G20 protesters: Boxed in

On Sunday morning, strolling past Toronto Police Headquarters (two minutes away from where I live), I struck up a conversation with a police constable.  Why, I asked him, did the police not protect property during the G20 disturbances of the previous day?  He replied, quite reasonably, that the police did not want to risk bodily harm to protect windows.  They would have intervened if people had been at risk.  Nobody was harmed, he pointed out, nor was anybody placed under that threat.

That sounded right.  But it was an odd echo of something a rioter from the notorious "Black Block" told the Globe and Mail: "We're not violent," he said, "all we damaged was property -- not a single person was hurt."  (That might sound a tad disingenuous: what would have happened if police had tried to arrest one of the rioters while he was smashing a window with a hammer? -- But let's not chase the thought down that hole.)  Ironically, the scary rioter was making the same distinction as my charming constable acquaintance.  Hurting property is different from hurting people.  Morally different.

Here is another head-scratcher from that Sunday.  A lot of people, including some suspected of carrying dangerous weapons, were milling around in the vicinity of Queen and Spadina.  (See below.)  Police suspected some of these people of carrying nasty items, such as Molotov cocktails.  So they told everybody they had to go, unless detained.  The crowd didn't disperse.  So the police boxed the crowd in -- presumably, they wanted to hold the malfeasant types in until they were ready to be inspected without resisting.  Problem is they held the whole crowd there for several hours in the pouring rain, until they could be inspected, and then detained or released.  Many of the people in the box were peaceful and legitimate protesters; one was a freelancer working for the Guardian newspaper in London. (I really do not want to say that the Guardian's coverage of the Vancouver Olympics makes it ok to punch their journalists in the stomach -- but I confess the thought did cross my mind.)  

Now, here's the question.  Were those who were not charged illegally detained? Were their civil rights violated?

 

I don't know anything about the law.  But here's what puzzles me.  The police claim that the crowd was ordered to disperse.  Suppose this is true.  Then, supposing that the order was delivered audibly, clearly, and repeatedly, not dispersing puts you in risk of some coercive action.  So on this scenario, some of the people in the box knowingly disobeyed an order given by peace officers.  They could not find their way out of a place that they had been told to vacate.  Look: if you wander into a place where there is a clearly posted Keep Out sign, you can't really complain.  Maybe the person who put the sign there had no right to -- but surely the police do have a right to ask citizens not to interfere with their actions.  (Hell, they do that every time I venture out onto an expressway in Toronto.  There's always some "investigation" that lasts for hours and backs the Gardiner up forever.)

Let's stick with the scenario for a moment.  Some of those people in the box claim that they didn't hear the order.  They may not have heard it -- that it was given audibly doesn't imply that everybody heard it.  Some may have been distracted; some may have been talking to their friends; some may have had other things on their minds.  But this doesn't put them in the clear, legally speaking, as far as I know.  If the order is properly given, not having heard it is not an excuse for disobeying.  Nor does it cut the mustard to say, as some did say, that they were waiting for a bus.  Once riot police tell you to clear out, the transit option disappears.  Better to think of walking, or taking a taxi, or hiking up to Dundas to see if transit is running better up there.  Inconvenient . . . but what else are you going to do?

Still sticking with the warning-was-given scenario, the best sense I can make of the just-hanging-around scenario is that, given the situation and its political implications, some people wanted to disobey the police.  That's civil disobedience.  I admire civil disobedience -- it's a much more lofty option than insisting that you have to catch the street car.  Hey, I was brought up in India, and Gandhi is my hero.  You are not going to catch me saying that peaceful civil disobedience is morally less-than-heroic.

But: and this was Gandhi's point -- watch the Ben Kingsley/Leslie Howard scene if you don't believe me -- that civil disobedience comes with the duty to suffer the duly administered legal penalty.  If you break the law for a noble political end, then assuming you want to change the state not destroy it, you accept the penalty.  What's this about civil rights being violated?  You don't have a civil right to hang out at the corner of Queen and Spadina when a peace officer has told you to move on.  Assuming, of course, that he has a right to do so.  (If you think he doesn't have that right, then why not say so -- rather than all this "I didn't hear him" nonsense?)

OK, let's come off the scenario now.  It hasn't yet been established that the police did clearly, loudly, and repeatedly enough make it clear that people had to disperse.  I would think, though, that this is easily established.  There must be film, right?  The guy/gal who took the photo above probably could tell you, if s/he was contacted and asked nicely.  If they just boxed people in without giving them a chance to leave, and kept them there for hours in the pouring rain, and didn't give them anything to eat or a private place to relieve themselves -- well, that is a crime.  How would you like to be treated that way? 

Canada's "Founding" Peoples

A couple of weeks ago, retired Supreme Court Justice John Major released his final report on the aftermath of the Air India crash of more than twenty years ago.  That crash was the result of a bomb.  The Major report itemized the Keystone Cop procedures within Canadian intelligence services and the RCMP that led them to ignore clear warnings of an attempted bombing that very weekend, the destructive squabbles between these two agencies that led to failed prosecutions, and other disgusting breaches of basic competence in the security services that are supposed to protect us.

An interesting sidelight of the report was Justice Major's bewilderment that after the crash Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, called the Indian Prime Minister to commiserate with him about India's loss.  Bewildering because by far the larger portion of the people who died in the crash were Canadian citizens and residents.  One commentator said, in a silly and unfeeling, but nonetheless revealing, exaggeration: "All that India lost was a plane."  Native-born white Canadians tended for a couple of decades to treat the Air India crash as if it were an incident that happened in a foreign country (other than England).

I have been seething about this, and doubtless this explains why I was irritated afresh by the plaque that the City of Toronto placed under the imposing equestrian statue of King Edward VII in Queen's Park. 

It reads: 

"Originally standing in Edward Park, Delhi, India, this statue was erected on the present site through the generous subscriptions of the citizens of this area.


