After several days of silent protest, prayer blockades and arrests, First Nations in New Brunswick are gathering support around the embers of a sacred fire. The fire, set to burn for four days near the junction of highways 126 and 116 west, is meant to symbolize a new boundary for fracking in the area, reports the Halifax Media Co-op.

Organized by the Mi’kmaq people in the New Brunswick community of Elsipogtog, the fire and gathering have impeded seismic trucks or “thumpers” believed to signal the beginning of shale gas fracking in the area. The region is currently under lease to SWN Resources.

Elsipogtog war chief John Levi told Miles Howe of the Halifax Media Co-op, “We’re not going to let them pass. This is the reason why we’ve set up.”

The peaceful gathering was recently broken up by a line of police officers, caputred in this video released today:

Twelve arrests took place early this morning during a sunrise ceremony.

David Alward, Premier of New Brunswick, has repeatedly promised that New Brunswick will have the strictest regulations in North America when it comes to shale gas exploration.

Yet Dr. Eilish Cleary, New Brunswick’s chief medical officer of health, told CBC news that the provincial government will not be implementing her principal recommendations for rules to protect human health.

Last Fall Dr. Cleary presented an 82 page report containing her recommendations for regulations to protect the health of New Brunswick’s citizens to the provincial government. While the provincial government has adopted some recommendations, such as the disclosure of the chemicals used in the fracturing process, the province has ignored a number of other recommendations.

Most strikingly, the province’s regulations exclude Dr. Cleary’s recommendation for project-by-project health-impact assessments as well as her recommendation for ongoing assessments of the adverse effects that the industry may cause. Not only has the province neglected to included these recommendations, it is possible that the public health office may not receive sufficient funding to carry out such research on its own.

Fracking has had a strange courtship with New Brunswick. New Brunswickers have been protesting for more than a year against the controversial method for extracting shale gas by blocking roads, gathering in front of the legislature building, organizing marches, and holding town hall meetings to discuss the dangers of fracking in the province.

Nevertheless, Premier Alward announced his plans to go ahead with fracking in his throne speech last November.

Opposition has not relented however, which may explain why the federal Minister for the Environment, Peter Kent, felt the need to come out in support of developing a shale gas industry in New Brunswick.

The Minister said that the economic benefits to the province would be “significant” even though seeing a “drill rig in one’s backyard is not the most pleasant of visions.” New Brunswickers, however, have been protesting over the threat posed to the health of their communities and environment and not the threat posed to pleasantness.

The province’s Conservative government is already failing to act on expert reports, showing how eager it is to get the industry up and running. The decision to develop shale gas was determined from the start, handed down from on high with federal support.

New Brunswick is a suffering province. After the closure of the Bathurst mine, unemployment in the north of the province has hit 20.2% and the province as a whole is operating with a $411 million deficit. Add to that an aging population and one can hardly blame the provincial government for being eager to find a way to turn things around. This is a province that has watched Newfoundland and Labrador transform itself into a ‘have’ province through its oil and gas industry.

The first draft of the fracking regulations stipulated that the company involved in a suit had the onus of proving that they did not damage private land. This was struck. The province has promised to compensate citizens in the event of an accident and pursue legal action against the company responsible. This was proposed to prevent scenarios where private citizens have to take on multi-million dollar companies.

At first glance it seems beneficial but Stephanie Merrill of the New Brunswick Conservation Council pointed out that this would in fact lead to a conflict of interest. Namely, it pits a provincial government desperate for economic development against the industry it is beholden to; an industry they have committed to develop in spite of opposition from the New Brunswick College of Family Physicians, environmental groups, and first nations leaders.

The new regulation may result in an elaborate pay off system that could allow the province to keep shale gas developers out of the lime light.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, the director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation at the University of Waterloo, criticized the province for making a permanent commitment to such an unpredictable resource. Shale gas may actually become scarce in the next 10-15 years, and the economic benefits would dissipate with it.

The residents of the town of Taymouth, near Fredericton, have organized a series of meetings to consider alternatives to the shale gas industry. Peter DeMarsh, who chairs the Taymouth Community Association, told CBC news: “Grasping at shale gas as the miracle that’s going to save us is beyond belief.”

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The Harper government has recently paid for advertising spots during playoff hockey to promote a new economic action plan project: the Canada Jobs grant. The jobs grant, however, does not in fact exist.

