Thoughts on Azzi’s Biography of Walter Gordon

Frankly, no one reads enough Canadian history… so I’m trying to do my part. I just hope Rudyard takes note.

For those who’ve never heard of Walter Gordon, he was Lester Pearson‘s first Finance Minister. Of course, he was also much, much more. For Liberals, Gordon was the man who organized the party back into fighting form while it served in opposition to Diefenbaker and, in doing so, won the Liberals the 1963 election. Perhaps more importantly however, Gordon was one Canada’s first nationalists who, among other things, founded the Committee for an Independent Canada the predecessor (or inspiration of least) for the Council of Canadians.

What makes Gordon such an interesting study are not only his accomplishments, but the numerous, and often contradictory threads that made up his life. Here is a man who founded several firms, including one of the most successful private sector consulting firms in the history of Canada. As a consultant, he was thus able to keep one foot in the world of public policy and government – advising ministers and deputy ministers – while keeping other foot in the private sector, advising presidents and CEO’s. As head of these firms that he also helped broker the sale of large Canadian firms to American buyers. And yet, here is a man who was a strong Canadian nationalist, who sought to introduce structural limitations on foreign ownership in Canadian industry. He was also, on the one hand, a man with incredible organizational skills and yet, when given strategic control, had a modus operendi that was often problematic. According to Azzi he seemed to always identify problems, solve them hastily, and then apologize for the shortcomings — however dramatic — of his already implemented plan.

Azzi’s biography of Gordon was also illuminating in how it reminds one of the old adage “plus ca change…”

For example, Gordon’s first major postwar appointment was as chair of the Royal Commission on Administrative Classifications in the Public Service. In other words, Public Service Sector Reform. Needless to say this issue is once again a hot topic (one I happen to take great interest in and write on occasionally). Interestingly, this report had negligible impact – a fact Azzi attributes to poor research and analysis – but nonetheless hinting at the fact that public service sector reform may have been as difficult in 1947 as it is in 2007.

Ironically, Gordon inability to effectively draft and garner support for his Royal Commission Report may have contributed to some of the frustration he later experienced as Finance Minister. His frustration with the public service seems straight out of an episode “Yes Minister” or possibly the diary of our current Prime Minister. This passage sums it up beautifully:

When Gordon’s private secretary, Nancy Burpee, ordered a red typewriter, a high official in the treasury Board sent a long memorandum explaining why government issue typewriters had to be grey. Douglas Land summarized Gordon’s attitude: “If you can’t get a damn typewriter, how can you draft a municipal loan fund in a month?” Incidents like this led Gordon to doubt whether the bureaucracy could draft a bold budget… Despite these problems, he still wished to move swiftly to carry out his plans. After a few days in Ottawa, Gordon described the situation to Douglas Land: “I thought I was back at the Royal Commission with everybody explaining why no idea could work and why everything would take ten years to do. I have ordered some dynamite and hope to stir things up.”

The real focus of the book however – mirroring Walter Gordon’s life – is the rise of Canadian nationalism or, more specifically, Canadian economic nationalism. In many ways Gordon is the grandfather of the various forces that in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s would first oppose free trade and then, globalization. It was this topic that both ended Gordon’s political career – after his disastrous 1963 budget – but that also made him a folk hero among particularly left-wing nationalists. Interestingly, based on Azzi’s assessment, it is hard not to feel that Gordon was less of a nationalist then simply anti-American. Today we can see how these roots of Canadian nationalism have shape the tree’s growth. Even 30 and 40 years later many ardent nationalists on both the left and right cannot separate out anti-Americanism from their Canadian nationalism.

Azzi never passes judgment on Walter Gordon the man. However, he is clearly deeply uncomfortable with his essentially protectionist and nationalistic economic policies. And for good reason. Gordon’s construction of the problem was, at best, less than scientific. As he himself stated, his views “cannot be analyzed scientifically or proved absolutely. But the fact that judgment or belief is arrived at in part intuitively or through personal experience does not necessarily make it any less true.” It’s a somewhat shocking statement, analogous to saying “he felt it in his gut,” exactly the type of thing the Left would justly mock President Bush about today.

