Legal Problems, Curmudgeons, and Sexual Assault. . .

I really wasn’t going to reply to Mound’s irate diatribes concerning the Ghomeshi trial. At the moment I have very little stomach for anyone who seems eager to blame potential victims or has too much faith in the criminal justice system, particularly when it comes to the issue of sexual assault. I’ll be honest, the Ghomeshi trial sent me for a loop, not because I was surprised by the outcome per se, (given that less than one percent of sexual assaults end in conviction, a guilty verdict would always be more surprising than a not guilty one), but because I have known survivors and I know that a big public trial like this will likely lead to even fewer assault victims coming forward. You can argue the technicalities all you want, you can believe that Ghomeshi is totally innocent, that won’t change the fact that this event helps to create a milieu in which survivors are going to be even more reluctant to come forward and subject themselves to such public trial and attacks on their characters. I have also been surprised and saddened by the degree to which many men seem to have an deep-seated psychological desire, expressed in anger, to blame victims for not “doing things right.” I include Mound in this, with all due respect, because he has performatively demonstrated it on more than one occasion. His satirical hyperboles such as “We could go for the guilty until proven innocent approach,” depend upon intentionally provocative embellishments rather than meaningful political, legal, philosophical, or even social discourse.

I have respected much of Mound’s work, and I am sure that I will respect much of it in the future. But we simply disagree with prejudice here. I know that his by-line warns us that he is a curmudgeon so I guess there should be no surprises here.

Mound suggests that none of the condemnations of the verdict in the Ghomeshi trial “offer the one thing that we need, how should we change the system to achieve a more preferable result[?]” Well, I don’t know what Mound reads, but this seems patently false to me. Though I have not bothered to make a conscious effort to record what I have read over the past few days in this regard, I think plenty of people have offered just such a critique. And I will get to potential improvements in a moment. But first I want to say this – there is one important thing that Mound doesn’t seem to be considering: the public anger is not just about the Ghomeshi trial here, its an outburst of a cumulative despair concerning the general lack of justice and continuing epidemic of sexual assault. And much of this anger is coming from real survivors of sexual abuse. In that regard, it is very important to give those people space to vent. When people are going through really difficult trauma they don’t need to lectured to about the mistakes they have made, the reasons that they might “technically” be wrong etc. They need compassion and understanding. You wouldn’t, for example, tell someone who just broke both legs and is in real pain that they were stupid for going sky-diving in the first place; it’s a zero sum game.

But regarding the concrete issue; since the gauntlet has been thrown down, it can be taken up. There are, in fact, very real and concrete steps that can be taken to improve the situation. Take this simple fact – the majority of women who come forward with charges of sexual assault are unaware that the Crown Attorney is in no way ‘their’ lawyer. People who are traumatized and in little condition to sort out how to properly navigate a complex legal system, are often wrongly assuming that someone is “looking out for their interests.” And it is not, as some people have suggested, as simple as “just telling the truth.” If these events have made people aware of anything it should be that victims of sexual assault are also victims of a special kind of trauma, particularly if their assailant is in a position of authority. People in this situation are almost always confused, they often initially blame themselves, they sometimes are in denial for a long time and it can take months or even years for them to understand what has actually happened. This is particularly true because we have lived in a society in which violence against women has been accepted and legitimized. If you think it is simply a matter of “telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” then you really appear to know nothing about the reality of sexual assault and what it does to people. For these people to come forward is often a herculean task of bravery, and then if they are faced with a hostile police force and cynical or even indifferent Crown Attorneys you might as well forget ever getting a conviction even with good physical evidence. Keeping these facts in mind, some pretty simple steps can be taken to make things easier. Rigorous and regular sensitivity training for all authorities involved. Any training that they are getting at the moment is obviously not working. Then free and on-going counselling that can help victims with the psychological effects of abuse, as well as free access to attorneys that can specifically protect their rights and help them learn what kind of actions might be considered legally appropriate or inappropriate. Then how about this – justices who are specifically hired to deal with sexual assault cases. Judges with their own extensive psych training so that they will understand how and why victims of sexual assault might act differently and even contradictorily to what is understood as the “norm.” More education on consent for younger kids is something that is just started, this needs to become a much more active part of the curriculums of public schools. Furthermore, there should be national standards for how our public institutions as well as private corporations must act concerning sexual assault accusations. Given, for example, how endemic sexual assault is on university and college campuses and how easily accusations can be swept under the rug, these standards would go a long way to creating an atmosphere in which people know that their terrible experiences are going to be treated with the seriousness that they deserve.