"This gift to the City of Toronto was made possible by the Government of India and the former Canadian High Commissioner to India, His Excellency, The Right Honourable Roland Michener CC, CD, Governor General of Canada, and brought to the City through the personal generosity of Henry R. Jackman CC."  William Dennison, Mayor.

The plaque does not say who made the gift, for it equates the role of the Government of India (GOI) with that of Michener. In fact, the story is that the statue had been relegated to a graveyard for imperial statues in Delhi, and Michener begged it for Toronto from GOI.  Then Henry Jackman paid for the transportation, and local citizens for its erection in Queen's Park.

In her disgustingly arrogant memoir, Michener's daughter tells the story, but expresses no gratitude at all, complaining instead of the delays in transferring the edifice which she attributes to Babu bureaucracy.  She writes as if the thing were her property, tied up by some backward Customs poo-bah.

The plaque gives the impression that the local citizens of Toronto are to be thanked ahead of the actual donors -- the people of India.  The latter are never acknowledged, much less thanked.

A small matter, yes: but indicative of the respect that immigrants and non-English foreigners used to receive in Canada and in Toronto.   

Three Calgary Restaurants

I have been spending some time in Calgary, and took the opportunity to visit three restaurants that people think well of here.

Catch is a restaurant that specializes mostly in fish.  It's located in an older stone building on Centre Street and 8th Avenue, on the well-preserved Stephens Street Mall.  There's an "oyster bar" -- really a pub -- downstairs and an attractive restaurant upstairs.  The restaurant is a very pleasant room and fun to eat in.  

We had the tasting menu.  It started with a risotto cake on caramelized onions.  This dish didn't work.  The cakes were nice and crisp on the outside, but the risotto itself was a disaster -- tasteless and mushy, it had all the culinary pizazz of porridge for babies.  This was followed by an indifferent ravioli with spot prawns -- it's a bit early for spot prawns, I think, and maybe these were frozen last year.  Anyway, they didn't have much flavour -- and when has one ever said that about a freshly caught spot prawn?  The third dish was excellent -- a beautifully prepared broiled "silk" snapper.  The broiler worked perfectly on this one -- though the server told us that most of his customers scrape off the skin.

Overall: B-.

The Osteria de Medici is an expensive restaurant that people like to be seen at -- George W. Bush was taken there, and recently the Edmonton Oilers had a dispute there when they drank themselves silly and then balked at the $20,000 bill.  I was flattered that the Philosophy Department chose this after my talk.  The food, however, was a disaster.  A limp bruschetta as an amuse bouche, followed by mushy tortellini in a brodo that showed its tomato origins in an slick of pink oil.  Then a spongy grilled chicken breast on undressed vegetables.  Bad cooking, a server who would have been ok at a much less expensive place.  No redeeming virtue.

Overall: F.

The River Cafe is a rustic stone building on Prince's Island.  My daughter and I went there for a lazy lunch on my birthday.  They seated us in a sunbeam by a large window, and we basked for two hours.  I had beautifully prepared pork belly -- slowly cooked so that a rich, almost winey, flavour suffused the whole piece, which was topped by crisp crackling, scored to create a striking pattern.  Accompanied by a small bean and spinach.  Drank a lovely Sicilian Planeta, which complemented the pork perfectly.  Premala ate scallops, for which she expressed great satisfaction.

Overall: A-. 

Intent/Intention

It's probably after the fact as far as usage is concerned, but may I protest about the use of 'intent' for 'intention'?  As in:  'He chased his dog with the intent of taking it home' instead of '. . . with the intention of taking it home.'

I am pontificating here, and doing so even without proper research (like looking the word up in the Oxford English Dictionary).  But here goes.  'Intent' is an adjective, as in 'She was intent upon ruining our fun'.  It gets turned into an adverb in the usual way, and the adverb reveals the meaning: 'She studied intently'.  'Intent' is a slightly odd adjective in that it requires a complement.  Usually, you cannot be intent without being intent on something.  Hence it can't be used attributively: you can't say 'She is an intent person' because this would be incomplete.  -- Or perhaps you can, meaning that she is to an unusual degree intent on things that she takes up.  But it is surely odd to say 'She is an intent on ruining our fun person'.  

'Intention' is, of course, a noun, and refers to the purpose of an action.

So how did 'intent' come to be used for 'intention'?  One natural, but false, theory is that since 'She was intent on spoiling our fun' means the same as 'She had the intention of spoiling our fun', 'intent' replaced 'intention' in the second.  As I said, this is wrong: the two sentences are not equivalent.   For when you say 'She was intent on . . . ', you don't merely mean that she had the intention, but that she displayed a certain focus and concentration on it.  That's what is revealed by the adverbial transformation to 'intently'.

I think that the confusion came in with the legalism 'with intent'.  I think this is properly used when a course of action has a point of focus, or when everything somebody did was focused on a single point.  'With intent' naturally takes the complement 'to', which says what that focus was.  Thus, 'She drove with intent to break the speed record' suggests that everything she did while driving was directed to this aim.  But then some people slipped into using it where the weaker "with the intention to" or "with the intention of" would have been more appropriate.  Thus, "She drove to Toronto with the intention of saving money" does not properly suggest that all of her driving-related actions were aimed at being money-saving -- she may have driven uneconomically fast -- just that the choice to drive (rather than to fly) were so aimed.

Coming back to 'He chased the dog with the intent to take it home': it suggests that his manner of chasing was particularly well suited to taking the dog home after he caught it.  But surely this is not right.  So maybe there are circumstances in which it would be right to say '. . . with intent to catch it', but not ' . . . with the intent to take it home'.

Two Places I Once Lived In (in Edmonton)

 

The one above (10908 126th St.) has been thoroughly renovated, which is good, since it was such a cold house.  But I was glad to see the colours I chose myself.   It's a beautiful house on a beautiful street.

 

 T

The one above (10317 Villa Ave, I think) is truly a gorgeous old brick place from 1911.  It retains its stately dignity.

Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton

So what do we think of the new art gallery in Edmonton?  My own view is that it is a bit too small for its very large ribbons, and doesn't have the grace of Frank Gehry's Chicago Millenium Park bridge.  But it does bring some drama to Winston Churchill Square, which has the City Hall glass pyramid, the Winspear concert hall, and the still charming Citadel Theatre.

 
Here's a shot of the lobby:

One odd feature is the ribbons are made of stainless steel plates, with exposed (but flush) rivets, much like an aircraft wing.  But there are water stains from the rivets (still much like aircraft wings) and places where the plates are not flush to each other (not like a wing).

Harvest Room, Edmonton

Is there a nicer room to eat in than the Harvest Room in the Macdonald Hotel in Edmonton?

This is my friend, Alex, and though the left picture behind him is a little crooked, you must admit that it is an awfully nice place to have lunch.

 

The food itself used to be better.  The menu for lunch is restricted -- one fish, saltimbocca, a steak, and a vegetarian dish.  Both Alex and I settled on the saltimbocca, which was nice enough -- crisp outside, nice ham inside, and the sage leaf rather tasty.  But whose idea was it serve this on a salad with croutons?

We did have a lovely wine with lunch though -- a Nk'Mip Qwam Qwmt Merlot from the Okanagan, on this last day of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.  A complex, chocolate heavy, but still fruity wine from the burgeoning wine industry in British Columbia.  The day before we tasted a Sandhill Sangiovese, which was truly sensational.  Go British Columbia!

WAM! The Story of an Academic Spat.

I am not an insider in the philosophy of biology. Though I have published on teleology, Aristotle’s theory of teleology, teleosemantics, genetic reductionism, natural selection, and species – a broader range than most insiders – I nevertheless lack the insider’s knowledge of biological science, and so have always been careful to work with other philosophers who know the science better. Perceiving this perhaps, the philosophy of biology community have never treated me as one of them: I don’t get invited to workshops, or to contribute to handbooks, and so on. Nor do I particularly feel at home discussing topics of the sort that regularly receive attention in the journal, Biology and Philosophy, topics that depend on a deep acquaintance with recent literature in biology. My friend and sometime collaborator, Marc Ereshefsky, tends to think of people like me as "cherry-pickers" -- he accuses us of giving undue weight to this or that finding in empirical biology without properly understanding the attendant caveats and cautions.

The philosophy of biology is not, by and large, a sub-area in which pure philosophy goes down very well, or which in turn attracts much attention in pure philosophy circles. For this too there are reasons. A lot of what is published in philosophy of biology venues is reportage of scientific problems, approaches, and even results, accompanied by what is at best a cursory effort to philosophize. And though there are some formidable philosophical minds in this sub-field – Elliott Sober, Philip Kitcher, and Alex Rosenberg, to name a few among the senior figures – most philosophers of biology are not particularly interested in traditional philosophical question. Discussions at philosophy of biology symposia are erudite and abstract, but often not philosophical, not even in the philosophy of science way. There is relatively little contact with traditional philosophy in philosophy of biology discussions of even such questions as teleology or innateness.

I say all this by way of introduction to my recent, mostly enjoyable, but completely unanticipated participation in a big kerfuffle in philosophy of biology. About ten years ago, I was writing something about functions, and since I take an evolutionary view of them, I dashed off a few elementary remarks on natural selection. Roughly, my thought was this: natural selection is the outcome of biases in the births, deaths, and matings of individual organisms. As these events accumulate, certain types increase in frequency while others decrease. There is no cause for these increases and decreases in frequency other than the causes of the individual births, deaths, and matings. So: natural selection is not a cause of evolution – where evolution is constituted by the said changes of frequency. Indeed natural selection is not something over and above the individual events that bring about changes of frequency. Well – I could refine this a bit, but for present purposes, the crude version is enough. That, very crudely, is what I said.

To my surprise, these simple remarks were energetically taken up by one of the editors of the volume for which I was writing – a young philosopher of biology by the name of André Ariew. André had a lot of criticisms of my arguments, but what surprised me was his opinion that my remarks were inflammatory, and that they could not simply be dropped into the middle of an article on functions without a great deal more preparation and argument. This surprised me because I had been under the impression that what I was saying was obvious to anybody who thought about it for more than a minute or two, and that it was certainly not worth wasting anybody’s time with a lengthy exposition. Anyway, I agreed to delete the section in question from the article on functions – and in recognition of the by then quite detailed correspondence between us, I asked André if he would like to collaborate on a new article, which we ultimately called “Two Ways of Thinking About Fitness and Natural Selection.”

In the fall of 2001, we finished this article, and by now having become persuaded that it was not completely vacuous, we sent it off to the Journal of Philosophy. JPhil is a Grand Old Journal in philosophy. Some have criticized it for its refereeing practices – everything is done in-house in the Columbia University philosophy department, and even that august institution has some need for outside advice, the critics say. Nevertheless, it is a philosophy insider’s journal – and for this reason, perhaps, it was a bit bold to send a philosophy of biology article there. Our thought, quite simply, was that one of the best philosophers of biology, Philip Kitcher, a former editor of Philosophy of Science, was on the JPhil board, and that if he liked our piece then it would be published. And if it were published, under Kitcher’s imprimatur, then surely everybody would fall for it.

September 2001 was a bit of an eventful month in New York City, a metropolis that was home not only to Columbia University and JPhil, but also the World Trade Centre. Consequently, our submission was met with a long silence – but once that was over, a stiff-upper-lip apology was issued (“It has been a bit hectic around here . . . “), and within a month, the paper had been accepted. By December, it was being copy-edited, and it appeared in the February 2002 issue. (You can find it here.) I had never experienced this kind of celerity in publishing, and I took it as a good omen. It seemed to me then that everybody would just accept our arguments. They would say “Why didn’t I think of that?” or possibly “That’s what I have always thought”.

