, the charge is that China's health care system kills tens of thousands of political prisoners and sells their organs for transplant services to foreigners, as a fundraiser.

My question, asked then, still remains: Why are we falling over ourselves to do business with these guys?

There is no justice except that which you bring from within yourself

Have you or a member of your family or close friend ever been victim of a violent crime? Has your home or vehicle suffered a break-in or robbery — perhaps multiple times?

If so, you will probably understand the premise of this article quite quickly, even viscerally.

There is no better explanation for how this world has gotten so messed up than our human desire to gain an eye for an eye. If you have experienced violence on your person or if the safety and sanctity of your home has been violated, it can be extremely difficult to let it go. You cannot return to being the person you once were.

When it seems that the people who commit crimes against us are going unpunished, or the crimes just continue in other families and other homes, it feels like a portion of our own humanity has been stripped away. We are left with more animal reflexes.

There are few true innocents around the shooting death of Colten Boushie in Saskatchewan. The racist furore on all sides in social media proves it. Violence begets violence, and when the “sides” are identified by race (as in the Boushie case) or by religion (as in the Middle East) our shared human impulses for revenge harden into lines that are extremely difficult to cross.

Boushie, 22, a resident of the Red Pheasant First Nation, was shot and killed at a farm residence near Biggar. He and three friends were apparently seeking help with a flat tire.

Gerald Stanley, a 54-year-old farmer has been charged with second-degree murder. There is obviously more to the story, but for now, we'll let the courts deal with the details.

Today, we need to look at our own human reactions to the story.

This one mirrors another killing in 2008 in Lethbridge, where George Many Shots was beaten to death by Bradley Gray, a man who did not react well when his truck was broken into by a pair of Aboriginal people.

His was not the only property violated in the neighbourhood, where a native shelter had recently opened.

Many Shots was assaulted and beaten in an unprovoked attack. He was just the wrong guy in the wrong skin in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After being convicted of second degree murder, an appeal reduced Gray's charge to manslaughter. Then the case went back to the original judge for sentencing — and the result was that the killing was deemed a hate crime, because the judge was convinced Gray simply hated natives, and wanted to get his own back upon them.

This is how the cycle of violence is perpetrated. This is how it comes to the point where nobody gets the benefit of the doubt.

Houses get broken into. Red Deer, in fact, has been tabbed by Macleans magazine as the Canadian city most likely for one's home to be broken into. That adds up to a lot of victims with personal feelings of violation — and identification of the kinds of people who do these things. Individual responsibility be damned; at some point groups of victims assume for themselves outrage at groups who look like they break into homes.

Our family was rocked by a violent night attack years ago. It took a long time — years actually — for the case to be resolved. In that time and after, the feelings of helpless anger would surface almost of their own volition and suck up the energy needed to become a normal, trusting human being.

It helped me to become a volunteer. I served on a board advocating for people with brain injuries. I also cooked at a downtown soup kitchen for a time. I often wondered if I had worked all day to feed the people who had attacked my family.

In the end, after a court conviction was achieved, we faced the media in the court parking lot. We were asked if we had found closure.

There is no closure, not the kind you can lock away and forget. In that time, I learned the police cannot bring you justice. The courts cannot bring you justice. They are concerned only with the person charged with the crime.

The only justice for you is that which you seek from within yourself, however you try to find it.

Homes and farms and businesses get robbed. By people from an identifiable group. The police do not always catch those responsible.

It is wise to be wary. It is wise to take precautions. It is not wise to blame people whose story you do not know, or hate them because of how they look.

Forgiveness? That's a personal question. But with taking an eye for an eye, soon everyone is blind. No one can see that no one is innocent anymore. This blindness has messed up the entire world.

Our Olympic athletes should be lottery-funded

A trip to London, England, is wasted without spending a few hours in the National Gallery or their lavish British Museum, to see the wealth of plundered cultural artifacts of a global empire.