Azzi spends some time talking about some of Gordon’s true accomplishments, specifically helping transform the Liberal Party into a progressive, thinking institution. Sadly, he spends very little time talking about Gordon’s contribution in the ultimate implemention of this agenda, largely set out in the Kingston conference of 1960. The policies implemented by, or initiated by Pearson and Gordon, such as the Canada Pension Plan, Medicare, Canada Assistance Plan, regional-development programs, unemployment insurance and a government student loan program, along with the foundation Gordon later created, are probably his real accomplishment. Indeed, many these institutions embody, in part, what it means to be Canadian. This alone should prompt one to overlook the book’s dry style and encourage you to get acquainted with a major influencer of Canadian history.

Why Cambie St. Should have been packed up.

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* first up – apologies for no post yesterday. It was a holiday in BC. Sometime later this week I’ll describe in greater detail my ridiculously BC-like day of island hoping, sea kayaking and BBQing. And to complete the leftcoast feel, a Smart Car was involved too.<!–

Second up… The Canada Line, the new subway being constructed between Richmond, the airport and Vancouver. The damage the construction has caused to businesses along the Cambie street corridor has been getting an increasing amount of buzz in the press. The whole situation is a fabulous lesson in urban planning and civic policy-making – one that sadly the press has not articulate.

For those out east who are not familiar with the Canada Line or its construction, it looks something like this:

Photo by Stephen Rees, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Sadly, these photos fail to do the situation justice. To put it bluntly, when there is a two story deep hole outside, traffic is at a stand still, the street is unpassable, and there is the endless sound of construction, people tend to stay away. This, needless to say, has made life difficult for the numerous businesses that populate the Cambie St. corridor.

As one can imagine, several businesses (most notably the restaurant Tomato) have moved, several others are complaining. The local MLA – Gregor Robertson – has even introducing a private member’s bill to provide affected businesses with direct financial support.

But is the construction responsible for the death of the Cambie st. businesses? Perhaps. But it is an inevitable death. And this is why the current public policy has so dramatically failed these businesses.

I’ve noted with interest that while businesses complain loudly about the construction and its impact, it is hard to find landowners who complain. One would think that the loss of tenants – and subsequent rental income – this would have generated a fuss. But it hasn’t.

Why? Because the landlords know that once the line is complete most of the Cambie corridor (currently composed of relatively low density commercial buildings) is going to be completely redeveloped. Higher density commercial and, more importantly, condos, are going to be common place along Cambie. Consequently, there is a good chance that if the construction hadn’t kicked these businesses out, their landlords would have in the ensuing rush to redevelop.

Thus the whole notion that Cambie businesses could be kept open was a mirage – a failure to look at the longer term implications of the Subway. Rather than waste time on a failed “Business is Open along the Canada Line” campaign (This is not a communication problem, advertising is not going to bring people to Cambie, only an end to the construction will) local businesses should have been offered money to move location and cover some of their transition costs. While this would have been painful for everyone involved, it would have been less painful then seeing their business dry up and having to move on their own dime.

I’m in favour of the Canada Line. I think it is great for the city. But that doesn’t mean that the Cambie St. businesses should have been left out to dry. The help they received wasn’t the help they needed. sadly, this is probably because giving them the help they needed wasn’t what they wanted to hear, or what politicians wanted to tell them…

* Aug 8th: The Vancouver Sun published this editorial piece on the same day as this post that provides a parallel but different perspective.

Canada as, err… a (cough) model power…

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With Russia planting a flag on the Arctic Ocean floor, Peter Mckay’s observing “You can’t go around the world these days dropping a flag somewhere. This isn’t the 14th or 15th century” and the press corp pointing out the rich irony of the situation (see Hans Island), it’s an exciting week in Canadian Foreign Policy.

Of course no one could have prevented the Russians from sending out a submarine to plant a flag on the Arctic floor. However, the irony of the Canadian response was entirely preventable. Once again, Paul Martin’s short sighted, “ready, shoot, aim” policies designed to capture voters comes back to haunt us.

(BTW: If I were a Russian diplomat, I’d carry a photo of this to every meeting.)

