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  • Congratulations on the new government, Canada. I give it 6 months.

    written by

    james

    It should be said right up front that if someone had told me a couple years ago I’d be referring to a Prime Minister Trudeau in the present tense I’d be questioning their sanity. But, here he is and here we are. So sure, that plus the fact the liberals went from third to first in the span of an election is impressive. Sadly for Canada, though, the Trudeau fandom won’t last longer than about 6 months–and for many of the reasons, I suspect, that it was apparently extremely necessary to give Harper the boot in equally impressive fashion. Politics just doesn’t know how to do anything else, and neither do most politicians–including, as we’re about to find out, Trudeau.

    Let’s start with the most obvious, because why not. Bill C-51 is, if you ask some people, the culmination of everything that was wrong with the conservative government. Shoved through with little debate, probably unconstitutional, treats dual-citizens as second class, yada yada we’ve heard it all a million times now. The vote for Trudeau–or, to put it in rather more appropriate context, the vote against Harper–was supposed to be a rejection of C-51. And it probably would be, if Trudeau hadn’t already decided he supported it. So, awesome. We ditch the bill’s authors, but we’re keeping the bill–at least until the eventual supreme court challenge, at which point we’ll see. Majority rules, and all that.

    Slightly less obvious, unless you’ve had your ear to the political ground for a while, was another something Trudeau–and Mulcair, for what that was worth–used to beat Harper over the head with. Openness/accountability in government. To contrast himself with how Harper ran things, Trudeau flat out said he’d let each riding handle their own nomination process and his people would stay out of it. And then, his people got involved and there went the open nomination promise. He could have explained himself. He should have explained himself. He blamed the other guy. And there just went accountability.

    Less into the politically obscure and more into the mainstream conversation, ask anyone who voted against the conservatives why they voted against the conservatives. I’d put money on one of the reasons for it being the conservatives are in bed with big oil–if I had money, anyway. Whatever the expansion, it was always assumed the conservatives would shove through any legislation that was required to approve the thing and damn the consequences. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if folks in some corners accused the conservatives of taking their legislation straight from the mouthes of the oil execs. They might even be right for all I know–I’ve never had the influence or a reason to know one way or the other. But one thing I can about guarantee is if one of Harper’s advisors had been found giving advice to the oil companies, there’d be screaming from all corners demanding to know what Harper knew, when he knew it, and why the advisor wasn’t outright fired on the spot. And somebody would probably be calling up the RCMP this morning. Not so much for Trudeau.

    I’m no fan of Stephen Harper, by any means. Well, if I’m being completely honest I’m no fan of the whole damn mess, but let’s put that out there up front. But I’ve been around long enough to know how this usually ends up going. The liberals held office for 13 years, until people got tired of them and then they didn’t. Harper got himself elected on a platform of openness, accountability, transparency, and generally not sucking–and then proceeded to forget about 90% of that platform. He’s just an MP from Alberta, now. Trudeau promised to be, escentially, not Harper–and then proceeded to borrow some of Harper’s tactics before he even won the election. Aside from that, this election in particular, the platforms weren’t entirely all that radically different from each other. They both treat the supposed middle class as something delicate and special without actually defining what the middle class actually is–I still don’t know, for instance, if I’d fall into that category (though probably not, for myriad reasons). both are all about tax breaks for the middle class. Both are all about fiddling with tax rates for other people–the conservatives, supposedly, lowering corporate tax rates and the liberals increasing taxes on people who make enough money to actually get ahead in a crap economy. Neither is willing to go into a whole lot of detail on what they plan to do with that extra money, beyond vague sort of halfway nods towards helping out the middle class. In other words, there’s no real reason to vote for one party platform over the other–and with the liberals having borrowed ideas from NDP platforms past, there’s no real reason to vote for the NDP over the liberals or vise versa either. All that leaves us is reasons to vote against the other guy–and in this case, that means Harper. So out come all the things $voter hates about Harper, the current government, its current policies etc, and they latch on to the most likely party to replace them not paying much mind to the similarities. So the less than open, unaccountable conservative authors of bill C-51 are handed the boot in favour of the slightly less than open, unaccountable supporters of bill C-51 and not much ends up actually changing. And once the anti-harper feelings go away and people actually look up to see what they’ve done, I get the sneaking suspicion they’ll latch on to that fact in fairly short order–the average voter isn’t stupid, though they tend to be easily seduced by the mob mentality. And when that happens, I don’t think I’ll be the only one drawing similarities between this government and the one it replaced. I figure that should take about 6 months–or, failing that, the minute Trudeau doesn’t bring parliament back in session right when someone thinks he should. And in a term or two, provided the conservatives get their feet under them in time, we’ll be right back where we are now–only voting against the liberals instead. And then, just like Trudeau won by virtue of not being Harper, the next one will win by virtue of not being Trudeau. Unless, of course, someone surprises me and actually gives us something to vote for rather than against, but let’s not hold our breath. We might hurt ourselves.