A closer inspection of the commercial (which cost up to $90,000 per 30 second spot) reveals some fine print stating that the Canada Jobs Grant is subject to parliamentary approval. The grant at this stage is nothing more than a “concept of how it would work” that “needs to be fleshed out,” according to Conservative House Leader Peter Van Loan.

The Canada Jobs Grant webpage states that it expects provincial governments and private businesses to contribute $5000 per trainee. Several provincial governments have already expressed hesitations over the program. The premiers of the four Atlantic provinces voiced their concerns in a joint letter, expressing doubts about “the ability of small and medium-sized businesses to participate in the program.”

Human resource officials for the provinces of Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia have criticized the proposed structure of the grant in that it allows the federal government to encroach on provincial jurisdiction. The current proposal involves re-negotiating labour agreements, which would expand the federal government’s ability to dictate job development priorities in the provinces.

The parliamentary secretary for Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, Kellie Leitch, has defended the Harper government’s decision to buy expensive advertising spots for the contested grant program. Leitch has said that the commercials ensure that workers and employers are informed about the grants available for skill development.

The New Democrats have critiqued the ad campaign from an ethical standpoint, stating that it is wrong to spend taxpayer dollars to promote a program that has not been brought before the House of Commons yet.

In response Leitch has called the opposition to “get on board” with this program. It is not clear what secretary Leitch means, however, given that there is no program to support yet. Nothing will be tabled until Fall at the earliest.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has also defended the decision, calling the Conservative government’s advertising strategy “reasonable.”

Liberals have attacked the Conservative’s ad spending, saying that it is money that could be used to fund summer employment for students, which is sorely needed as youth unemployment is double the national rate.

Jim Flaherty responded by saying that the economic action plan advertisements are worth it and that the ads are being run because “Canadians are entitled to know what their government is up to.” The excuse that the Harper government is running the ad campaign for the sake of transparency doesn't quite hold water if one considers that it is announcing dollar and employment projections for a program that still needs to be tabled and negotiated.

The Conservative government has already spent over $113 million on economic action plan advertisements since 2009.

Many of the economic action plan ads promote programs that are defunct as of the latest budget.

No numbers have been released concerning the recent Jobs Grant ads but with each spot costing $90,000 that number is climbing quickly with each passing playoff game.

Image Credit: Wiki Commons, World Economic Forum

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This is the fourth and final instalment of the Canada Closed for Debate series on bad arguments in the Canadian public sphere. Read the first part on topic laundering, the second part on reductio-ad-villainum, and the third part on carrying a concealed motive to get caught up.   

Identifying and listing bad arguments has its uses but how does one dispel them? How does one create a political culture that is hostile to dishonest, manipulative arguments? I doubt that an appeal to reason will produce much effect. I have no easy answers but one thing is clear: bitter herbs are needed. 

The classicist E.R. Dodds made a distinction between Guilt societies and Shame societies in his work The Greeks and The Irrational (1951). In a guilt-based society we feel bad (guilty) when we have done wrong. In a shame-based society we feel bad (ashamed) when we appear inadequate.

 This distinction goes some way in explaining the difference between the behaviour of private citizens and our political and commercial leaders. I believe that most Canadians outside the public eye live with a guilt-based ethics, whereas those who are in the political limelight seem to have a shame-based ethics.

Feeling guilty depends upon one’s conscience. Feeling ashamed depends upon getting caught.

[view:in_this_series=block_1] So long as a political player does not appear foolish in the public eye, they will not feel ashamed. It is even doubtful they would feel guilty about making bad arguments given it's 'all part of the job.’

In this void of conscience perhaps one must harness shame towards good ends.

A political career lives and dies in appearances. It seems to be an everlasting truth that political success depends more on appearance than on reality. But what exactly makes for good appearances is not very stable. It can change.

What if we found some way to make bad arguments look bad? What if our public leaders felt ashamed when they are caught making a bad argument? We Canadians get upset if we find out an MP has been abusing the old expense account – how much more upset should we be when they abuse our trust?

Political leaders and captains of industry fear appearing foolish more than they fear being deceptive. For that reason it may take little more than ridiculing bad arguments to change the political climate. Satire has long been a friend to reasonableness.

