From Fall 2014 until 2018 I audited Political Science classes at the University of Guelph.
The following was published The Ontarian (the student newspaper).
From university my second time around to the first timers
I’m an old sixties battlehippie taking political science courses because I like talking politics more than most sane people. Students today are smarter and more hard working than I ever was but show a remarkable lack of interest in public affairs. Good marks to get a job is the total focus. Student activism and protest, the hallmark of my first trip through university, are unheard of.
The Canadian military has been killing people who have done us no harm for reasons of domestic politics since current students were in kindergarten but there is not a peace group on this campus. Canadian and American elections pass without notice. Poster Day is content free – no issues, no political leaders of any party, of any country. Club Day featured one political group – the Young Communists. Federal legislation on marijuana proceeds without student comment despite Canadian students being among the world’s heaviest pot smokers. Most of my classmates in third year political science barely know there was a war in Vietnam. A substantial majority don’t recognize the name Tommy Douglas.
Nobody asks questions
Is the government doing well? How can I help to change things I think are important? Should CSIS be allowed to collect everybody’s phone data. Should Canada buy the F35? Once a dynamic caldron of intellectual curiosity, passion, debate, challenge, disruption and growth, university today is a place of eerie silence cowering in fear that an idea might offend someone.
This lack of interest in real life politics extends to the Political Science faculty. I found it bizarre to take a course in American politics from a Prof. who didn’t know that the Republicans had taken control of the Senate the previous year. When I took a course in public policy development that bore no similarity whatever to the process that has been the centre of my entire professional and political life, silence was no longer an option.
Beyond Policy Analysis (text)
The text is a jaw-dropping cornucopia of Orwellian alternative facts so utterly unrelated to the actual process of policy formation that a conspiracy theorist would see it as a deliberate effort to produce docile employees by supressing in students any notion that they have any role in political power or that their views were important. It is beyond parody.
“...the origins of policy analysis in the “policy sciences” were steeped in a sense that policy and politics would be immeasurably improved if the messy interplay of political interests could be tamed (if not completely supplanted) by the rational application of technical and expert knowledge. “Insofar as possible, science and factual information should replace the politics of bargaining and negotiation that characterize pluralist democracy.” ” p 228
If this was how it actually worked in real life, SUVs would be illegal and marijuana would not. Despite such worthy outcomes, this statement is a complete repudiation of democracy and an endorsement of the policy formation process in Communist China (which, despite its considerable successes, is not a model I wish to emulate). The problem with a reliance on experts to determine policy is Newton’s Third Law of Politics, which states, “For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.”
People have different priorities, strengths, needs, and ideas. There are no objectively correct answers. We live in a culture with people who are urban/rural, with/without family, hard working/lazy… The list, and the resulting complications, gets longer fast without even considering ideology, fraud, religion, race, or incompetence. Democracy is indeed messy. Politics is how we sort it out. “Politics, at its best, is nothing more, and nothing less, than the peaceable resolution of conflict among legitimate competing interests” - Mark Shields
Forty years involvement with public policy in the Ontario electricity sector taught me that we live in an effective, functioning democracy and we get the government we deserve. One person working hard through the system for a long time can have an important impact. I know this is a fact, not a theory, because I’ve done it myself three times and I’m not done yet.
Issue management in turbulent times (text subtitle)
During my first journey through higher education (1967 – 75) Brezhnev sent tanks into Prague. LBJ sent tanks into Detroit (before Black Lives Matter, there was Burn Baby Burn – check out “Black Day in July” on YouTube). Trudeau the Elder sent tanks into Montreal. Troops murdered four students at Kent State. Birth control and homosexuality were made legal. Political demonstrations were surrounded with first-aid tents for the wounded. There was a police riot at the Democratic convention. Israel had two shooting wars with its neighbours. The second led to an overnight quadrupling of the international price of oil. Pure evil stalked the earth in human form as Milhous, spreading carnage and death until public pressure led to his impeachment.
We live in comparatively peaceful times. Suggesting otherwise is marketing for those who want to increase security budgets and compromise privacy and civil liberties. Canada can best protect its citizens from terror by simply not going to other peoples’ countries and killing them. The Third Law of Belligerence states, “If you shoot at people, sometimes they shoot back”.
Rational v the competitive and political nature of policy development
The text describes policy formation as an antiseptic, top down, technical process of thoughtful consideration of the public interest. In real life policy formation is a combat sport. Think mixed martial arts with less blood, more tears, and much higher stakes. Inside government, especially in cabinet, policy positions are driven by the interests of the donors to the political parties. Claims about serving the public interest are nothing more than a marketing tool.