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  • On putting the dis in ability.

    written by

    james

    The fairly new thing now is what folks are calling transabalism–the act of a perfectly (or, at least, mostly perfectly) able-bodied someone explicitly wanting to make themselves in some way disabled. The most noteable of these, of course, is Jewel Shuping, who very recently blinded herself with the help of a psychologist using drain cleaner. I won’t go through that entire affair again, mostly because I wouldn’t be saying anything that hasn’t been said already and better. But I’ll ask the question in more general terms, because I honest to god cannot wrap my head around where that comes from.

    What would make a perfectly able, some would say functional, person decide to damage perfectly working eyes, or cut off a perfectly functional limb? It’s a way different beast from, say, deciding you should have been born the opposite gender–if only because you can still, I’d argue relatively easily, live a perfectly normal (*) life while your body learns to function as, and you adapt to being, that opposite gender. But with very few exceptions, so few in fact that I’d be hard pressed to think of any right off the top though I’m sure they’re out there, the same can’t be said for learning to live with a disability–even if, as Jewel has apparently done, you do things that would ordinarily be associated with that disability. The way of life in general changes–sometimes pretty freaking dramaticly, and you can’t really compensate for that by closing your eyes or sliding on a blindfold, or making a conscious effort not to use the problem limb you’re hoping to some day do without.

    I’m completely open to the possibility that my perception is based on my own thoughts about a chance to gain at least part of the sight I never had. I’d have as much an idea what to do with sight as I would what to do without an arm or leg. By that, of course, I mean absolutely none. Which is why, to an extent, I can understand some able-bodied people’s reaction to the movement as a whole. If you have yourself convinced it would absolutely be hell on earth if you were confined to a wheelchair, then you’d be more likely to assume anyone who is, whether they’re there by choice or not, must be going through the same–and you’d therefore be more likely to wonder why anyone would willingly want to be put there. I’ve certainly wondered that a time or two, and I know people who’ve functioned perfectly well in that position–though again, that’s largely on account of they didn’t have the option. Now, let me slip into my disabled person roll for a minute.

    I’m 32 years old. I’ve had that long to learn how to be a disabled person in a largely able-bodied world. I’ve had that much time to adapt parts of that world to what I need, and to adapt myself–with varying degrees of success–to the parts of that world I can’t. I like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at it. One would after doing it for 30 years, after all. And a lot of that comes from not knowing or really caring that things could–or, in some people’s estimation, should–be any different. My blindness is as normal, as natural, for me as the exact opposite is for most other people. Would it still be that way if I lost my site in my teens? My twenties, maybe? Probably not–for exactly the reasons I wouldn’t imagine anyone would want that to happen by choice. In short, I’d have to relearn how to do escentially everything. Reading and writing. Travelling. Interacting with people. Basicly, living. I rely on things, be they environmental queues or things I pick up on from other people, that someone with a perfectly working pair of eyes wouldn’t need to. And they, in turn, rely on things I don’t necessarily care about on the not entirely unreasonable grounds that they’d just go right over my head anyway. Even if you’ve decided one of these things just doesn’t belong, your brain’s gotten used to the idea of it being there. You close your eyes, you’re still open to receiving and processing the information they’re sending–you’ve just told them not to send any. You make a conscious effort, say, not to use one arm, and that might actually work to an extent–but again, it’s still there, and it’s going to be a near constant effort to actually restrain yourself from using it.

    By willingly cutting off that arm, or damaging your eyes, you’re escentially short-circuiting that connection. I’d imagine, on that level at least, it would be equally as traumatic as if you’d become disabled in the same or similar ways through no fault of your own (the onset of something like MS, for instance). You’d still, in ways you very likely hadn’t thought of previously, need to pretty much reteach yourself how to do things. At the very least, it’s now become a full-time job reteaching your brain how to process everything around you in entirely new and hopefully interesting ways–much like, were I to wake up with sight tomorrow, I’d almost immediately be putting my life on hold for the sole purpose of figuring out how to filter out, then process, an entirely new stream of information I haven’t had the means to get hold of or a reason to use for 30 years.

    Add all of these complications on top of the usual routines the disabled go through on a regular basis (discrimination, both intentional and not, or the magnification of even the smallest every-day task into an act of inspiration, or being the latest political victim of choice just to name a few), and I don’t think it’s too far reaching to ask why someone would willingly want to put themselves through that if they had a choice not to. Does that make what people like Jewel are doing wrong? I haven’t got the faintest idea. But it does make it, at the very least, curious–and maybe, just a little bit, concerning. Being the way I am now, I wouldn’t want anything to do with a surgery, or treatment, that could give me my sight. I’m equally sure if I had it already I wouldn’t want to lose it. I can only guess at why someone else would–and I, very likely, wouldn’t even be close.