Entry to these — and more — is free, thanks to perpetual funding of the British National Lottery. With the money you save (versus what you would spend just to enter The Louvre, or any of the grand museums of Berlin) you can spend in the gift shop on art books to bring home.

From a tourist's point of view, that's lottery profits well-spent. From the point of view of a fan of our national sports teams, lottery funding our local athletes would likewise be a good investment. And from a taxpayer's point of view as well.

According to the CBC, Canada's Own the Podium program allots around $30 million a year to athletes aspiring to represent us at the Olympics.

The money is carefully targeted toward those who are expected to come home with medals, versus the happy amateur toilers who sacrifice and train every day just to “do their best” on the international stage.

As such, Canada spent about $5.5 million for each of the medals our athletes won at the Rio Games. That's half of what Australia paid per medal, says CBC.

In fact, Canada spends less per capita supporting national sports teams than Australia, New Zealand or the Netherlands. If you look at it in these terms, our Olympians are pretty cost-efficient.

Where does the money come from? Far and away, it comes from corporate donors. In all, there are 34 major donors listed by the COC on their web page.

Even you and I can send a cheque to the Canadian Olympic Foundation, and get a refund at tax time.

I propose that this is an inefficient method of funding our national athletes, and that greater funding can be had, with more generalized support for all athletes on all teams, as opposed to targeting “winners.”

The vehicle of choice should be our lotteries.

There is something unseemly in how much of the roughly $14 billion a year in profits from legalized gambling in Canada finds itself in the general revenue pots of provincial governments.

Each lottery region spends millions a year on community sports, recreational and cultural infrastructure. Well and good. But hundreds of millions end up in the general revenue pot of governments, in lieu of legitimate taxation for legitimate spending.

On several levels, that's just not right.

As to the topic of funding our athletes to represent us on the world stage, it would be more ethical to tap the billions governments make from gambling for this, rather than using this money to build schools or hire nurses — a task which should be shouldered by fair taxation from everyone.

Likewise, it is better for Canada to assume responsibility for training athletes and presenting national role models, than to give large corporations tax incentives to do so.

Let legitimate taxation fund our public sphere, and keep the proceeds from gambling far away from political hands. Many a treatise on the corrupting nature of this has been written over the decades since governments became addicted to gambling.

There's more than enough money to go around. There's more than enough to build rinks, pools, fields and centres of excellence to foster the benefits of healthy living all around the country, at every level.

If we agree to pay our doctors more in the health care system, for instance, we need consensus to pay for it from a fair system of taxation. Or ring roads, or whatever.

It is more ethical that we can choose to participate in a lottery, for instance, knowing that the vast profits come back to us in better cultural infrastructure, of which sports and athletics play a huge part (especially during Olympic years).

There are always priorities for governments to balance at budget time. That's what we elect them to manage. But giving them a slush fund of lottery money, while squandering more in tax incentives for corporations to bolster their public images, is a corrupting force both on politics and our general support for the Olympic movement.

National assets like Britain's museums or Canada's athletes cannot get consensus for increased taxation. So we turned to corporations to gain “win-win” opportunities that taxpayers end up subsidizing anyway.

Let's just take gambling profits out of politicians' hands. Give these profits back to communities for better cultural amenities (including high-performance sports).

On balance, ranked ballots our best chance for best electoral reform

A recent Canadian Press story effectively debunks the theory that if the Liberal government imposes a ranked-ballot system for national elections, they will somehow guarantee themselves power in perpetuity.

Next week, as hearings into electoral reform resume, Conservative supporters will resume using stats gathered from voting patterns in past elections as proof of election results in future elections, if the current first-past-the-post system were dropped. Which, according to the experts quoted in the CP article, is extremely unlikely.

Brian Tanguay of Wilfred Laurier University, York University's Dennis Pilon and Ken Carty of the University of British Columbia all agree that if you change balloting systems, you also change voting patterns. So it becomes impossible to predict future performance by studying obsolete past performances.