Things didn’t turn out quite that way. The reaction in the philosophy of biology community was agitatedly negative. Print reaction takes quite a while, but right off the bat there were replies and criticism in person and on the web. Some of this reaction was to the first half of the paper, which is a critique of Elliott Sober, a very popular figure in philosophy of biology – even we love him (ha, ha!). But a lot of the reaction was to our edict against saying that natural selection is a cause. A lot of biologists want to contrast cases where natural selection is responsible for evolutionary change with cases where other factors such as “random genetic drift” or migration are responsible. And our treatment didn’t allow them to make this contrast in this way -- though we were certainly generous in making suggestions about how this kind of talk could be reformed and accommodated. This upset many philosophers of biology – generally, philosophers of biology are nervous to contradict biologists. (One recent author has said that we were “metaphysically principled”, but untrue to biologists’ linguistic habits. My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that one can’t be metaphysically principled and also follow biologists’ linguistic tics.)

At the time, Denis Walsh was our one friend in all of this. He had in fact scooped our conclusion – though his reasoning was along different lines – and together our interpretation came to be known as the “statistical interpretation of natural selection”. Denis had also worked on a paper with André and Tim Lewens, and initially, the Walsh-Ariew-Lewens-Matthen group were bunched together under the name of WALM. However, Lewens later changed his mind about certain aspects of the statistical interpretation, and I suppose we should now be called WAM. A couple of years later, Denis (who had been at Edinburgh) and I (at the University of British Columbia) both accepted jobs at Toronto – and he and I now tend to call it “The Toronto Interpretation”, though the A in WAM (who is at Columbia, Missouri) is not thrilled by this moniker.

This storm of criticism was really exhilarating for us – at least for me. Critics would make this or that point – usually derisive, and often directed against “WALM”, as if we were Bourbaki – and we would think up a response. (Talking about derisive responses: some critics entitled our view Drift-as-Outcome-Alone, or DOA -- is this clever or what?) Graduate students would write to us and ask what we thought of this or that point their supervisors had made against us in a seminar, and we would defend ourselves. Generally, these exchanges were constructive and fun, and I think that we held our own, and continue to do so. For me in particular, there is very little downside – my day job is in philosophy of perception, and even if I got egg on my face pursuing this avocation, I did not feel that any harm could come to my career. As I said earlier, I am not an insider. The stakes were, of course, a bit higher for Denis and André.

That part of it was fun, but another was not. For though our critics seemed to have no trouble getting into the journals, our responses were rejected. This, of course, is what happens when most of the senior figures in a field agree that you are wrong: the criticisms get published, but your replies do not (and at times it feels that they cannot). But it was frustrating because, as I said just now, I thought we had a bunch of new arguments, as well as some neat responses to criticisms. And never before in my life had I received such contemptuous referee reports – with words such as “ignorant” and “incompetent” occurring in them. For seven years, we were turned away by every journal we submitted to – even good old JPhil said that though they thought that we were right, they also felt that the discussion was becoming a bit "scholastic". (And there was some truth in that.)

Finally, help came from a rather unexpected source. Sympathetic reviews at Philosophy of Science, another grand old journal, though not quite grand or old enough to merit majuscules. André and I had submitted a response to our many critics; I had independently submitted an article on random genetic drift, both significant extensions of the statistical interpretation; Denis had submitted an article on the untenability of causal interpretations. At the time though, Philosophy of Science was somewhat tied up in knots – I am not sure why or how – and it took a long time to get a decision, even though the reviews were sympathetic. Indeed, so long had it been between receiving the “conditional accept” and the final accept, that André and I had more or less decided to move on and submit somewhere else. But suddenly the logjam broke and all of the above articles have appeared or are about to. And though opposition continues, it is generally a bit more respectful than it had been.

I suppose that there’ll be another few rounds. There’s a lot to respond to in our new publications, and as I remarked earlier, print responses take years and years. For now though, I once again enjoy the serene belief that everybody will come to their senses and say either “Oh, I see now what you mean – clearly you are right” or possibly “That’s what I have always thought”.

What Kind of Stimulus?

Here are some of the things I have heard over the last two weeks:

1. FDR's stimulus spending in the nineteen thirties slowed recovery down. Only when war came in 1939 did the North American and world economies recover from the Great Depression.

2. FDR's stimulus spending was doing a marvellous job, but then his government got panicky and returned to "fiscal discipline". When this happened, the recovery stalled, and only when war came in 1939 did the North American and world economies recover from the Great Depression.

3. Infrastructure spending has a low multiplier effect (less than 1, according to some accounts). Only tax cuts stimulate the economy.

4. Infrastructure spending has a much higher multiplier than tax cuts. Tax cuts only ensure that the government will borrow forever, going deeper and deeper into debt.

5. It is highway robbery for bonuses to be paid to executives when the Government is bailing out their corporations.

6. Bonuses are a normal cost of doing business effectively: not to pay them has the consequence that Government bailout money is handled by incompetent people.

I guess I tend to believe 2, 4, and 5. But I have no better reason to do so than that I want to. I am hoping that Timothy Geithner has better reasons for believing these same propositions.

Research Funding Worries in Canada

On Tuesday, January 27th, the Harper government brought down its long-awaited budget. The Liberals indicated their support, so the coalition is dead and the Harper government alive.

One of the most worrying features of this government has been its antipathy to intellectuals and artists. As for the latter, Harper traduced artists in the last election campaign as citified types who go to a lot of cocktail parties -- and lost a lot of seats in arts-loving Quebec as a result. As far as this is concerned, the Government may have learned its lesson: 160 million is in the works for big arts festivals (and the attendant cocktail parties in big cities, one imagines). Well, good -- but it's a pity that struggling avant-garde artists won't benefit from this.

With respect to universities, the Harper record hasn't been bad. At least up until now. Paul Martin, the former Prime Minister, was a staunch believer in universities (though not necessarily a supporter of pure research in humanities) and under him, the three federal research granting councils had strong budget increases, peaking (under Harper) at around 2 billion dollars per year. This, together with such programs as the Canada Research Chairs and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, has brought considerable excitement to Canadian universities in recent years. There's a palpable feeling of things happening.