    (*) In as much as anything these days can be considered normal, the definition of which if you asked three people you’d hear three different versions–just about none of them remotely the same.

  • On October 19th, vote Bluejays for American League champion.

    written by

    james

    If you live in Canada and haven’t been living under a rock, you know there’s an election on. You could be forgiven for thinking that election has anything remotely to do with picking the faces who will cover over what’s left of your federal government. But you have a much more important decision to make tomorrow evening. On Monday night, you will be left with the decision of whether or not to cancel your evening plans, crank up the TV, and settle in for a couple hours of postseason baseball. For the first time in 22 years, the Sky Dome (*) will play host to an American League Championship game–and a chance to turn that, and the next two that follow, into a possible setup for World Series entry. You could decide you have way more important things to do. Like, I don’t know, watch a Senators game (**) for example. I hope you don’t. Because we may not see something like this for a good long while afterwards–and you’re not going to want to be wondering what the hell everyone else in the office is talking about Tuesday morning. So on October 19th, cut out of your evening shift early. Stick a set of headphones in your phone and pull up the game while you’re studying. Follow all the things on Twitter while you’re at evening classes. Vote Bluejays. Because no matter which way your political leanings go, nothing will make you happier. And no one who’s anyone can say no to a moment like this.

    (*): I have never, will never, call it the Rogers center. Rogers couldn’t pay me enough–unless they threw in Bluejays tickets, and even then I’d probably want a discount at the consession stands.

    (**): I dunno. Some people have wickedly messed up priorities. I don’t judge. I’m a Leafs fan when the Jays aren’t playing, after all.

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  • And now, the obligatory “where the hell did these come from” link dump.

    written by

    james

    One disadvantage of forgetting you put this thing up here so you can write and/or be snarky in your own space on your own time is running out of that second one and forgetting you still have that first one. The end result, besides the fact that I almost always end up neglecting to post just about everything, is I have a fairly large stockpile of things I keep meaning to throw down over here and my list of things to do (TM) never gets that far. And this is how we discover the art of the link dump.

    When not even a doctor’s note is enough. A Michigan catholic school dismissed a 12-year-old girl for not meeting their attendance/academic requirements–in spite of the fact she was in line to pass anyway. Her excuse for not attending classes? recovery from cancer. clearly that doesn’t fly in Michigan. do better next time, or else.

    When academia goes snap. Teachers put up with a lot of BS. My networking professor, finally, got fed up and warned a section of our class yesterday that if they didn’t kindly shut the hell up while she was talking they’d be removed–she used nicer phrasing, naturally, but they got the point. That doesn’t work so well in Texas, apparently. To the tune of one university prof failing the class on principle. How bad do you have to screw up to get an F for participation at the university level?

    Some people’s parents. a Columbus mother decided now would be a fine time to teach her son a little respect. So she had him arrested. Now she’s a pushover and he’s either afraid of or distrusting of the cops. Good call, mother of the year.

    They don’t make them very bright in Montana. Police in that state post a mugshot on Facebook. Owner of said mug clicks the like button. Owner of said mug gets arrested. And that’s what we call a routine day at the office.

    Rental ramsacking. I’ve said it before, though probably not here. I don’t mind renting. I like it more than I’d like owning my own house, if I’m being entirely honest. But if I can get away with it, I will never rent a basement apartment–or, for that matter, any apartment–attached to someone’s house. The reasoning for it is simple. They decide to move out and sell the place, you’re screwed. And if they decide you’re not moving out fast enough, they’ll help you in the most expedient way possible–and you’re screwed times two. Stick with a rental company instead if you value what remains of your sanity–though maybe not this one.

    And finally: What happens when the jailer takes a nap? Anyone who’s anyone’s probably heard of Megaupload. They’re in, let’s say, a wee bit of legal trouble at the moment. So much so, in fact, that the US government took control of their various domain names. Which you’d think should be game over. Except somebody fell asleep at the switch. The Megaupload domain names are now, shall we say, slightly suspect–and not because of any proven or otherwise piracy. Hey, DoJ guys? I’m available and my rates are reasonable. Call me. The NSA has my number.

  • In which life happens and leaves me behind. again.

    written by

    james

    Not for the first time and not for the last time I’ve gone a small age without actually touching this site. Fortunately this time I’m not coming back to the thing in time to deal with a potential malware infection–I don’t think. Long story short: everything is happening. And because not everything requires a full paragraph’s explanation, coupled with the fact I’m still as lazy as ever, have a thing in list format. Because sure.