Far more likely, they say, a ranked-ballot voting system will produce governments that more closely resemble the collective will of voters, without the complications and confusion of calculating winners and losers through a proportional representation system. And without having to change electoral boundaries or increase the number of MPs already crowding Parliament.

Under the current system, both national and provincial parties regularly gain local riding victories with substantially less than majority support from voters. More, the victors nationally and provincially regularly manage to assemble majority legislatures far in excess of the expressed support of voters.

The fear of this happening leads people to pull their votes away from candidates and parties that they actually support, in favour of candidates and parties they merely hope can defeat a candidate or party they despise.

Even worse, parties with platforms that many voters would like to support do not attract viable candidates in many ridings, because (a Donald Trump charge here) the system is rigged against them. A minority party has little hope of advancing its agenda in rock-ribbed ridings that have always voted a certain way — despite those ribs being much thinner than advertised.

In Canada, this is called democracy. It is anything but. First-past-the-post balloting cannot possibly produce democratically-elected governments that reflect the collective will of the voters in our diverse, interconnected society.

With a ranked-ballot system, voters with a minority view can much more effectively register support for their views at the ballot box. They are not “wasting” their vote in a hopeless cause, because other parties will need to change their platforms slightly to attract these voters' second choice or third choice.

Not every voter can be happy with the outcome of every race — that's just life. But every voter can at least be assured their votes were even counted.

That's a vast improvement over the current system, where winners are frequently declared minutes after the polls close, and with a mere fraction of the votes even counted. That is the greatest outrage of all, under our current system.

Electoral reform is a big deal and a huge undertaking for our rookie federal government. But they should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

A ranked-ballot system is easy to inaugurate, easy to understand, does not require Ottawa to house dozens more MPs, nor a wholesale re-drawing of electoral maps.

It does not guarantee victories for any particular party, nor even guarantee majority governments. But it does guarantee that every MP must get a majority of votes in their ridings, and it does force parties that hope to govern a diverse society like Canada to better consider voters outside their core support.

That looks a whole lot more like democracy than the system we've got now. It's also a whole lot more achievable than a messy constitutional battle and complex national referendum that would most likely result in no reform at all.

Follow Greg Neiman's blog at Readersadvocate.blogspot.ca

Trump vs trade: did he get this one right?

Day by day, more of the world's pundits, politicos and pop stars line up against the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency. The idea that a person like Trump could end up being leader of both the world's largest economy and the world's largest military power is frightening, to say the least.

But ideas always have a basis in something. For Trump, that something is a widespread suspicion among the beleaguered working class that they've been lied to. Not just the lies that we cynically think politicians and business elites tell us all the time, but lied to regarding the very promise of co-operative well-being that holds society together.

The army of the working class has looked at the past 30 years and decided the future ain't what was sold to us — and it's time for a reckoning.

By no means does Donald Trump have any workable answers for the problems of huge income inequality and long-term wage stagnation that act like sticky mud on our economy. But when large numbers of people seize on the thought that the purveyors of global free trade and the so-called New Economy have lied to them, somebody will eventually have to pay.

That's what could make the thought of a Donald Trump presidency thinkable.

Consider: has free trade really worked for you? Have all the myriad agreements Canada has signed to create the free movement of goods and services around the world made your future or your children's future any more secure?

That's a hypothetical question; we can't test outcomes against what might have happened if NAFTA had never evolved, for instance. But I'm willing to suggest that a whole lot of people in the U.S. (or Canada) aren't feeling the same love that the top 10 per cent of income-earners are feeling for free trade.

So when Trump says he'll tear up NAFTA and sandbag the Trans Pacific Partnership immediately upon taking the oath of office next January (that is, right after banning Muslim immigration, crushing ISIS and getting that wall with Mexico started), who are we to say that's such a bad idea?

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz is a heavy hitter in the field of analyzing global trade. And he's no fan of how the consequences of free trade have played out.

Free trade agreements are not the only reason the top strata of income-earners have gotten so fabulously rich, while the rest of us have been stuck or sliding backwards in real income. But Stiglitz says they are a major contributor to the problem.