For years it was very difficult in the US south to get any kind of conviction of the murder or assault an African-American by white assailants. When civil rights activists made this a major issue, saying that something needed to be done, people actively made arguments very much like Mound’s – saying sarcastically that “do we need to get rid of presumption of innocence?” But that was never the point and everyone knew it. Concrete steps had to be taken. Getting African-Americans on juries, hiring judges who themselves weren’t actively racist, etc.

The Ghomeshi trial is over. But the anger isn’t. The anger is totally understandable and telling people that the judge just did his job, is not in any way helpful unless it inspires people to make changes. Blaming the victims certainly isn’t going to help. Only compassion, sympathy, and a determination to change things will help. I personally don’t think the judge took enough consideration of how sexual assault trauma can affect someone’s behavior. But there is little benefit in debating the minutia of this case. Instead, we should embrace survivors, listen to their anger, and let it remind us that things have to change. Some of these changes can be specifically legal, others are wider social changes that must take place. And one of those changes is not to blame the victims! It is essential that we understand how our own potential biases and sexism can make us less sympathetic or compassionate than we should be because we are all, at some level, part of the wider social problem.

We need to be judged on how we treat our most vulnerable citizens, and few people are more vulnerable than victims of sexual assault. So let’s do everything we can do to empower them and make their recovery and the justice they need easier, not more difficult. Mound sticks to his self-given epithet of curmudgeon. His use of facetiousness demonstrates that beautifully. But facetiousness in the face of real pain offers nothing, and telling people to “let it go” when they have been systematically oppressed, abused, and assaulted, is more than curmudgeonly, it’s downright mean and insensitive. I think one can argue whether or not “hard cases make bad laws,” but they often become the fulcrum which inspires real change.

Empiricism, Rationalism, Ghomeshi, and our Worldview. . .

Many political scientists insist that we live in a democracy. After all, there are multiple parties, we all have a right to vote how we choose, and no one holds a gun to our head in the voting booth. Furthermore, we have significant regulations about how political parties can function, act, and discourse in the public sphere. These political scientists will tell us that though the system isn’t perfect, it is still properly so-called a ‘democracy.’ Be we don’t have to be experts of any sort to understand that something is desperately wrong. If this is really a democracy, why do we keep getting government which de facto function in the interests of the richest ten percent of the population? Why is it that in a country like the US, for example, where an overwhelming majority seem to favour a single-payer healthcare system of some sort, do successive governments fail utterly to deliver on such generalized desires?

In another, but similar, vein, many experts say that the police aren’t really systematically racist, but that they are just “enforcing the law” the way that they are supposed to. Again, we don’t have to be experts to understand that something is wrong here. Racialized people are brutalized and killed in shocking numbers in North America. They are brutalized in numbers that far outweigh the percentage of the population that they represent and even in numbers greater than the percentage of crime in which they are involved. In Canada, in particular, indigenous people make up a huge percentage of the prison population. And even if someone were to argue that this high prison population simply reflects a high crime rate among natives, we don’t have to experts to understand that this number is a reflection of a systemic racism. Furthermore, we have to ask ourselves why wealthy white people are so significantly less likely to be convicted of a crime once they are indicted.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking example of this thinking is the one in which legal experts tell us that we have the fairest legal system that we can make. These experts point to various factors such the ‘burden of proof’ and the ‘presumption of innocence,’ to make their point. And these principles are important, but when we think about the fact that if a man commits a sexual assault, there is less than one percent chance that he will ever be convicted of a crime, we know something is deeply and desperately wrong. And the problem isn’t just with men’s actions, though god knows this is very problematic. There is something wrong with how we treat women when they make allegations of sexual assault. Though there is no way to be certain what percentage of allegations are false, even studies undertaken in the deeply misogynist context of our society have suggested that the numbers of false accusations are very low. And studies have further found that even when a false accusation is made, the accuser has been assaulted in some way, even if it is not the exact way in which they describe. Again, one needn’t be an expert to understand that given these facts, in cases in which multiple accusers tell similar stories, the chances that no assault has taken place is astronomically low. Yet, again, the number of convictions is also shockingly low.