    • College: Holy hell on toast the busy. I started my second semester in September. It’s now mid-October. And I just now think I might have a sort of handle on how my schedule looks. In short, I expect to have no social life to speak of between now and approximately 2017 barring complications of the unforseen variety. Love the courses, though. I even love the courseload. Could do without the schedule. In particular, doing the lab work for stuff we haven’t yet spent any theory time on is all manner of fun–particularly when the courses, rather, don’t necessarily come with textbooks.
    • Personal: What hit me? It’s been a very interesting/eventful summer/early fall. Without getting into details that aren’t fit for public consumption, everything is changing and will just keep right on changing. There is yet another move in my near to immediate future. I’m still staying in Ottawa, mind, and will hopefully still be in this end of Ottawa, so there’s that. But, uh, that’s a thing to be planned around. It’s gonna get interesting before it gets stable–hey, kind of like just about anything I touch so far as code’s concerned.
    • Baseball: What the actual? The last time Toronto had a team that was anywhere near the postseason of baseball, I was 10. That year, they won the world series for their second time. Now, we’re playing in the ALCS–and just lost one, but I’m not overly concerned. I say again. What the actual?
    • Related: Hey guys? You picked the wrong year for the #LoveThisTeam hashtag. #ComeTogether is just so very much overrated.

    Hockey: don’t–just don’t. My Leafs are rebuilding. It, uh, shows. I’ll watch when I think of it, but let me let you in on a little something. IT doesn’t hurt any less when you know that’s the plan.

    Like I said. I probably forgot or skipped past more than a few things. That’s what happens when you just now remember that yes, you can actually do more than check the thing for signs of broken. With a little luck and a lot of miracle, it won’t be 2016 before I remember to do this again. But who am I kidding? It’s what I’m good at. Well, that and coming from behind in the world of academia. Speaking of, ahem… Excuse me.

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  • Your password or your freedom, Canadian version.

    written by

    james

    It’s pretty common knowledge. You cross the United States border with your laptop, mobile phone, whatever, and you run the risk of some customs person deciding that’s a nice piece of equipment you’ve got there and he’ll just be taking a closer look at it if you don’t mind. Courts have been okay with this for the most part–part of the reason I haven’t lost much sleep about returning to the US any time soon. And now, like so much other American culture, the practice is moving north.

    I’ve traveled to many different countries in my life and the only time I’ve ever had any trouble at all at a border crossing was flying into Canada for a conference one time. I was pulled out of the line and sent to a special side room where I was quizzed about the real reasons I was coming to Canada. They couldn’t believe I was speaking at a conference, because I didn’t have a paper invite, and had to dig through my emails to show them it in email (thankfully, I stored my emails locally and didn’t need internet access). When I tell that story it shocks some people, as Canada has always had a reputation as a fairly easy border to cross — especially for Americans.

    But apparently the Canadians are stepping up their crazy antagonism at the border. The latest story involve Alain Philippon, a Canadian citizen who was returning from a trip to the Dominican Republic. Upon landing in Halifax he was ordered to cough up the password to his smartphone, and upon refusing, was charged with obstructing border officials.

    The charge has the potential to carry up to a year’s jail time–all for not turning over access to his phone to a guy with no reason to have it. Now, I’ve had my share of overly nosey border patrol folks. You know. Playing twenty questions just because you kind of don’t have much choice but to sit there and put up with it if you plan to actually get into the country–where are you coming from, where are you going, for how long, who are you meeting there, how much do you make a year (yes, I was asked that), etc. It’s become pretty standard operating procedure even before everyone got all security paranoid after 9/11. But seriously, if I wanted to sneak something across the border and didn’t want the US (or Canadian) agents there to find it, the last place I’d store the thing is locally on the laptop, phone, tablet, whichever. I’m trying not to get caught, remember. So odds are good I’ve stashed whatever I need on a remote server somewhere they don’t know exists and therefore couldn’t ask me for its password, deleted my local copy of that thing, and the only thing they’d see on a scroll through my phone are emails/text messages to my girlfriend on my way out, and quite probably a whole heap of sports notifications. Not exactly crossing a legal line, here, but at least partially crossing a privacy one. And for that, they’d need to do a lot more than ask me for my password. Or, you know, they could at least say please–it’s the Canadian way.

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  • “We’ll reform the voting system! For really real!” … and other reasons I’m not voting this year.

    written by

    james

    So if you’re in Canada, there’s an election coming up in October. And if you’ve been paying any regular degree of attention to it, you probably have a general idea of what you’ll be voting on–hint: “yes or no on throwing Stephen Harper out on his ass” isn’t it. If you’re voting, you’ve probably already decided on who–or, in the case of a small minority, against who. If you’ve decided to stay home, odds are pretty good you’ve decided–not inaccurately–that it probably doesn’t make a whole lot of difference who comes out ahead in any eventual election.