Indeed, the only silver lining to the whole thing is a rather personal one. It isn’t often that pundits make predictions that are accurate, so when it happens you know we are going should “I told you so…”

Back in September of 2005 I wrote the following paragraphs in an article entitled “Reality vs. Fiction: Canadian Foreign Policy in Light of the International Policy Statement” for the Queen’s International Observer:

…the government’s recent tactics in the ongoing dispute with Denmark over the ownership of Hans Island appear to run counter to the strategic goals of the IPS. By resorting to jingoistic rhetoric and petty tit-for-tat flag planting symbolism the government has undermined the country’s reputation as a state that both perceives security as a “common interest” and strives to overcome disputes peacefully.

Ideally, the Hans Island issue should have presented Denmark and Canada – two NATO allies – with an opportunity to model effective international conflict-management diplomacy-based on a fair and respectful process. Instead, the government’s actions may have undermined one of the few arrows left in the quivers of small countries that have under invested in their foreign policy assets: moral legitimacy. One’s capacity to “build a more secure world” by advocating for a “responsibility to protect” in complex intra-state conflicts is necessarily undermined when one is incapable of handling maturely and responsibly one of the most traditional forms of inter-state conflict.

I’ll concede it isn’t a perfect prediction, but not bad in the chaotic world of international relations.

I’m sure trying to score some jingoist points in the polls seemed like a good idea at the time. Indeed, it was probably even designed to demonstrate that Canada would be serious about dealing with threats to our sovereignty by other arctic powers (such as, for example, Russia). In reality, all we did was give up any sense of honour in order to sanction the basest and most child-like behaviour.

Thank you Paul!

Millennium Villages

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I few months ago I blogged about how I’m a big fan of the millennium village concept.

This week, Jeffrey Sachs published this update in Time Magazine about how small changes in one such village are cascading into larger successes by plugging the desperately poor into the global economy. It’s evidence of how getting regions onto the first rung of the economic development ladder can lead to growth, stability and success.

Last time I gave a donation to the millennium villages as a father’s day gift – those who have a reason to give (or those without a reason, but contemplating it anyways) can find out more here.

The Boomer Factor

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I’m not sure what to make of The Boomer Factor. In some ways it’s a fascinating read, a snapshot of how Canadians view themselves at the beginning of the 21st century. But while reading it you can’t help but feel that all the author has done is list stat after stat and link them together with a few sentences. This assessment may be a little unfair, but it reads more like a play by play of the data than as a thought-provoking analysis. Maybe it’s just that there’s very little prose between the streams of stats that inundate the reader.

I should also warn you that I have no capacity to assess whether or not the methodology used to generate these steps is it all sound. If there are true statisticians reading this I’d love your thoughts. That said I did find some of the presentation of the statistics deeply troubling. A notable example is the graph to your right. It shows two bars – one more than twice as large as the other – suggesting an increase of 100 – 120%. And yet, a closer looks at the numbers indicate there’s only been a 12 point difference between the two data points. This visual representation is thus grossly misleading, visually suggesting the argument is much more dramatic than what the data supports.

But these problems aside the book’s author, Reginald Bibby, keys in on several trends that are of interest. Some chapters, like “From Deference to Discernment” have been well documented by others. Others however, such as “From Tomorrow to Today”, a chapter on our quest for more time and the rising expectations we have of one another, along with Chapter 6 “From Knowing too Little to Knowing too Much” on the implications of the Internet and are increasing access to knowledge, are interesting.

But what’s most intriguing about Bibby’s concluding thoughts in these chapters – and the book overall – is that it departs from the book’s title. Bibby seems sanguine about the baby boomers’ capacity to adapt to our changing world, but is exceedingly optimistic about post-boomers – Gen Y and Gen X. Indeed, he terms these emerging generations “Reflective Post-Boomers” and says this about them:

Perhaps to a greater extent than any previous Canadian generation, they (Post-Boomers) have been able to have the time to assess what kind of lives they want to live...

…As they have been assembling their lives, post-boomers have been able to take a good look at how their grandparents, and her parents, lived. They grew up in homes were dads and moms, frankly, were experimenting with how to combine education, careers, raising kids, and marriages. The Post-Boomers saw how things turned out.