I encourage Canadians to discuss arguments made by our leaders to see if they are ignoring critiques, switching topics, vilifying opposing arguments, or hiding their real intentions. I encourage Canadians to write more letters and e-mails to their leaders that begin with “You ought to feel ashamed.” I encourage Canadians to find the humour in sophistry – there is great pleasure in making fun of a political animal who speaks in sound-bites and argues poorly.

A bad argument is like diner coffee: it is watery, opaque, acrid, and we all drink from the same carafe.

Although I have drawn my examples in the previous posts from Conservative politicians and the Ethical Oil campaign, bad arguments do not recognize political allegiances.

The best way to protect an open discourse is to value well-founded, honest arguments above ones that agree with our tastes. Ultimately that is how bad arguments have been allowed to thrive in our political climate: they are constructed to appeal to our taste and not our reason. It is now time for some accountability to enter the game.

Image Credit: The Greeks and The Irrational, 1951 book cover.

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This is part three in a series on bad arguments in the Canadian public sphere. The aim of this series is to take a closer look at the soft-serve reasoning employed by public leaders in order to see how they are unconvincing and even harmful to open discourse. Get caught up with part one concerning topic laundering and part two on reductio-ad-villainum. 

The present piece is about ‘carrying a concealed motive.’

Carrying a concealed motive: this species of bad argument hides the goals it wishes to achieve and presents other insincere objectives that are more palatable to the public. It consists of the refusal to be forthcoming about the intentions behind an argument, as though that were immaterial to the debate.

Canadians as a whole frequently have difficulty admitting that they want something – we keep our eyes on the last honey-cruller at the office party and when it’s offered to us we say ‘Oh no, you go ahead and have it’ and a little bit of us dies as the last glazed morsel irrevocably vanishes. In political debate, however, it’s necessary to be clear about what we want in a piece of legislation and how we stand to gain by its passage. 

In politics every decision has some motivation behind it – seeking some benefit or avoiding some detriment. The intention behind a proposal is a genuine and important ground on which to evaluate it. A politician might put forward a well thought out piece of legislation but if it involves a conflict of interest it can and should be struck down. Indeed the ‘conflict of interest’ is one of the most heinous forms of scandal because it involves a betrayal of the public trust. It is crucial to an open and democratic society that the public is aware to what ends its leaders are arguing. 

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Consider the Ethical Oil Institute, a not-for-profit registered by Ezra Levant with Calgary lawyer Thomas Ross. The Ethical Oil Institute runs advertisements about Iran’s human rights record in the hopes of gaining political support for tar sands projects in Alberta where human rights are supposedly respected.

Ezra Levant is a private citizen, free (within reason) to pursue his own chosen ends and to express himself.

He is also someone who has been successfully sued for libel several times and is currently under investigation for hate crimes after his racist comments concerning Romani immigrants to Canada. Whatever Ezra Levant’s and the Ethical Oil Institute's reasons are for promoting tar sands ventures (I assume financial gain and political influence), we can be quite certain that they have little to do with championing human rights. 

Carrying a concealed motive ultimately consists of just saying something in order to get what you want. The motive-concealer has already decided on the end result, they just have to pick the most sympathetic reason to get people go along with it.

Carrying a concealed motive invariably involves a form of hypocrisy. It is not a crime to be a hypocrite but we would do well to not take what hypocrites say very seriously, not without first investigating what they get out of arguing a certain point and what they stand to gain if they get their way. 

Hiding one’s motivations is a form of dishonesty that is inimical to open debate. What holds an open discourse together, what makes it productive, is the sincerity of its participants.

When private citizens try to influence us and our leaders while concealing their motives, we cannot fire them from their lobbying jobs or bring them before a tribunal. But we do not have to be convinced by them – we can make their advertisement spending and their rhetoric pointless by seeing through them.

We need only ask: what do you stand to gain? Establishing a motive is a crucial step in any investigation.

In the face of political insincerity I advocate for scepticism above cynicism. A little scepticism goes a long way in promoting rationality and honesty in the public discourse.

Image Credit: Screen Shot from Ethical Oil Ad.

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This post is Part 2 of the Canada Closed for Debate Series, a four-part exploration of argumentation in Canadian political discourse. For Part 1, click here. Read Part 3, Carrying a Concealed Motive or Part 4, What to do about Bad Arguments?