    My thoughts on voting in general, at least insofar as Canada goes, aren’t secret. You get a lot of hot air for a lot of partial reasons, then the individual political parties let their diehard supporters loose on each other until voting day–at which point somebody wins and not a whole lot changes. We went through it last year in Ontario and have been paying for it since. We went through it several times federally and have been paying for it since (note: That is not a dig at Harper. Relax, conservatives.). It’s too soon to offer an opinion on Alberta’s election, but if history’s any guide, I’ll be reevaluating that notion in about a year or two. And now, we get a chance to do it all over again federally to the tune of a very similar song and dance as we saw last time around. So with that in mind, the reasons I won’t be voting in this year’s election–just like I didn’t vote in last year’s.

    We’ll reform the voting system!

    This one I hear about every so often. I have no idea why, as it never seems to go anywhere, but it gets people through the night I suppose. Ontario talked about it last year. This year, they’re sort of doing it, if you loosely define “doing it” as updating their regulations to match the federal equivalent. More recently, the federal liberals have been musing about the prospect of some kind of new system within a year and a half of winning office, which should give you a general idea of the likelihood of its success. But what Justin Trudeau doesn’t mention–and Harper didn’t either when he jumped off the election reform bandwagon after, you know, winning one–is the only folks who seem to contemplate these notions are folks who aren’t currently benefitting from the broken system at the time. File this under “I’ll believe it if I see it” and let’s move on.

    Kill the Senate and Harper with it!

    To hear pretty much anyone not currently in government tell it, the senate broke the second Harper started appointing people to it. Unless you’re Harper pre-2006, then it broke the second Cretien/Martin started appointing people to it. either way, somebody somewhere usually calls for either reform or outright elimination of the senate and usually that’s as far as it goes. Why? Because outside of the NDP, no one particularly fancies opening the constitution. And if the NDP gets a shot at it, it may be the next election before it gets anywhere meaningful. But that’s a thing to beat the government over the head with, so “Die, senate, die!: or something.

    I have no idea who the middle class is, but I will defend you!

    spend 5 seconds on Google looking up any news article related to “the middle class”. go ahead. I’ll wait. Everyone says it. The conservatives say they’re looking out for it. The liberals say it’s hard done by and needs help. The NDP says business is screwing it over. None of the above can seem to explain exactly who would be covered under “the middle class”. Would the guy who works minimum wage at McDonalds? What about the high school English teacher down the road? Would you? Would I? No one’s saying. But whoever it is, clearly they’re crying out for help. So vote $party, and it’ll be business as usual for another 4 years because really, what can you do?

    The scandal! The impropriety!

    This one’s probably my favourite. The conservatives haven’t met an election they couldn’t be accused of cheating to win. The liberals were booted from office thanks largely to their own legal and financial shananigans. And let’s not leave the NDP’s own money troubles out of the mix. Because guilty as the other two are, they sure won’t. “We’re not as corrupt as they are” is starting to hold less and less meaning here, guys.

    It may be my God-given right to vote. But if I’m expected to exercise that right, please for the love of that god give me something worth exercising it on. At the moment, options include bad, bad, slightly less bad and where the hell did you come from. Mandatory voting won’t change that–I’ll just take the fine for not bothering to waste my time picking from the better of three coruptions. Preferencial voting won’t change that–you’ll just have your pick of any three godaweful choices, each with a platform they’ll stick on a shelf when the election’s over. lowering the voting age won’t change that–if you can’t convince somebody in their 30’s to get out and vote, and they have arguably more of a dog in this fight than a high school student, you’ve got bigger problems than shaving a couple years off the voting age. In short: fix the options, or the method for picking those options won’t matter worth a damn. Give me a reason to vote, and stop it with the reasons not to. Until that happens, I’ll be withholding my vote. And Trudeau, if he actually follows through on something as potentially significant as electoral reform, can fine me for it until the cows come home. Who knows? That might be the proof I need that someone up there actually means it.

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  • I see you paying me for spam in your near to immediate future.

    written by

    james

    Getting anything but a higher bill out of companies like Rogers is often times an exercise in futility. But for a guy in Edmonton, that was only half his problem. The other half was not actually signing up for some of what Rogers had decided to bill him for.

    Andy Pearcy is probably like most people. You’ve got 80 million things on the go, so when the end of the month rolls around, you take 20 minutes or so, stare at your bills long enough to figure out what the final number is, then fire that final number in the required direction so you can move on with your day and they can’t call you about it tomorrow. The problem if you’re Andy, though, is $10 of that final number was going to a fortune teller he didn’t sign up for. In exchange for the money he didn’t know he was paying, they sent him occasional text messages he thought were your run-of-the-mill spam you just shrug off, delete and forget about in 5 minutes–since, you know, he didn’t sign up for the things.