He wrote in the Globe and Mail this week that he warned about this 15 years ago. And by the way, he has another book out suggesting that free trade needs to include a social contract for the 90 per cent of us in developed countries — or we'll get more of people like Donald Trump.

The agreements that allowed big corporations to move jobs and livelihoods out of developed countries into countries with the lowest wages have indeed contributed to the “race to the bottom” — at the expense of the masses of people who now think Donald Trump could turn things around.

Trump has not offered even one concrete plan that could possibly “make America great again.” But the promise to do so has been enough to gain him the Republican Party's nomination for presidency.

From all evidence, it's safe to say that Trump doesn't have even one concrete plan to restore lost manufacturing jobs to his nation. Nor has he any details that could restore hope to the masses of people who are working ever longer hours for less reward, while the moneyed class gets ever richer.

Here's irony for you: Trump may actually be right that global free trade has not worked in favour of that huge demographic of ordinary Americans (suggestion: it might not be working for Canada, either — not if you ask the struggling middle class).

But the fact that his proposed solutions are either hare-brained, unconstitutional or non-existent does not deter the belief among his followers that they've been lied to by the current political and business elite.

And his army of voters seems willing to swallow even bigger lies, just to get their time of reckoning.

Some people in the oil industry just don't get it

We know the oil and gas industry in Alberta is suffering right now. We know that Alberta's energy-related businesses and their thousands of employees will need the goodwill and co-operation of government to turn things around.

So how would you go about achieving that? By placing a cutout photo of premier Rachel Notley as a fairway target at an oilmen's golf tournament and inviting people to take shots at her? Probably not a great starting point.

I mean, doing that is not illegal, right? We have freedom of speech here; we're not living in a totally communist regime here, are we? No, just a civil society, where the thread of civility is wearing thin.

And so Ernest Bothi, president of the the Brooks Big Country Oilmen's Association, honestly believes he has no reason to feel sorry for symbolically inviting violence against the Alberta premier.

He told reporters he would apologize to the premier as a person for this stupid and tasteless stunt, but not as a premier. One wonders if he actually tried to do that personally.

Bothi spent a lot of time with reporters defending his decision to place the target on the fairway at the golf tournament, but no time at all reflecting on the consequences.

“A lot of good people have invested their entire life into this industry and for what?” he said. “So that a government can strip it away from us?”

I haven't heard that the government was planning to nationalize the energy industry in Alberta, have you? I hadn't heard that the NDP was responsible for the overproduction and glut of oil on the international market leading to the price crash, had you?

Rather, I see the government doing everything it can to see that major pipeline projects are approved, to allow more Alberta bitumen and gas reach more markets. Part of that effort is to try to scrub the label of “dirty oil” off the Alberta brand, so that more buyers will accept it.

Is that the part that Bothi objects to? If so, he should be more clear.

“I just read online that her carbon tax is going to cost billions,” he said. Now there's a good reason to dehumanize our elected officials.

Let's try to help Bothi out here. The carbon tax has a variety of integrated goals, one of which is to get at least one of the proposed major pipelines built, so that people like Bothi can get back to their million-dollar profits. In this regard, I would think the government is the oilman's friend right now.

The best bet for a lot of highly-skilled former oilworkers to get a job again within our province is for the carbon tax to seed research and development in new technologies, beyond mining and processing ever-growing daily bitumen production levels.

When even the Saudis are actively retreating from the oil business, you'd have to think that, finally, Alberta might have to diversify its economy as well.

If people like Ernest Bothi want to be a part of that, they'd better start treating the government as a partner, not an enemy.

The world is what the world is. We've had too much airing of grievances in our politics today, and not enough educated people coming together to look for for solutions.

Oilmen are supposed to be pragmatists, realists, adapters. So act like them, not like junior-high dropouts.