In this week's budget, however, the news for research was quite bad. Today (January 29, 2009) the Globe and Mail reported on its front page that Genome Canada's funding from the feds had dropped to zero. This is a high-profile and high-prestige agency, and is very visible in cities like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, which have large medical research establishments. In the 2008 budget, Genome Canada received an increase of 140 million. Today, it's gone from the budget altogether. This seems bizarre. A 100% cut! (UPDATE: Colin Farrely points out that this story is based on a misinterpretation of how the Government funds Genome Canada. It does so by means of one-time grants, not by on-going base funding. In the last two years, Genome Canada got grants of $100m and 140m. These grants can be drawn on any time over the subsequent four years, and are still current. However, no new money came in this year. So things are not as bad as the Globe story suggested, but still quite a bit worse than last year, since GC can't make new commitments.)

At the same time, the budgets of the three granting councils drops by 87 million -- or about 3%. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's budget is cut by 14 million (also in the 3% range). Compounded by a stupid recent emphasis on directed research at SSHRC, and a consequent internal reallocation of funds away from independent research, this could be a very bad development for humanists. (Again, this is a reversal. Last year, the government proposed an 80 million increase in each of two years.)

The news was not all bad though. This is a stimulus budget, and public works are the theme. As part of that theme, colleges and universities are to receive about 2 billion dollars for infrastructure renewal, which must be matched by the provinces. Many Canadian universities suffer (as do universities everywhere) from deferred spending on maintenance, and this should help. There are also some increases to the Canada Graduate Scholarship funds and Canada Foundation for Innovation (which is a source of research infrastructure funding, mainly for scientists).

What's the trend? I don't know, but there is cause for worry. Especially for humanists.

UPDATE: Further evidence now emerges of an anti-intellectual approach to "training". Lisa Shapiro kindly referred me to the Canadian Association of University Teachers analysis of the budget. There it is pointed out that some money has been redirected from granting council base budgets to the Canada Graduate Scholarship program. However, the new money that goes to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for these scholarships will be restricted to students in business related programs!

Another, more positive note: The Government will contribute $50 million to the Institute of Quantum Computing in Waterloo, presumably matching the contribution of Jim Balsillie of Blackberry fame.

What Michaelle Knew

In my post on Parliamentary Democracy below, I argued that the post of Prime Minister is not well defined in Westminster style democracies. (For example, neither the Constitution of India nor the Canada Act define the office.) There is no clear rule about the length of a Prime Minister's term, or about the conditions under which s/he may hold office. It is also not clear what powers attach to this office. In constitutional fiction, s/he is the first minister of the Queen or the Head of State; by convention, the Queen or Head of State acts on the advice of the Prime Minister. When can the Queen or her viceroy dismiss a Prime Minister? This is far from clear, and constitutional epistemology plays a role.

If the PM enjoys the confidence of the House of Commons, then the Governor-General must do his or her bidding. On Thursday December 4th, Prime Minister Stephen Harper asked the GG to prorogue Parliament so that he would not have to face the House on a vote of confidence. Should she have acceded to his request? If he had the confidence of the House, she was obliged to do so. If he did not, she was obliged not to do so.

Here's a problem in what I call constitutional epistemology. Does the GG know that Harper did not have the confidence of the House? Well, in the ordinary sense, yes. Nobody could doubt that a majority of members of the House had no confidence in him. They said so. They signed pieces of paper to that effect.

Nevertheless, they had voted to receive the Speech from the Throne. So when the Commons had voted last in a confidence measure, they demonstrated confidence in Harper's government. Thus, the GG does not know, in a constitutional sense, that he does not have the confidence of the House.

Tortured reasoning? Perhaps, and I'll return to that in a moment. Think of the reasoning that some citizens express on the airwaves and the internet. We know that the electorate rejected Stephane Dion, they say. How can the GG call on him to form a government? This reasoning is irrelevant in two ways. The first and most direct reason for irrelevance is this: as pointed out by many learned people (and by myself in my post on Parliamentary Democracy), we don't get to vote for the Executive. But secondly, just think of constitutional epistemology. If the GG does not know that Stephen Harper has lost the confidence of the House, she surely does not know that the electorate does not want Stephane Dion as PM. We all know it, if we know anything at all. But she does not. Not constitutionally.

OK. On this thread of reasoning, Michaelle Jean was right to prorogue Parliament on the advice of her first minister. Parliament is to open once again on January 26th. On this day, Jean will deliver a speech from the throne. The next day, the Government will present a budget. If the opposition coalition holds, the Government will be defeated on one or both. It will then demonstrably have lost the confidence of the House.

Harper will then advise the GG to dissolve the House and call a fresh election. But as somebody who has lost the confidence of the House, he will not have the right to expect that she will take his advice. He will argue that he has the confidence of the people. But by constitutional epistemology, she will not know this. Perhaps some Canadians will think they know this, and who am I to say they are wrong. The problem is that what they know, or don't know, is irrelevant. The GG cannot know such things.

So here's what I think Michaelle Jean must have said last Thursday: Mr Harper, I will take your advice and prorogue Parliament. But if you lose a confidence vote in the House early next year, don't expect me to dissolve the House. You can't have an election until it is clear that a Government cannot be formed.

If she said all of that, she has my respect. If she only said the first thing, she does not.

Parliamentary Democracy

Those of us who grew up in the British Commonwealth learned about parliamentary democracy in high school. We are used to the idea that we elect a House of Commons, and that the Government -- the Executive -- is responsible to the Commons. We tend to fall into a certain line of thinking about the nature of voting in this country, and in other former British colonies. When people say: I voted for Stephen Harper, or I didn't vote for Stephane Dion, meaning that they voted Conservative, or didn't vote Liberal, we tend to think that they are just confusing our system with the US system. Here we vote for an MP, right? Unless you live in Calgary Southwest, you couldn't vote for Harper.

