Confronting difficult situations is never easy

There have been few occasions where I have felt so mad at myself for biting my tongue as two separate occasions where comments I would deem racist have been uttered and I remained silent.

These events occurred over the past year or so and I think they are always a bit of a difficult issue. Even more so in a country, which proclaims its colour-blindness and refuses to acknowledge race as an issue, or when it does simply claims " Things are better here than in the United States" rather than dealing with the substance of the issue. I think the best description of this is in the book Black Berry Sweet Juice by Lawrence Hill. Though there were some parts I couldn't relate to, the experience he tells, of being a mixed-race person, half-black half white, like I am in Canada resonates with me.

In each situation, I was the only non-white person in the room, and the person's comments clearly made me feel uncomfortable. How do you reproach someone for such comments though? It isn't easy, especially in a social situation, where there are others around, and raising your voice and yelling and screaming at someone clearly isn't appropriate. How do you even broach the topic without making everyone involved feel uncomfortable.

Now there are those who claim that making the person uncomfortable is the point, and that such comments need to be held up to scrutiny and shouldn't be allowed to pass unchallenged, and while that's easy in theory in practice it's much more difficult.

I will try to be more assertive in the future. After the second of these situations, and how angry it made me, I hope I can rise to the challenge, of confronting these kind of racist statements.

What would Harper actually do?

So I started a conversation with a friend this week, if you take the premise that Harper won a majority in the next election, what exactly would his platform be?

It's a hard question, given that he's been so focused on keeping his minorities alive. He seemingly hasn't had enough time to think through what he would do if given time and license.

The other difficulty is that he like many conservatives, is "against government". Now I've always had a problem understanding why someone who dislikes 'government' would want to run one, but that's another issue. The point being that he seems to be mroe interested in dismantling (destroying?) programs and also not all that interested in doing things that would involve more government.

So in the end there isn't much left. As far as I can see, there are a few things they feel strongly about. The big two are:

A national securities regulator
Dismantling the wheat board

Other than that, I'm not too sure what they really want to do, lower taxes of course. They seem to want to lower spending, but haven't to date.

I'm kind of curious to see what a Harper majority would do. One thing I think that would happen is is some kind of machinery of government changes. It's been a long time since there were any MOG changes, so it's a possibility. The last major changes were in 1993 and things have certainly changed since then.

Update

I forgot, they also want to get rid of the gun registry and stop financing poltiical parties and maybe stack the senate with more partisans to then "reform" it...

Maybe they should run on those 5 priorities and see what happens

Ah, the Senate

Well it's an interesting week in terms of the senate.

One of the most interesting appointments, at least in Quebec, is the appointment of Jacques Demers to the senate. Famous now for admiting his illiteracy there's been a fair amount of commentary on this choice. (Which I think was the point)

What also piqued my interest this week was the following comment by Matthew Yglesias


— It’s also important to have in place systems for effective monitoring of elected officials. A Canadian voter elects one federal official—a Member of Parliament. An American elects four—a President, two Senators, and one Representative. Americans don’t have four times as much time as Canadians to pay attention to what politicians are doing or to learn the issues; our politicians are just being monitored less. When you consider the proliferation of things like independently elected school boards, district attorneys, sherrifs, etc. keep in mind that this diffusion of responsibility is a good way for the egomaniacal to evade
responsibility.


This is actually one of the best arguments against Senate reform. I've never really understood who the Senators would represent. It would complicate Federal-provincial relations. Ultimately I kind of like the idea of undercutting the provinces by having an elected Senate that can represent regional (or provincial) interests in federal legislation. However the possibility of gridlock is there. Also of course on paper is one thing, but in reality I can imagine elected senators trying to expand their power.

One of the reasons the Senate actually works is because of its illegitimacy. It has a high amount of power, but it is checked by the fact that they are not elected.

Generally, I think it works ok, and I think there are a lot of problems with having elected senators.