    Naturally, when he found out, he called rogers. Naturally, because rogers, they said he ought to call the guys sending him the text messages–because Rogers and refund are mutually exclusive terms, you know. And naturally, Andy had no interest in asking a company he didn’t sign up with who wasn’t doing the actual billing to stop taking his money. The rest, as they say, is pretty business as usual. I’m no expert here or anything, but I’m thinking perhaps if Rogers had done a little fortune asking of its own, it could have quite possibly avoided a headache. But then, Rogers not asking questions might be a small contributing factor to its picking up half the bill for itself. Yeah, I see a not very smart executive promotion in somebody’s near to immediate future.

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  • Trigger Warning: In which I worry about an assisted suicide ruling.

    written by

    james

    Warning: I have no idea how triggers work, particularly related to depression and contemplation of suicide. I am your typical, undereducated thug in that department. But if any of this entry serves to trigger something, please know it was not intended, I apologise, and you can inform me of it privately if you so choose so I can change it accordingly. I’m not here to traumatise.

    I’m more often than not a fan of any time the Supreme court of Canada wants to take a swipe at our government. The way things tend to come down the pipe now and again, it’s probably deserved more often than it’s not. But on assisted suicide in particular, the supreme court has gone too far.

    The court ruled very recently that a law banning doctor-assisted suicide was entirely unconstitutional–and that the right to life, more or less, should include the right to death. On its face a logical ruling, if you can tie anything remotely akin to logic around an issue of when it’s considered legal to kill someone. The ruling allows for the possibility of assisted suicide for any incurable physical–or mental–illness. So, for example, someone determined to be dying of cancer can opt to have it done and over with quickly, as opposed to living out the rest of their however long knowing the disease will eventually kill them. that’s good, in theory. But so can someone dealing with depression. that’s not so much.

    Already this happens in certain European countries–Belgium permitted the assisted suicide of two deaf twin brothers who were going blind and couldn’t handle it, for example. And the same procedure for chronic depression is surprisingly not uncommon in jurisdictions that allow it. Unless a bunch of folks are reading the supreme court’s ruling entirely incorrectly, there is ample room for the trend in Canada to follow that path–as, quite aptly, has been explained to death already.

    But that is not what the Court has in mind. First, it is clear from the ruling that the “enduring and intolerable suffering” that would confer the right to have someone kill you (with your consent, of course) is not limited to physical pain, but also psychological pain — which, besides being a murkier concept by far, raises the question of how competent the subject really is. Nor is suffering defined further: it is enough that it is intolerable “to the individual.”

    Second, nothing in the words “grievous and irremediable medical condition,” the court’s other requirement for the exercise of this right, suggests that death is near, or even likely. It is enough that the condition be incurable; it need not be terminal.

    So. You’re on medication for life. It’s keeping you functional, perhaps even something close to healthy, but it’s still there. As a friend told me once, it never goes away–you just get better at ignoring it. You could decide that’s plenty good enough–for all intents and purposes, you’re as cured as you’re going to get. But if you–or your doctor–decide that no, being on medication isn’t good enough–that it doesn’t actually cure you, but just treats the symptoms, assisted suicide could–again, based on this ruling–be an option. In states where it’s already legal, it is an option.

    Patients themselves say that the primary motive is not to escape physical pain but psychological distress; the main drivers are depression, hopelessness and fear of loss of autonomy and control. Dutch researchers, for a report published in 2005, followed 138 terminally ill cancer patients and found that depressed patients were four times more likely to request euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide. Nearly half of those who requested euthanasia were depressed.

    In this light, physician-assisted suicide looks less like a good death in the face of unremitting pain and more like plain old suicide. Typically, our response to suicidal feelings associated with depression and hopelessness is not to give people the means to end their lives but to offer them counseling and caring.

    I know people who suffer from depression. Even completely treated, it’s still there. But because people have been there to offer help, they haven’t decided on their own it’d be better to call it quits. Some of those are friends, family, people I am or was close to. Some of them didn’t speak up about it until they had but two options: get help now, or get out–and they’d already tried that second one. It’s very possible some of them still haven’t spoken up about it–to people, at least, who could potentially have done something about it. I can only guess at exactly how many of those people I’d know now if this were a more widely accepted option. I’d rather not guess at how many people I know would consider taking this path if it becomes a more widely accepted option.

    It’s been said to me on more than one occasion. Once a depressive, always a depressive. The best you can hope for is to cope. This is not coping. We can do better than this. The supreme court has it wrong, and I sincerely hope someone in this government or the next puts some effort into correcting it. Even if I will never fully appreciate it, the people who need it most will. That’s what we’re here for.