Such a vantage point has provided the emerging adult generation a unique opportunity to learn from the pre-boomers and boomer cohorts and extract the best and delete the worst from both. The preliminary evidence suggests that many younger adults are doing just that. They, like the boomers, have moved away from the racist and sexist tendencies of many older Canadians, to an extent as readily exceeding that of boomers. They also have recovered and restored some valuable pre-boomer “files” the boomers had tended either to use infrequently or delete – what people want most, the importance of family life, stability, and religion.on a

They have drawn on the boomers strong emphasis on education, discernment, and information. But they are determined to do a better job of harmonizing such themes with their desire for relationships, time to focus on their children, social compassion, spiritual fulfillment, and the opportunity to simply enjoy life. And so far, at least, they are reporting levels of happiness and for film and that match those of pre-boomers and exceed those of boomers.

Promising developments indeed!

According to his research Bibby also reports that younger Canadians — post-boomers — are more likely to be politically active than their boomer parents. given all the talk about political apathy this conclusion was counterintuitive and interesting. Sadly there wasn’t much discussion before the next statistic was thrust before the reader and the text moved on.

The two places where I think Bibby falls down is in his assessment of how Canadians are associating with one another. He refers repeatedly to the notion of how we’ve shifted from a we to me, while at the same time many of his stats suggest that people are actually deeply interested and engaged in communities. I’m not sure there we’re shifting from a we to me in an absolute sense. What is true is that people are more selective and have more options about who they associate with. Does this mean that we are more “me” focused? Or is it that we can afford to be more “we” focused in ways that make us comfortable?

The other place where Bibby lost me was in his discussion about religion. He suggests that many baby boomers are returning to religion to fill a growing spiritual void in their lives. I confess I don’t know. But this chapter had more analysis and opinion than any other, and so it felt like the story didn’t flow and it was less clear the data supported his assertions. A religious man himself, and an expert on religious trends I couldn’t help but feel that Bibby was inflating this chapter out of personal and professional interest. This could be a gross misunderstanding on my part, but while the rest of the book resonated with my personal experience from what I’ve seen of the country this chapter felt out of place.

Is The Boomer Factor a must read? Not really. But it was nonetheless an enjoyable read. For those interested, it will give you some compelling statistics to reinforce a number of trends you observe, and live with, on a day-to-day basis.

Op-Ed in Yesterday's Toronto Star

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Taylor Owen and I published this piece in the Toronto Star on the 10th anniversary of blogging and its impact on news media. (PDF version here)

Blogosphere at age 10 is improving journalism
Jul 30, 2007 04:30 AM
David Eaves & Taylor Owen

Although hard to believe, this month marks the 10th anniversary of blogging, a method for regularly publishing content online.

And what a milestone it is. A recent census of “the blogosphere” counted more than 70 million blogs covering an unimaginable array of topics.

Moreover, every day an astounding 120,000 new blogs are created and 1.5 million new posts are published (about 17 posts per second). Never before have so many contributed so much to our media landscape.

Despite this exponential growth, blogging continues to be misunderstood by both technophiles and technophobes. For the past decade the former have maintained that blogs will replace traditional journalism, ushering in an era of citizen-run media. Conversely, the latter have argued that a wave of amateurs threatens the quality and integrity of journalism – and possibly even democracy.

Both are wrong.

Blogging is not a substitute for journalism. If anything, this past decade shows that blogging and journalism are symbiotic – to the benefit of everyone.

To its many ardent advocates, blogging is displacing traditional journalism. But journalism – unlike blogging – is a practice with a particular set of norms and structures that guide the creation of content. Blogging, despite its unique properties (virtually anyone can reach a potentially enormous audience at little cost), has few, if any norms.

Consider another, more established medium. Books enable various practices, such as fiction, poetry, science and sometimes journalism, to be disseminated. Do books pose a threat to journalism? Of course not. They do the opposite. Journalistic books, like blogs, increase interest in the subjects they tackle and so promote further media consumption.

The same market forces that apply to books and newspapers apply to blogs.

Readers will judge and elect to read based on the same standard: Does it inform, is it well researched and does it add value?

Because blogs are cheaper to maintain they will always be numerous, but this makes them neither unique nor more likely to be read regularly.

Ultimately blogs, like books, don’t replace journalism; they simply provide another medium for its dissemination and consumption.

If technophiles mistakenly claim that blogging competes with – and will ultimately replace – traditional journalism, then technophobes’ fear of being swept away by a tsunami of irrelevant and amateurish blogs is equally misplaced.