This is part two of a series on the types of bad arguments frequently found in the Canadian public sphere. The purpose of this series is to provide a taxonomy of demagoguery and to see how these arguments (as put forward by such polarizing campaigns as ‘Ethical Oil’) are harmful to our democracy. The first part concerned topic laundering.

The topic launderer puts a stop to open debate by refusing to answer questions and then changing topic to confuse everyone as to what the debate is really about. This part is about reductio-ad-villainum (reducing your opponent to a villain) in which a peculiar form of libel puts on the cloak of rational argument.

Reductio-ad-Villainum: This style of arguing consists in recasting an opponent’s position to make it look morally bankrupt. It is a curious species of character assassination. You do not have to dig up any dirt on your opponent (that after all requires some research). All you have to do is reframe their position to make the argument itself look dishonourable.

Take the reaction surrounding Thomas Mulcair’s ‘Dutch disease’ argument last May. The leader of the NDP claimed that the Federal government was not enforcing environmental legislation when it came to the Alberta tar sands so that the oil sells cheaper. This over-inflates the worth of the Canadian dollar, which then harms manufacturing exports in other parts of the country (as economists observed in the Netherlands after it found natural gas in the 1960’s). 

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It is a controversial argument that has economists divided, which is all the more reason that it should be debated in parliament, especially after the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) released a report finding that the Harper government’s policies are creating an uneven economy across the provinces.

What response did Mulcair receive?

A chorus of conservative MPs claiming that he was trying to pit the West and the rest of the country against each other. What this response boils down to is that the ‘Dutch disease’ argument is not good because it makes Canadians dislike each other. This isn’t very likely to convince anyone once the veil is pierced.

The MPs no doubt wished to vilify Mulcair but what is especially sinister is that they vilified the argument itself. This fine specimen of the reductio-ad-villainum creates an easy talking point so that anyone who subscribes to the Dutch Disease hypothesis can be accused of hating Albertans. Anyone who rejects the hypothesis is a defender of the prairies.

We go from having a situation where we can debate the causes of manufacturing decline and natural resource development to a situation where anyone who makes the villainous claim is trying to divide the country against itself. Although, it's not likely that advocating strict enforcement of environmental regulations on tar sands development will lead to our nation's first civil war.

The reductio-ad-villainum consists in making an opponent’s argument sound as though it were mean-spirited and then rejecting it on moral grounds. By parodying a rational argument and providing a sound bite, this style of argument appeals to what is worst in us: we get to ignore an opposing argument while feeling a sense of moral superiority.

This bad argument does not foster debate; it shuts debate down.

It is bad for our democracy – it drags down the level of discourse and makes people afraid of holding an opinion after it has been slandered.  The reductio-ad-villainum is a way of silencing an argument rather than a person. It has been used time and again concerning the tar sands by the Conservative government and the Ethical Oil campaign so that, instead of discussing the environmental and economic impact of the oil industry openly and honestly in parliament, most MPs hold their tongues for fear of alienating voters in resource rich provinces.

We have lost sight of the goal of open debate: to get at the truth, not to win at all costs.

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This post is Part 1 of the Canada Closed for Debate Series, a four-part exploration of argumentation in Canadian political discourse. Read the second part on villifying your opponent, the second part on reductio-ad-villainum, and the third part on carrying a concealed motive to get caught up.   

There are certain things that tolerant people should not tolerate.

There is a very peculiar kind of dishonesty in the Canadian political sphere that we see through but seem to tolerate all the same. These are bad arguments made by our public leaders. 

There is a difference between a bad argument and an invalid argument. An invalid argument is one where the speaker has made a mistake in drawing a conclusion from the premises – a sort of logical gaffe. We can argue in good faith but still get it wrong. A bad argument is one where the speaker conceals his aims, misconstrues opposing opinions, and relies on rhetoric to convince the audience. 

Bad arguments are easy to spot and I consider myself something of a zoologist of bad arguments in the ecosystem of Canadian politics. Here is a brief taxonomy I have compiled: a) topic laundering; b) reductio-ad-villainum; c) carrying a concealed motive. In this instalment we take a closer look at the topic launderer in its natural habitat.

Topic Laundering: A topic launderer changes themes and topics of discussion in a debate to hide what the argument is really about.