Right. But let's ponder for a moment the nature and history of the executive branch of our Government. The Commons itself originally had, in England, no function other than to authorize taxation. An important function, no doubt, but not an executive function. Moreover, ministers didn't sit in the Commons; they were appointed by the sovereign, and held office at the pleasure of the sovereign. In the constitutional fiction under which we live, this is still so.

Some people think that the Commons got its present powers after the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. And its legislative powers were certainly enhanced then: for all laws had to go through the Commons. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister (who was not even called that) did not answer to the Commons until much later. Wikipedia correctly says: "throughout the 18th century parliamentarians and legal scholars continued to deny that any such position was known to the Constitution. The title was first referred to on Government documents during the administration of Benjamin Disraeli but did not appear in the formal British Order of Precedence until 1905. George II and George III made strenuous efforts to reclaim the personal power of the Monarch, but the increasing complexity and expense of government meant that a minister who could command the loyalty of the Commons was increasingly necessary."

This means that though there is a substantial body of precedents that define the office of Prime Minister, no law defines the office. Every new decision makes that law. In this country, substantial centralization of powers occurred under recent Prime Ministers. It may well be that in India or Australia, there are subtle differences about how much authority a Prime Minister can claim. And these differences would trace not to legislation, but simply to what former Prime Ministers have done or have been allowed to do.

Moreover, it means that though the electorate votes for Parliament, and thus indirectly for the Government, they still vote under a system according to which Parliament was not the home of Government. In the British system, the Executive is separate from the Legislature -- and that's the assumption that defines voting in Westminster style democracies. We don't really vote for the Executive. In theory, the Prime Minister is still an officer appointed by the Crown, though now more than ever s/he must command the loyalty of the Commons, who votes up the money by which the Crown governs.

Contrast this with France or the United States. There, the electorate votes for both the Executive and the Legislature. We vote for those who authorize or reject legislation, but we do not vote for those who propose and execute legislation. Some think of this as "our system" -- different but just as good.

Last week's events have shown us in Canada that however good our system might be, it is less democratic.

Why I am not Voting Conservative Again

When the Conservative Party won a minority government in 2006, I was glad because that non-performing ass, Paul Martin, had lost office, but also unworried because I didn't think that the old Reform social agenda would ever come into law. As explained in a recent post, I thought that Harper would keep his promise about bringing gay marriage to a free vote in the Commons, that it would be reaffirmed there, and that the issue would then die away. This has come to pass, I think -- though God knows how many people are huddling in dark corners in Red Deer muttering about the evils of gay marriage, and plotting to bring capital punishment back.

But at the time, I did worry about anti-intellectualist tendencies in the Conservative government-to-be, and Harper's alarming lack of belief in the ideal of Canada. I'll return in a moment to that lack of belief. But first, a couple of other things.

Two years later, I want to acknowledge that the Government has done some good things. It corrected Chretien's dangerous neglect of the military. It courageously eliminated income trusts -- this tax dodge, though quite beneficial for individuals, had not only resulted in alarming corporate tax avoidance, but also in the smothering of global ambition in many large and successful Canadian companies, who were offered an incentive to de-globalize. The government has also played the Quebec question quite adroitly, though Quebecers have since wized up that if they don't keep sovereignty on the simmer, they will lose bargaining power in Ottawa.

OK. But there are also some disgraceful things. First, Harper cancelled the Kelowna accord -- the all province plus Federal government agreement that was Paul Martin's one substantial achievement as Prime Minister. Kelowna would have seriously addressed the native question that so blights and disfigures the Canadian nation today. Harper did apologize to the natives in the Commons for the abuses they have suffered over the years -- and that was remarkable. But he has not done anything to replace Kelowna. Sooner or later, Canada will suffer for not righting this historic and momentous wrong. We are rightly proud of Canadian social justice -- but we tolerate something not far short of apartheid within the state. Kelowna would have been a step toward dismantling the current system. Harper cancelled it. He simply reneged. He went back on a promise given not by the Liberal Party, but by the Government of Canada with the agreement of the provinces. (He did the same with Kyoto.)

Secondly, Harper has promised to treat fourteen year old criminals as adults in the criminal justice system. This is the most barbaric proposal I have encountered in my thirty plus years as a Canadian. Can you imagine bringing children to adult court? But this isn't all. To add insult to injury, the proposal is only for Canada outside Quebec. In Quebec, the age will be sixteen! Right, let's leave it there . . . I don't think I need to say more.

But what I find most disspiriting about this government is its utter rejection of any Canadian ideal. Judging from the constant loud denials in public media, we all know that Canada has a bit of an identity deficit. But contrary to what Canadians tend to believe, we are not alone in this. The Dutch, the Danes, the Belgians -- quick, what's their identity? Do you think that say Malaya has a national identity?

Now, I tend to think that the identity deficit is a bad thing. The Americans and Brits and even the poor besieged French and Germans have an inbuilt cultural crutch to rely on in moments of reduced cultural genius. Even in periods when the best of British literature is a bit enervated, as it is today, they still have their great literary past, and a confidence that someday the spark will return -- ditto German science and French style. (So: yes, there will be good British novels again, even if Ian McWho?en is as good as it gets today.) But we and the aforementioned northern Europeans are only as good as our performance on the day. When our geniuses die or become senile, our whole culture is diminished.

There is a way to build up our identity. It is to stand for something. Back in the sixties and seventies, when we and the rest of the Commonwealth were pulling ourselves out of the swamp of postcolonial insecurity, Canada did stand for something. The Canadian welfare state was built then, and is today much celebrated -- as was Canadian multiculturalism, Canadian foreign policy (think of opposition to apartheid by the Conservative Prime Ministers Diefenbaker and Mulroney; think of Canada in Suez and in the UN), and (yikes!) even Canadian architecture and design. This is the Scandinavian way too, and it is so even today: if you don't have an identity, at least have some values. Then you can wear your maple leaf with pride -- as Canadian hippies did in the seventies.