Traditionalists’ concern with blogging is rooted in the fact that the average blog is of questionable quality. Ask anyone who has looked, and cringed, at a friend’s blog.

But this conclusion is based on a flawed understanding of how people use the Internet. The Internet’s most powerful property is its capacity to connect users quickly to exactly what they are looking for, including high-quality writing on any subject.

This accounts for the tremendous amount of traffic high-quality blogs receive and explains why these bloggers are print journalists’ true competition. As technology expert Paul Graham argues: “Those in the print media who dismiss online writing because of its low average quality miss the point. No one reads the average blog.”

Once this capability of the Internet is taken into account, the significance of blogging shifts. Imagine that only 5 per cent – or 75,000 – of daily posts are journalistic in content, and that only 1 per cent of these are of high quality. That still leaves 750 high-quality posts published every day.

Even by this conservative assessment, the blogo- sphere still yields a quantity of content that can challenge the world’s best newspapers.

In addition, as a wider range of writers and citizens try blogging, the diversity and quantity of high-quality blogs will continue to increase. Currently, the number of blogs doubles every 300 days. Consequently, the situation is going to get much worse, or depending on your perspective, much better.

As bloggers continue to gain tangible influence in public debates, our understanding of this phenomenon will mature.

And this past decade should serve as a good guide. Contrary to the predictions of both champions and skeptics, blogging has neither displaced nor debased the practice of journalism. If anything, it has made journalism more accurate, democratic and widely read.

Let’s hope blogging’s next decade will be as positive and transformative as the first.

The Trust Economy (or, on why Gen Yers don't trust anyone, except Jon Stewart)

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I was listening to Dr. Moira Gunn’s podcast interview of Andrew Keen – author of “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture” – and was struck not only by how Keen’s arguments ate themselves, but how he failed to grasp the internet’s emerging trust economy.

Keen is the new internet contrarian. He argues that the anonymous nature of the internet makes it impossible to trust what anyone says. For example: How do you know this blog really is written by David Eaves? And who is David Eaves? Is he even real? And why should you trust him?

According to Keen, the internet’s “cult of anonymity” creates a low-trust environment rife with lies and spin. But the real problem is how this erosion of trust is spilling over and negatively impacting the credibility of “old media” institutions such as newspapers, news television, movie studies, record labels, and publishing houses. With fewer people trusting – and thus consuming – their products, the traditional “trustworthy” institutions are going out of business and leaving the public with fewer reliable news sources.

Let’s put aside the fact that the decline of deference to authority set in long before the rise of the internet and tackle Keen’s argument head on. Is there a decline of trust?

I’d argue the opposite is true. The more anonymous the internet becomes, and the more it becomes filled with lies and spin, the more its users seek to develop ways to assess credibility and honesty. While there may be lots of people saying lots of silly things anonymously, the truth is, not a lot of people are paying attention, and when they do, they aren’t ascribing it very much value. If anything the internet is spawning a new “trust economy,” one whose currency takes time to cultivate, spreads slowly, is deeply personal, and is easily lost. And who has this discerning taste for media? Generation Y (and X), possibly the most media literate generation(s) to date.

The simple fact is: Gen Yers don’t trust anyone, be it bloggers, newscasters, reporters, movie stars, etc… This is why “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” is so popular. Contrary to popular opinion, The Daily Show doesn’t target politics or politicians – they’re simply caught in the crossfire – the real target of Stewart et al. is the media. Stewart (and his legions of Gen Y fans) love highlighting how the media – especially Keen’s venerable sources of trustworthy news – lie, spin, cheat and err all the time (and fail to report on the lying, spinning, cheating and errors of those they cover). In short, The Daily Show is about media literacy, and that’s why Gen Yers eat it up.

In contrast, what is being lost is the “blind trust” of a previous era. What Keen laments isn’t a decline in trust, but the loss of a time when people outsourced trust to an established elite who filtered the news and, assessed what was important, and decided what was true. And contrary to Keen’s assertions, those who struggle with this shift are not young people. It is rather the generation unaccustomed to the internet and who lack the media literacy is being made transparent – sometimes for the first time. I recently encountered an excellent example of this while speaking to a baby boomer (a well educated PhD to boot) who was persuaded Conrad Black was innocent because his news source from the trial was Mark Steyn (someone, almost literally, on Black’s payroll). He blindly trusted the Maclean’s brand to deliver him informed and balanced news coverage, a trust that a simple wikipedia search might have revealed as misplaced.