The future ain't what it used to be, if you want to quote Yogi Berra. Whether you prepare for it or not, the future will come. In the eyes of many, that future includes oil and gas, but less of it in the mix of energy that will be sold on world markets. A global market, by the way, worth trillions of dollars.

Does crying that the dinosaurs are dying make them live longer?

When you depersonalize our leadership, make them symbolic targets, some jerk is going to conclude it's OK to make them real targets. How far is it from launching a golf ball at the face of the Alberta premier, to the shooting death of British MP Jo Cox, as a political statement?

Premier Notley has gotten too many death threats in the past year to allow making her face a golf course target into something funny. Or into something acceptable as free speech at an industry golf tournament.

News reports have it that although the target was out there in the open fairway, none of the participants was able to hit the mark. Maybe that's symbolic, too.

ISIS wants all-out war; we'd be fools to let them lead us to it

The time gap between action and reaction to moments of violent horror in our society grows ever shorter. People scarcely took the time to allow for the funerals of the victims of the Orlando massacre before politicizing it, and demanding violent retribution.

Don't wait for the full facts to come out, we need a lynch mob.

Act in haste, regret at leisure, as the saying goes.

Columnist Michael Taube, a former speechwriter for former prime minister Stephen Harper, wants Western democracies to declare all-out war on Islamic State, committing troops to hand-to-hand combat “to eradicate this evil presence from the face of the Earth.”

He wrote that it's a fight that would take years, cost enormously and require huge losses on the battlefield. But it's a sacrifice he is willing to make — from the safety of his desk.

He referenced a column in the National Review that said: “Islamic terrorist's war . . . will continue here as long as we refuse to exercise the tactics necessary to stamp it out.”

Taube suggests such tactics would include identifying anyone who supports “radical Islam” as an “enemy of freedom, liberty and democracy.” Such people need to be “constantly attacked and denigrated,” according to his column.

That would be sort of hard to do, since even America's top spymasters, listening in on our every phone call, reading every text, Tweet and email, can't locate ISIS operatives within their own borders.

That is, if Omar Mir Seddique Mateen even was an ISIS operative — which is far from certain.

Rather, these kinds of tactics will far sooner result in home-grown atrocities, perpetrated by our own governments, than wiping anything from the face of the Earth.

Let's consider a small portion of what our governments are doing now to identify and denigrate potential terrorists within our borders: the no-fly list.

It's a net that snares five-year-old children born with the wrong-sounding name. The snare never releases its catch, and there is no appeal process for even a young child to be shown he or she is not a terrorist, therefor they can never board an airplane.

And we would want to expand that to government powers of war for anyone who looks different, speaks different or prays different than us? There is no such thing as “radical Islam” any more than there is such a thing as gun-toting abortion clinic attackers who are “radical Christian.”

There are just good people and criminals. And if we make religion or ethnicity the first filters in deciding between them, we are on the road to destruction. Which, if you look at it, is exactly what ISIS wants from us.

There are still people among us who can remember the arrests and murder of innocent people identified as enemies of the state because of the way they prayed: Jews during the Holocaust.

There are still Canadians alive today whose perfectly peaceful homes and businesses were confiscated and who were imprisoned — without legal recourse — because they were of Japanese descent.

On the road between Banff and Lake Louise, you can tour the remains of the prison camp where, recently in our history, we put people who were too Ukrainian to be trusted to stay on their farms and milk their cows.

How well did all that go in protecting “freedom, liberty and democracy?”

And now there are people who want us to do this all over again, this time with Muslims. One such person wants to be president of the United States.

This is playing into the terrorists' game.

I don't know how one goes about eradicating mindless hate masquerading as pure faith. But I suspect massive bloodshed creating even more massive throngs of displaced refugees is not the best way to go about it.

As far back as the Crusades, those tactics have never worked.

So rather than acting on a knee-jerk desire for revenge, let's instruct our leaders to get the facts and think about what does work to eliminate the foundation on which this hate is based.

Hint: it's not religion.

Follow Greg Neiman's blog at Readersadvocate.blogspot.ca