In a democracy government responds to people. The text suggests dealing with government through earnest presentations about the public interest in an orderly process along a flow chart. This is indeed the approach used by the lobbyists for wealth to argue that tax cuts for the rich and fewer environmental regulations are in the public interest.
The rest of us, having less money with which to bribe parties, traditionally have had the most success using the grab-them-by-the-throat-and-squeeze-until-their-eyes-bug-out approach to government relations. When you can organize well enough to make them fear electoral impact they will pay attention. Government does not respond to politeness, they respond to fear (Kathleen Wynne and electricity rates). Make government fear your numbers otherwise the priorities of donors dominate based on “The Golden Rule” – who has the gold makes the rules.
Impact of activism
Most disturbing is the suggestion in this, and other Political Science classes, that effective, large scale social activism is relatively recent phenomena dating from the nineties or perhaps as far back as the seventies (and seen by some theorists as a distracting nuisance). Really? Pray tell, what then were the Suffragette, Temperance, CCF, Wobbly (union) movements or the Mac Paps that challenged governments in the decades before I was born? Were the anti-war, civil rights, women’s liberation, and environment movements I grew up with just hallucinations?
The 1974 Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry introduced intervener funding which professionalized movement political activism. The Aboriginal community is working on their third generation of lawyers. They’re getting really good. They win a lot. Governments have learned to fear messing with them. Women’s groups and environmental advocates have followed their lead. Computers and the internet have made politics a much more level playing field. Business still has more lawyers but ours are better. They are true believers.
What is the point of a university education?
Is the objective of training students for the job market in conflict with teaching the critical thought necessary to encourage innovation, entrepreneurs or participate in democracy? That depends on your goals and sense of the future. If one’s life aspiration is limited to a cubicle with a dental plan and a modest condo, and you imagine this is sustainable, the best education is; work hard, do as you’re told, keep your mouth shut, and never, ever, imagine that your opinion is important to those who actually matter. Public policy is not the concern of the public except on voting day. The relentless message of “policy science” (sic) is that power is with business and government not individuals or interest groups.
Bullshit! Interest groups going to court, environmental assessment boards, regulatory tribunals, and hounding politicians, are not subverting the authority of elected members of parliament. It’s how we have an impact in a rules based democracy. Aboriginals, women, environmentalists, unions, LGBTQ, or pot smokers, we carry the fight to as many fronts as possible. Sometimes we win. Sometimes we lose. We will not kneel. This is where all positive change comes from.
Join us.
You are the future
To be smart, healthy, and educated at a Canadian university makes students here among the most privileged people on the face of this earth. You are the future. Not only does your opinion matter, it’s all that matters. If you hope to live as well as me when you hit my age, you have to aim much higher than a cubicle. You have to save the world. You will have to make sacrifices for your kids that my generation and the generation that runs the university didn’t make for you.
None of this is fair. It wasn’t your selfish, short-sighted mismanagement of the environment and economy that created the degradation and debt you’re going to raise a family in. To live and prosper you have to clean up the mess we left you. Business as usual is not a survivable option.
Peace, the environment, the economy. Be inclusive. Intolerant political correctness, identity politics, and pronoun wars will narrow your organizational base and encumber the alliance building necessary to make a serious difference. Make yourself difficult to annoy. A thick skin is an absolutely essential political resource. There are no “safe spaces” in real life, especially if you compete for the high stakes that are always part of changing government policy. Potential losers in a policy discussion will exploit your every weakness and crush you if they can. Do not allow the pursuit of perfection to encumber the achievement of the useful.
People that don’t ask questions and check the answers elected Donald Tweet. The Women’s March on Washington and the American Civil Liberties Union flooding the airports with lawyers in response to the Muslim ban are the meme of the new revolution. Make it grow or your kids are screwed.
Question Authority
Raise questions and demand answers. Authority is a necessary part of society but, get into the habit of keeping it on a short, accountable leash with a choke chain. If not on the great issues of the day, start with local questions that effect student life. Why is there no seating for the buses while the university is piling boulders in front of the UC? Why do we have to walk through mud – crossing for the bus at the South Loop, in front of Massey, across Johnson Green? Would you hire an engineer trained at a university that showcases north facing solar panels (Raithby House)? Given the grotesque overuse of materials, what makes the Gryphon Bike shelter “green”? Can we have a mileage standard to get a permit for the university parking lot?
Many of these questions have perfectly reasonable answers that are available on request – but nobody ever asks. That’s OK for fitting into a cubicle - not so good for participating in democracy, starting a business, or being an innovator.
Battlehippie values
Community and co-operation work better than selfishness and competition.
Make love not war
The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment
Women should be paid a dollars wage for a dollars work
Racism is evil