Consider the case of the Ethical Oil campaign. [view:in_this_series=block_1] Someone concerned with environmental ethics might ask if it is right to rapidly expand drilling operations, if it is right to permanently alter the landscape in the name of private interests, or if it is right to allow business interests in the tar sands to dictate the nation's environmental policy. In response, Ethical Oil spokespeople would launder the topic and change the theme of debate to the human rights record and environmental practices (or lack thereof) in OPEC countries.

This amounts to not taking the initial questions seriously.

If I am interested in the environmental impact of tar sands-related projects to Canadian and American wildlife, a spokesperson could not answer my questions by telling me about women’s rights in Iran.

Further, if Ethical Oil really wanted to diminish OPEC’s market share because of its lack of environmental regulation, why not do that by investing in technologies that would free us from our dependence on oil altogether, regardless of its provenance? Even dressed up as 'ethical,' oil is still oil.

In changing the theme but keeping the title of the debate (e.g., the tar sands), topic laundering not only ignores the critic’s questions and arguments, it also erodes the very condition in which a sensible political debate can take place in a democracy, i.e., that we are weighing arguments and counterarguments about the same thing.

For that reason, topic laundering is not just a form of spin, it is a form of treachery.

The topic launderer betrays Canadian democracy to which s/he belongs by gnawing away at open debate. Open debate is not just an expression of freedom. As John Stuart Mill tells us: “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action.”

In other words, if the Ethical Oil crowd will not give us the freedom to contradict or disprove their arguments, they are not justified in maintaining them, or building public policy upon them.

To the topic launderer I pose two questions: what does ethical oil have to do with the price of eggs? And did you know that Dante placed the fraudulent and treacherous in the lowest circles of the Inferno?

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Sunday marked the beginning of Freedom to Read week, an annual event reminding Canadian citizens of the intellectual freedom they are constitutionally guaranteed. It also reminds us we are governed by other citizens with the capacity to permit or limit that freedom. These are citizens that we can hold accountable only to the extent that we know how they make their decisions and what consequences those decisions have.

The event this year stands out on the Canadian political landscape, an uncomfortable reminder of just how frustrated the free flow of information has become in this country.

The timing is significant, as the event arrives on the heels of a University of Victoria study that highlights the Harper government’s efforts to restrict media access to federal scientists.

The study, called Muzzling Civil Servants: a Threat to Democracy and conducted by the university’s Environmental Law Clinic, found that new federal communications policies require government scientists to receive consent and coaching from media relations officers before speaking with reporters. The report also found that Environment Canada scientists are prevented from publicly commenting on such matters as “climate change or the protection of polar bear and caribou until the Privy Council gives approval.”

Such restrictive policies mean federal scientists are unable to respond to media requests within a short timeframe. With increasing regularity, interviews with scientists are grossly delayed or simply denied.

The government’s role in severing the ties between scientists and the media has been seen as integrally tied to the government’s role in streamlining industrial development in Canada, a plan in which tar sands expansion, increased levels of fracking, pipelines and supertankers are all implicated.

Now, more than ever, is not the time to scale back on or suppress the communication of the one thing that – in the world of heavy industry – stands between responsibility and recklessness: science.

Environment Minister Peter Kent recently praised Canada for the nation’s increased transparency and accountability in environmental decision-making, while outside the bureaucratic chambers journalists, academics and environmental organizations decried the government’s role in obscuring or misrepresenting inconvenient facts about Canada’s flagging environmental stewardship.

The one thing these recent events have made clear is the federal government’s willingness to prioritize public relations over public access to information.

Last week’s Muzzling report was addressed to Canada’s embattled Information Commissioner, Suzanne Legault.

Legault, referring to immense delays in access to information processing and dwindling percentage of disclosed information, told the CBC the Harper government is “not the most transparent.”

Unlike other Commonwealth countries, such as Great Britain and Australia, our Information Commissioner only has the power to suggest how requests should be handled, and cannot order departments to expedite responses or the release of information.

As Elizabeth Renzetti recently reminded us, this government’s transparency problem is not going away. Scientists will become more aggravated, like the hundreds who gathered on Parliament hill last July to make their frustration known. And they will likely become more empowered, with respected voices rallying them to fight back.

Canada has dropped ten places in the World Press Freedom Index since last year. We now sit at number twenty out of ninety – not even first in the Americas.

A sorry state of affairs when one must ‘celebrate’ the Freedom to Read in a country with no Freedom of the Press.

But we can also look upon this as good news. Because the only truly bad news is the kind that is withheld.

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