Harper is viscerally against this whole line of thinking. He hates state-sponsored values (even when they are not state-manufactured). He's even against state-identified values. He is all for strengthening the military (and so am I), but he is not for strengthening External Affairs and Canadian diplomats. He doesn't like state-funded culture, and he doesn't think that anybody else did -- except for the people who directly benefit from Canada Council grants. He was probably taken by surprise when his arts-funding cuts lost him significant popularity in Quebec. (Interestingly, this might deny him his majority. Just imagine: cut grants to effete opera-huggers, and you lose a government. There's Canadian identity for you: just when you discount it, it jumps up and bites your leg.) Economically, he is generally in favour of individuals doing better -- but he does not like the idea that Canadian collective entities should be strong global entities, whether they be corporations, or cultural organizations, or NGOs.

We have all been diminished by this neglect of the collectivity. I cannot support the person who is responsible. C'mon Harper: let's have a little 'country first'.

Nagel's Prizes

Further to my post about Tom Nagel and Intelligent Design (September 15th), and Brian Leiter's information that Nagel has won the Balzan Prize worth 885,000$, a Swedish friend informs me that he was once "awarded the Swedish Rolf Schock prize in philosophy (or "philosophy and logic", as the statutes have it - "and" to be read as "or"!)."

How I Voted in 2006

In January 2006, I voted for the Conservative Party. I did so in Vancouver East, one of the most reliable NDP ridings in the country. In Jeff Wall's celebrated photos, some of it looks like this, which may explain why:




For the very first time in six elections, I failed to vote for the winning candidate and the winning party.

Why did I vote that way?

First, I was disgusted with the Liberals. They had threatened national unity by their dirty tricks in Quebec.

By contrast, the Conservative Party had made genuinely innovative proposals vis-a-vis Quebec, which still serve them well in that province.

Third, I was horrified by Paul Martin's vindictive treatment of old Chretien supporters, for instance pushing the old warhorse Sheila Copps out of her Hamilton riding, and Stephane Dion out of cabinet.

Fourth, I didn't think that the social yahoo-ism of some Conservatives would do any harm. Harper had promised a free vote on gay marriage, just as Brian Mulroney had promised a free vote on capital punishment in 1984. (For my friends in countries that don't have a Westminster style parliamentary democracy, a free vote is one where members of parliament are freed from party discipline, and are free to vote their own conscience. Since the Government has no stake in the issue, neither result counts as its losing the confidence of the House.) Capital punishment lost in 1984, and it went out of Canadian discourse. I was convinced that gay marriage would go the same way (and it has).

In a word, I was truly tired of the Liberals, and quite ready to see a grumpy old duffer, Paul Martin, leave.

Famous Philosopher Comes Out for Intelligent Design Theory!

Neo-conservatism has been so gratingly strident of late that some liberal intellectuals seem ready to embrace anybody who just turns the volume down. How else to take celebrity philosopher Tom Nagel’s recent defence of Intelligent Design (ID) in Philosophy and Public Affairs? Nagel protests the “campaign of the scientific establishment to rule out intelligent design as beyond discussion.” While he acknowledges that ID is more likely to appeal to those who already believe in God; he pleads that by contrast with “young Earth creationism” it does not rest on biblical literalism. That’s apparently enough to get it into the biology classroom as far as he is concerned.


Nagel’s central scientific observation is that one may legitimately doubt whether random mutation affords natural selection enough variation from which to generate the observed diversity of life on Earth. (“This seems on the face of it to be a scientific claim,” he says, and not “self-evidently absurd.”)

How does this make ID science? By a series of snide equivalences. For instance: “No one suggests that the theory [of natural selection] is not science, though the historical process it describes cannot be directly observed.” No indeed. But then the “purposive alternative” (ID) cannot be so dismissed either. To do so would be to hold that “Only the falsehood, and not the truth, of ID can count as a scientific claim.” Does Nagel think that the entire research program of evolution by natural selection could be summarized as – not-ID! (In passing: it is not axiomatic that if p is science, not-p must ceteris paribus be so. Popper, for example, held that universal statements were scientific because refutable by a counter-instance, but existentials not so.)

Nagel seems to allow that one cannot construct a good scientific explanation out of something so indeterminate as God’s intentions. But he thinks that nonetheless there could be good scientific evidence in support of the proposition “An intelligent designer created the world.” (Not uncontroversial: for discussion, see Elliott Sober, “What’s Wrong With Intelligent Design?”, available here.) According to Nagel, you can exclude this proposition – call it IDE – from the domain of science only if you believe that God is impossible. But if IDE is beyond the reach of science, then so is its contradictory. Though it is “perhaps” the “nub of the issue,” the impossibility of divine intervention is “a religious assumption” and constitutionally suspect.

It is surprising that, brilliant ethicist as he is, Nagel is not more sensitive to the path-dependence and essential temporality of practical reason. He couches the entire ID question sub specie aeternitatis in terms of probability and evidence. But whether ID (or IDE, for that matter) is science or not depends not on eternal questions of the status of religious belief, but rather on what it has contributed or can contribute to science. This depends on where science is today. It may be true that in Darwin’s time, the hypothesis of divine creation had scientific standing. It is certainly true that in 1859, Darwin’s theory lacked an adequate theory of heredity and was for that reason contestable by proponents of directed mutation. (Fisher famously argued that on Darwinian blending inheritance, populations would not be able to retain enough variation to support significant evolution. This is one of the fundamental motivators for incorporating Mendelian particulate genes into the theory of evolution.) This vulnerability was not forever.

Things are very different today. We should ask: Is there a scientific problem on which ID sheds new light? Does it shed new light on mutation? Does it offer us a systematic alternative to evolutionary theory? And surely, the answer to all of these questions is: No! For a time, the notorious bacterial flagella were touted as a problem better addressed by ID – but this has been thoroughly discredited (as demonstrated in the Dover School District case). As for mutation, none of the tests of Motoo Kimura’s neutralist hypothesis or of junk DNA reveal bias suggesting divine intervention – and something should have showed up if ID is correct about this. And what perspective of scientific value does ID offer us, what prospect of new research? Admission to the biology curriculum requires more than non-infinitesimal prior probabilities; it requires scientific utility now, and utility is temporally dependent. (Remember Lorentz contraction: a theory that might have been useful in the 1890s, but one that became scientifically jejune after Special Relativity.)