There is no question that experts play an important role in our society. But the question that we have to ask ourselves is – when does expertise become ideology? This is actually a deeply philosophical question. The nature of the question is not one in which one could simply create some sort of objective scale by which we determine when someone who is supposed to be rational and objective is tainted by some ideological bias or bigotry. Rather, the question is a paradigmatic one. When we realize that we have a problem with the experts’ thoughts as outlined above it really means that we are operating is a slightly different paradigm than those experts. This is complex argument with a long history, but what I am essentially pointing to is the deep divide between the rationalist and the empiricist paradigms. Many political scientists (a least in relation to the issue of democracy) and many legal experts examine these problems with with a very strict empiricist methodology. To put it simply, in the operation of this paradigm, the empiricist limits himself to ‘the facts at hand.’ Thus, when examining a question of, say, sexual assault, the empiricist looks at the facts of the case and doesn’t explore potential operational or systemic influences on the matter. So they don’t ask, given the wider social context of an unbelievably low number of indictments and convictions in cases of sexual assault, maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with our legal system? The empiricist might not even ask more basic and prosaic questions such as ‘could it be that how we allow assault victims to be questioned in court or treated by the police might be contributing to a systemic bias?”

This notion of an empiricist paradigm is indicative of how the Harper Government reacted to calls for a national inquiry into murdered and missing indigenous women. Harper and his ilk had no interest in uncovering potential systemic or operational biases of our system. Like true empiricists they only wanted to see the facts in each individual case. It was a similar case when Harper and his crowd reacted to Trudeau’s call to understand the root causes of terrorism. But there was an irony in the fact that Harper said that we shouldn’t “commit sociology.” Because sociology is not the opposite of empiricism, rationalism is. The rational paradigm investigates in a different way. The rationalist argues that there are contexts and cases in which our concepts or knowledge outstrips the immediate sense experience or the “facts at hand.” Furthermore, the rationalist looks to construct a picture with a wider experience of the world around and consider and how issues that may seem unrelated to the immediate events might play a significant part in a process.

One of the primary ideological problems with empiricism is that it can allow people to hide their biases behind of supposed veneer of “facts.” Instead of looking for operational flaws or systemic biases in a system an empiricist will utilize an in-put/out-put model of operational efficiency. To put it in a more literary vein, the empiricist will mistake the facts for the truth. Thus, the empiricist is unlikely to ask whether there is a problem with how a crime is investigated, the potential biases of the investigators, the biases of the prosecutors, or the operational flaws and biases that might occur in the court itself. But a rationalist will be very likely to ask these questions. *

 Few readers, and I am sure there are only a few readers, have missed the fact that this exposition is, in part, a veiled attack on the Ghomeshi verdict. But, as sympathetic as I am to Ghomeshi’s victims, I know that there is something much bigger at stake here. There is an irony in the classic sexist view that women are somehow less “rational” than men. Because in my experience it is men who are more likely to push the empiricist view and women who are more likely to embrace the rationalist paradigm. This is because it is easy to hide behind empiricism, and people who have status and power to protect are often in need of a good conceptual hiding place. Thus, in the Ghomeshi case, for example, it seems that men are much less likely to see the obvious biases not only of Justice William Horkins but of the police and court operations that not only allow dubious attacks on witness credibility but utterly fail to take into consideration the wider social issue of how victims of sexual assault might act in legally problematic ways because of particular kinds of trauma. Women, on the other hand, who have historically been overwhelming victims of systemic and operational bias are more likely to understand right away the rationalist paradigm that examines and comprehends the wider socioeconomic prejudices in the system.

And in my experience this kind of bias runs throughout the system. Men are much more likely, for example, to see their success in an empiricist way. They figure “I put in the work and now I am successful.” It is a simple matter of facts. It is shocking how seldom men understand their systemic advantages on the road to success, to say nothing of the fact that even their desire for and expectation of ‘success’ has been trained into them from the day of their birth. If the Ghomeshi trial has done anything it has reminded me of just how deeply not only sexism runs in our court system, but how deeply it runs in the very patterns of our thoughts.

People who use an empiricist paradigm tend to be cocky (no pun intended) and confident in their understanding of the world and society. But one only has to look around to know that there are very deep problems with our prevailing worldview.

* Ironically, it is the rationalist paradigm itself which led, in philosophical circles, to the breakdown of classical rationalism in the strict sense and led to a so-called post-modern paradigm.  