Is there a decline in trust? Perhaps of a type. But it is “blind trust” that is in decline. A new generation of media literates is emerging who, as Dr. Gunn termed it “know that it’s Julia Robert’s face, and someone else’s body, on the Pretty Women posters.” And this skepticism is leading them on their own quest for trust mechanisms. Ironically, it is this very fact that makes Keen’s concerns about old-media unfounded. This search for trust may kill off some established, but untrustworthy “old media” players, but it will richly reward established brands that figure out how to create a more personal relationship with their readers.

Maclean’s: The Black Trial’s other casualty

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Maclean’s magazine was just getting interesting again… Andrew Potter (my favourite columnist) was on board, Paul Well’s offered fantastic insights on Ottawa, the new format was edgier and the content more interesting. But Mark Steyn’s coverage of the Black Trial, among some of the worst commentary and news reporting in the country, is a significant step backwards.

I don’t mind biased reporting… everyone has a bias. But it is one thing to have a bias such as “I’m skeptical that non-competes should be criminal under any situation” versus “no matter what evidence is presented, Conrad Black is innocent.” If facts aren’t going to influence you, why go to Chicago? Why be in the court room at all? What insightful analysis could you possibly provide?

If I wanted this type of mindless coverage I’d read one of the numerous conservative blogs.

So won’t somebody in the (Canadian) media stand up and call out the obvious? Mark Steyn is clearly more worried about losing a good reference letter than he is about providing thoughtful analysis or accurate reporting.

What makes this all the sadder are the ridiculous contortions he gets into when reconciling his coverage with other issues.

There was a great example of this yesterday. A reader asked Steyn if he was concerned about the treatment of all convicts or just prisoner Black. So Steyn – now a convert to justice reform – published a list of changes that would improve the US justice system. Listed below is a sample:

Reform 1) “An end to the near universal reliance on plea bargains, a feature unknown to most other countries in the Common Law tradition. This assures that a convicted man is doubly penalized, first for the crime and second for insisting on his right to trial by jury. The principal casualty of this plea-coppers’ parade is justice itself: for when two men commit the same act but the first is jailed for the rest of his life and dies in prison while the second does six months of golf therapy and community theatre on a British Columbia farm and then resumes his business career, the one thing that can be said with certainty is that such an outcome is unjust.”

If one believes that the justice system is only about punishment then I guess Steyn is right. However, the justice system is also about responsibility, rehabilitation and acknowledgment. It offers some latitude to those who accept personal responsibility for their illegal actions. Black might also have enjoyed a more lenient sentence – if he’d acknowledged his guilt.

Reform 2) “An end to the process advantages American prosecutors have accumulated over the years – such as the ability to seize a defendant’s funds and assets and deprive him of the means to hire good lawyers and rebut the charges.”

Ah yes, it was so sad to see Conrad Black – striped of his assets – rely on a public attorney provided by the court. If only he could have afforded Toronto and Chicago’s most elite, prestigious and expensive defense attorneys. If he had, things almost certainly would have gone differently.

Steyn’s clearly not a fan of Black’s defense team. But does he really believe that Black’s case was damaged by his inability to hire one of the most expensive defense teams in North America?

Reform 3) “An end to countless counts. In this case, Conrad Black was charged originally with 14 crimes. That tends, through sheer weight of numbers, to favour a conviction on some counts and acquittal on others as being a kind of “moderate” “considered” “judicious” “compromise” that reasonable persons can all agree on. In other words, piling up the counts hands a huge advantage to the government. In this case, one of the 14 counts was dropped halfway through the trial, and another nine the jury acquitted Conrad on. But the four of the original 14 on which he was convicted are enough. One alone would be sufficient to ruin his life. This is the very definition of prosecutorial excess. Why not bring 20 charges or 30 or 45? After all, the odds of being acquitted of all 45 are much lower than those of being acquitted of 30 or 40.”