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  • I’d support a minimum guaranteed income law. Too bad one doesn’t exist.

    written by

    james

    If you’ve spent any amount of time out of work, whether you’re disabled or not, you know it hurts. It hurts twice if you’re out of work with any kind of disability–particularly as you’ve already got at least one strike against you. Governments think they’re helping, usually–when they’re not actively trying to do everything but, but more often than not the services most people have access to equate approximately to barely covering the rent if you happen to ask nicely. There are probably a few exceptions, depending on your definition of exceptions, but for the most part it goes approximately like this:

    • Step 1: Pray like nothing else your disability/welfare deposit comes in on time and for the correct amount. Optionally curse a blue streak when it doesn’t.
    • Step two: Try and ring up your caseworker, pray she’s in her office, pray she’s awake, pray she’s not currently mid-moodswing, and pray twice she’s not stuck using what escentially amounts to barely tested beta software (I’m looking at you, Ontario).
    • Step 3: Quite probably curse as at least one of those nested if statements turns false before your eyes. If you’re lucky, it may only be 1.
    • Step 4: Explain, probably twice, and a third time for good measure, that yes you’re broken again and could she kindly fix you and damn well mean it this time.
    • Step 5: Spend the rest of the month catching up on barely paying for the things you meant to pay for before your deposit went pair shaped.
    • Step 6: Repeat steps 1-5 as needed.

    If the system works perfectly, you can likely skip that whole dance–and still have enough money left over for perhaps a cup of coffee if you haven’t gotten real good at getting real creative real fast. Which is still a problem, but it’s not necessarily the one problem with the potential to be your complete undoing. The problems that could potentially be your complete undoing are pretty much all administrative, mostly unnecessary and usually avoidable if the people handling the files would demonstrate a collective IQ above about 2.1.

    I’m going to bash on Ontario, specificly the Ontario disability support Program (ODSP) and Ontario Works (OW), for two very simple reasons. Reason the first: I’m far too familiar with the system here for my own good–and have written way too much about them to be healthy. And reason the second: It’s not all sunshine and roses–and people who show up here looking for info on what they offer (this has happened) need to see that.

    ODSP and OW come from a very similar set of procedures, slightly tweeked to account for the intended difference in clients. Which also means they come with the same, or close to the same, set of problems. Specificly, the process of actually providing the services hangs them up and they’re left spinning their wheels while figuring out how to actually provide the services–when they’re not taking their sweet time not approving you, anyway. So you’re left with a wheelchair user having to pay out of pocket to sort out complications ODSP was explicitly designed to cover, because ODSP has dropped the ball. Again.

    It’s not entirely the fault of ODSP/OW for the way the system’s been bent out of shape. They’re covering their respective asses, more often than not–and that covering process tends to trip them up. It’s not a complete excuse, but when you’re alternating between people who’d rather be on ODSP than working and a system that seems set up to both allow and encourage it, you can kind of see why a little coverage is required.

    There is a possible way around problems like this, and we largely have systems in place already that would be capable of handling it if a government were so inclined to develop enough of a spine to put it in place. Rather than an overcomplicated system of disability/welfare payments that seems to depend more on the phase of the moon than your medical condition, why not just move to a system of guaranteed annual income and be done with it? Take the payments out of the hands of social services, which comes with enough of its own stigma as it is, and hand it over to either provincial or federal tax authorities, say–like they already do in some jurisdictions for assessing things like your HST rebates, for those who get them. Or child tax, if that’s mildly more relevant for context purposes. The only requirement for determining whether or not you qualify for this particular benefit, then, would presumedly be your income tax filings–which you should be submitting if you’re not working anyway because potentially helpful.

    The trend is to increase the minimum wage instead–Alberta’s government was considering a $15 minimum wage at one point, which would help, but only if you happen to be already working–and only then if your employer hasn’t decided the increase is going to cost too much and your particular job isn’t worth what they’re expected to pay. But there are more than a few good reasons to change that trend, which at least some parts of that same government are making vague-sounding rumbling noises about.

    A minimum guaranteed income would accomplish the one thing no social services system has been able to actually do with any degree of success, if it’s executed properly. Get people off social services, and living moderately independently while they try and hopefully succeed at getting their feet under them. Unfortunately, and this is more than likely precisely why it’s not a thing that’s anywhere close to happening yet, proper execution is far from guaranteed–and getting there will be far from popular in just about any jurisdiction.

    First, the receiving end of the spectrum. We’re assuming the idea behind a system like this is to give people just that little boost closer to the poverty line–the general assumption that was supposed to be the intent of social services, before it wasn’t. That means we’d need to see a minimum guaranteed income in or around the $19000 per year range to be considered closeish to the cutoff line. Doable, perhaps, but not easy–and it still won’t be entirely equal, though it would be more equal than the current system.