Nagel quotes the Dover judgement as follows: “Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God.” And he objects, in yet another tu quoque, that this is no reason to exclude ID since “evolutionary theory as a complete explanation of the development of life is more plausible to someone who does not believe in God.” The question he should ask is this: would anybody today turn to ID as a scientific program except for a belief in God-as-creator? Nagel quotes a number of respectable scientists who share his scepticism concerning the sufficiency of random mutation – Stuart Kauffman, for instance. These scientists do not turn to ID; rather they try to show, by appeal to considerations of evolvability or to dynamic systems theory, that the evolution of complex systems is not as improbable as might at first appear. These are constructive proposals, and prima facie at least, they have some claim to inclusion within biology, though even here, random mutation and the bottom-up evolution of complexity are “null hypotheses” that will prevail if shown to be possible.

The scientific evaluation of theories involves much more than an enumeration of possibilities, and Nagel would be well-advised to adopt a more nuanced position on the “demarcation question” of what should count as science, and what not.

Day Five and still no improvement

Stephen Harper said yesterday that the Liberal Green Shift plan would be catastrophic, not only for the economy, but for national unity. He said that Government economic modelling has shown that meeting Kyoto commitments would cause a recession equivalent to that of the 80s.

That modelling had nothing to do with the Green Shift, which cuts income taxes and levies a carbon tax. It was about emission controls in isolation.

Of course, the Liberals have done nothing so far to explain their position. In the Green Shift brochure, a clear explanation is offered: "We will cut taxes on those things we all want more of such as income, investment and innovation. And we will shift those taxes to what we all want less of: pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and waste." Yet, Dion continues to respond to Conservative attacks with a message of sacrifice: Mr Harper "does not have faith in Canadians' ability to meet great challenges."

This morning's Globe summarizes the Liberal Plan, but fails to note that it includes personal as well as business income tax cuts. Yet, the cuts are clearly stated: "We will cut the lowest income tax rate to 13.5 per cent from 15 per cent, a 10 per cent reduction. And we will cut the middle class tax rates to 21 per cent from 22 per cent and to 25 per cent from 26 per cent."

Why doesn't Dion introduce some clarity into this debate?

In an interview yesterday, Harper said that only popular arts programmes should be publicly funded. I guess Feist can expect a grant from the Canada Council some time soon.


More than half of the arts funding story in the Globe and Mail is devoted to how well Harper plays the piano. Not clear why this is relevant (except perhaps to soothe the feelings of arts-supporters in this country).

Still No Green Shift . . .

The campaign remains idea-free. Harper has promised to leave Afghanistan by 2011. That's simply reacting -- he doesn't say why Canada's right decision to support NATO in Afghanistan will become wrong in 2011.

Meanwhile, the Liberals refuse to present the Green Shift in simple terms. The simplest way to put it is this: We're going to cut income tax. And we are going to tax carbon. We're going to take less money from your pay-cheque. If you choose to spend your money on gas, that's your business.

This simple message should be very attractive to city dwellers in particular. Granted, in Canada, they get less than one vote per person -- and so its good politics to ignore them. But remember that Harper opposed the Green Shift even in Richmond BC, a suburban riding where upwardly mobile voters hate taxes, and where carbon obscures the citizens' view of the mountains (for which they pay a lot in terms of property values).

Instead of this, Dion tells a New Brunswick crowd that "transforming to more fuel-efficient practices must start now to ensure economic viability in the future." This is almost like telling them that they have to make a sacrifice for the future. Not a sexy message, is it? (And it's all in polysyllabic words.) What's he thinking?

As for news today: Elizabeth May of the Green Party will join the debate (Good! -- now get Duceppe out of it); the NDP advances in British Columbia.

Paradox on the Campaign Trail

Bored? Don't be. Stephen Harper is playing with our minds:


"The biggest single problem we have is it's a chicken and egg problem -- it's that we are not here," he said, peering through a giant tea-cup in Toronto.

He was talking about dim Conservative prospects in Toronto -- "Once we start electing some people, it will be easier to elect some more." But what's the chicken and egg problem -- "Which came first electing more or electing some?" That doesn't sound like a problem exactly. Hmm . . . And "We are not here" -- don't you have to be?

The Green Shift

Another day of vapidity. The Conservatives posted an ad on their website, which showed a puffin (behind Dion's ear above) shitting on him -- Really! -- as it flew by. Harper has apologized. Good, I guess.

In the meanwhile, Dion has a new website, which pushes him as a nice guy ("not rich"), and the papers speculate that his "music of English" statement (see Revelations post below) was sympathetic. (Sure it's sympathetic. Hell, it's almost pandering: when did you last hear a francophone talking about the music of "the beautiful language" --- English???)

The Liberals announced today that they will reinstate the Court Challenges programme, which (before the Tories eliminated it) used to fund constitutional challenges brought by private citizens against the government. A very worthy idea. (Even Sarah Palin could get behind that, right -- private citizens suing the Government at Government expense? Don't tell her that's how we got gay marriage though.) I hope it is followed by promises of reinstating the cultural programmes recently cut by the Tories. But look: this is not really a nation-sized story. How many people are going to be swayed by the Court Challenges programme, which they have likely never heard about?

I don't get why the Liberals are not campaigning on their Green Shift programme. Yesterday, Harper told the Huangs that it is a revenue grab. (See the Harper in BC post below.) This is nonsense: the promise is to legislate revenue neutrality. For each dollar gained from the carbon tax, the proposed legislation will say one must be cut somewhere else. The Shift cuts personal income tax and taxes carbon emissions instead -- at $40 per tonne, I think. Well: isn't that a good idea? Why are the Grits acting embarrassed about it?