Maybe because there were 14 charges worth prosecuting? Either you believe in a jury’s capacity to discern the truth or you don’t. If you don’t trust juries, don’t limit the prosecution, eliminate the jury. Besides, the analysis isn’t even sound. I’ve seen court reporters discuss the opposite effect, about how frivolous charges can taint the credibility of all the counts and so increase the odds of a complete acquittal. But maybe we should cap the number of charges a prosecutor can lay… Of course, by Steyn’s logic this would mean limiting the Picton trial prosecutors to laying charges on 1 or 2 murders since 7 would unfairly weigh the process in favour of the prosecution.

So what’s Steyn’s conclusion?

“Conrad Black would have benefited from the above changes, but so would a lot of nickel’n’dime stumped-tooth losers with tattoos – which is as it should be: Justice is supposed to be blind. But this system is blind drunk on its own power.”

Why? Because according to Steyn’s column and blog, everybody is at fault: the courts, Black’s lawyers, Black’s business partners, the jury, the press, pretty much everyone except Black. In short Black has to be innocent. Consequently some narrative, any narrative, even one that must awkwardly describe a perfect storm of how all the above actors conspiring to bring Black down, must be constructed. Of course, for such a storm to exist the failure of the system must be dramatic, and clearly reform – even radical reform – must be necessary. Hence, the contortions.

It’s a good thing Steyn was in Chicago, providing us with another account of how the system keeps the wealthy, aristocratic white men down. He truly is a modern day Charles Russell.

The end of TV and the end of CanCon?

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A few weeks ago I blogged about how the arrival of Joost could eventually require the rethinking of Canadian content rules (CanCon).

For those unfamiliar with CanCon, it is a policy, managed (I believe) by Heritage Canada and enforced by Canada’s broadcasting regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), that establishes a system of quotas to ensure a certain amount of Canadian programming (e.g. music, TV) is broadcast within Canada.

In laymen terms: CanCon ensures that Canadian radio and TV stations broadcast at least some Canadian content. This can be good – making stars out of artists that might not have have received airplay – think The Bare Naked Ladies. And it can be bad, making (usually temporarily) stars out of artists that should never have received airplay – think Snow.

Well I’ve been allowed to serve as a Joost beta tester. After getting my email invitation last week I downloaded a copy.

In essence Joost is like You-Tube, but bigger, faster, and sleeker. It’s as though Apple’s design team revamped You-Tube from the ground up and, while they were at it, grabbed themselves some partners to provide some more professional content.

But what makes Joost so interesting is how it’s organized. Joost feels like on-demand TV, with content divided into “categories” – such as “documentaries films” – and subdivided into “channels” – such as the “Indieflix channel” and the “Witness channel.” There is already a fair amount of content already available including a number of hour long (or longer) documentaries that are worth watching. (I can’t WAIT until Frontline has a channel up and running. I’d love to be able to watch any Frontline episode, anywhere, anytime, on a full screen.)

So what happens to Canadian content rules when anyone, anywhere can create and distribute content directly to my computer, and eventually, my TV? At this point, the only options left appear to be a) give up, or b) regulate content on the internet. Problematically, regulating internet content and access may be both impossible (even China struggles with this policy objective) and unpopular (I hope you’re as deeply uncomfortable as I am with the government regulating internet content).

The internet has (so far) enabled users to vastly expand the number of media sources available to them, and even create their own media. This has been a nightmare for “traditional media” such as newspapers and television stations, whose younger market demographic has significantly eroded. As a result, these same forces are eroding the government’s capacity to control what Canadians watch.

Which brings us back to option (a). At worst, CanCon is going the way of the Dodo – it will be too difficult to implement and maintain. Indeed a crisis in cultural policy may be looming. On the bright side however, the internet enables ordinary Canadians to create their own media (blogs, podcasts and now even videos) and distribute it over the internet, across the country and around the world. This is a better outcome than CanCon – which essential supports large, established media conglomerates who do Canadian content out of necessity, not passion – could ever have hoped for. Ordinary canadians may now be in the driver seat in creating content. That is a good outcome. Let’s hope any policy that replaces CanCon bears this in mind.

more on segmenting open source communities

eaves.ca

if writing is a muscle, this is my gym