    This is the part where I start to throw numbers at you. So if you’re the type that goes crosseyed at the prospect, 1: I know the feeling and 2: I warned you. Ontario’s minimum wage is about $11.25 as it stands right now. Crunch a few numbers based on a 40-hour work week, and you come out with $23400 in before-tax income on the year. Assuming they set the cutoff for this new guaranteed income plan at $19000, the actual hourly rate would be just slightly over $2 cheaper (at $9.13, based on that same 40-hour work week). So anyone who can’t find a job for more reasons than I feel like ever writing down in an entry would still lose out, but not by all that much in the grand scheme of things–and by a whole lot less than what they do now. Contrast this with the maximum you’d be entitled to on a system like ODSP, without the extras for things like special dietary requirements. Based on that same 40-hour work week, an ODSP recipient who’s actually entitled to the maximum allowed would earn $13176 on the year, or $6.33 per hour. Nearly half what Ontario’s current minimum wage is at present. And with the insentives against going out and finding work (see above), which would only end up hurting you long-term unless you found work at a rate of pay significant enough that it cancels out your ODSP entirely, the situation doesn’t end up actually doing a whole lot of helping you–and even if it does, the extra paperwork it requires, and the multiple opportunities for that extra paperwork to grow legs and wander off somewhere, don’t make it something most people look forward to actually doing.

    Contrast that to the process for either reducing or getting completely off the minimum guaranteed income list–or getting back on it, if somewhere down the road your prospects take a turn for the nonexistent. As I said elsewhere, presumedly you’re filing your income taxes whether you’re working or not, particularly if you’ve got student loans–as keeping track of that becomes slightly easier at that point when it comes time to figure out how much of those loans you can claim credit for paying back. If the system is set up properly, meaning tied to your income tax filings similar to some other benefits you can claim from the government, then your eligibility for the minimum guaranteed income is either validated or revoked by virtue of the very same process you’d be going through anyway. So our person making minimum wage above, while maybe not flying in style, would be able to get himself off the minimum guaranteed income provision just by indicating he now has a job that pays him that minimum wage. If yearly income is more than minimum income threshold, minimum income doesn’t apply. If he later ends up losing that job and taking employment insurance, then the next time he files his taxes he’ll likely come in at or below the theoretical $19000 income cutoff. There’s probably a lot of room for maneuverability and all sorts of fun and games to make the system a little more fluid than the example I’ve just described, but given it’s a thought bubble at worst at the moment and a working theory sitting on some government staffer’s stack of paperwork at best, I’m using what I have to work with as a loose baseline. It will probably be challenged. Please do.

    And now we get into the not so fun part of all this, and the reason I don’t expect to see one–not even one spearheaded by Alberta’s new NDP government–in the foreseeable future. The fairly significant matter of funding this provision. From the opinion piece on minimum guaranteed income linked earlier on:

    But notice how it works. The benefit is a social obligation; thus, it is socially financed, i.e., through the tax and transfer system. Everybody pays for it (though the more you make the more you pay) and everybody is eligible for it (though the more you make the less you receive). It is available whether you are in work or out, and has no impact either on the willingness of workers to supply their labour or the willingness of employers to demand it.

    The problem, roughly summarized, is that everybody pays. So the people who would have an issue with handing over their money for social assistance funding would very likely still have an issue with handing it over for this fund. The difference is, on a more technical level, they’d be as eligible to receive the benefit as, say, I would–though perhaps, depending on their particular situation, they might not see it that way if they’re paying in more on balance than they’re technically getting out of it. The trick, then, would be to frame that discussion in such a way that it’s not so much a net loss to the ones doing most of the paying. Which, incidentally, is precisely why I don’t particularly see it happening any time soon.

    governments of just about any stripe, on principle, mean well–at least when they initially take office. They have their ideas, their pet projects, their whatever, but at the end of the day, they ran on something they thought would improve the situation. They were elected on that something. Then they get into the details and one of two things happens. either the government decides–truthfully or not–that the thing they ran on is quite a bit more involved to put in place than they figured, so they try to dance around it without being run over by the train of broken promises let loose by the government they just replaced, or the details of what they’re looking to implement are–mostly–released to the public, who decides that wasn’t what they signed on for in the first place, and that thing that got the government elected isn’t quite as popular now as it was on election day. Either way, like so many other potentially decent ideas, the details get hung up on how it’s being paid for, who’s paying, how much and why isn’t $GroupOfTheWeek exempt from these new taxes. Enter the problem with getting something like this minimum income provision approved. If any government with this kind of a brainstorm doesn’t articulate it exactly right, and I haven’t seen a government yet with that particular ability, the media will be pumping out headlines to the tune of “$government introduces new employment tax” and that’ll be the end of that in incredibly short order.

    I would love, absolutely, to see a system of minimum guaranteed income put in place. I’d openly support something like that–and might actually be convinced to vote for anyone who’d willingly step up to the plate with an idea like that. It’s a sad, sad shame such a beast doesn’t exist.

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