Post Script - For those of you with a particularly philosophical turn of mind, what I am really point toward when I talk of rationalism this way is 'critical theory' in the continental sense of that concept. But for clarity and simplicity I think it is better in the limited context of a blogpost to pare down to more basic concepts. 

Rob Ford is Gone but the Violence and Bullying go Merrily on. . .

The death of Rob Ford (and the upcoming verdict in the Gomeshi trial) has gotten me thinking about violence in our society. First of all, let's be clear, I think Rob Ford was a really bad guy at both the personal and ideological level. In public he continually used nasty and violent language, by many accounts he was implicated in occurrences of domestic violence, he was accused of sexual assault by peers like Sarah Thomson, and he and his close associates were involved with known gang members. And yet, as often happens after someone's untimely death, Ford is being widely praised even by critics. Just this morning I saw a female reporter in Ottawa talking about how "charming" and "vulnerable" Rob Ford was much of the time.

What all of this reminds me of is the degree to which, despite paying lip-service to the need to reduce violence and bullying, we live in a society that continues to be shockingly tolerant of these things. For example, according to the Canadian's Women's Foundation, only 1 in 3 Canadians understand what sexual consent is. More disturbingly, every day over three thousand Canadian women are forced to sleep in shelters due to domestic violence and every six days a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner. (And keep in mind that as frightening as these stats are, overall Canada is lower on the worldwide scale of domestic violence) At a more prosaic level, bullying is endemic in our society, it is everywhere you look and for a decade became the modus operandi of the federal government. Now, looking south of the border we have the front-runner Republican candidate who is actively and openly advocating violence by his supporters and saying he will cover their legal costs if they are indicted for such violence.

There are, of course, many people working actively to overcome violence in our society. But it is a difficult task when we, as a society, tolerate and even laud people who are bullies, abusers, and perpetrators of violence. Take our society's treatment of indigenous children, and their most famous advocate Cindy Blackstock. A decade ago activist Cindy Blackstock brought a case against the Federal Government at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal for their racist treatment of indigenous youth. The Harper government did everything it could to obstruct and block Blackstock's efforts to expose the systemic violence perpetrated against the indigenous children of our society. And for years Blackstock was subject to continual secret government surveillance. According to Save the Children Canada, more than 40% of indigenous children live in poverty. In many cases this poverty is extreme to the degree that if average Canadians truly understood it they would find it difficult to believe. Yet the government has knowingly and systematically failed to fund services for indigenous children to anything like the level of non-indigenous children. This is, straight-up, a willful act of systemic violence that has been ignored for decades and the Harper government actively tried to hide it from public view. We should also keep in mind that the Harper government spend nearly a decade resisting a public investigation into murdered and missing women, and one of the primary messages of this resistance was that such violence is only an isolated phenomenon perpetrated by criminal individuals and has no social or systemic reality.

At an international level, we have governments who actively support violent and repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia and Israel, while regularly and smugly contemning violence perpetrated by other nations that are not close allies. Rona Ambrose's recent whining about Trudeau's decision to stop dropping bombs on Syria speaks volumes about how eager many of our political "leaders" are to continue our active involvement in violence at any and every opportunity. I remember a couple of years ago amid the furor over Trudeau's comments about the need to think about the origins of terrorist violence, I saw a Conservative Party MP (I can't remember which one, though it may have been Michelle Rempel) actually say, "I don't want to know why Terrorists commit violence." The import of this comment is obvious. Like anything, you can only put an end to violence if you find its causes. In suggesting that they don't want to understand its causes, many politicians are de facto saying that they don't really want to put an end to it. And I think it should be clear that many politicians (particularly rightwing ones) don't want to put an end to violence and bullying because not only does it feed their vicious base and keep them getting elected, but because it supports their world-view.

The Gomeshi case has demonstrated how we actively undermine victims of sexual violence. Though things are better than they once were, most victims of sexual violence today (particularly women) who go public are opening themselves up to ridicule and public shaming. And women who have been victims of sexual violence are treated differently according to their social and professional status, as though working-class women or those with less "successful" careers are more apt to lie or worse, somehow 'deserve' it. I don't know if Gomeshi will be convicted on Thursday, but even if he is found guilty, much of the damage has already been done by his lawyer who suggested that women who didn't instantly go to police must be lying. This is one of the deep prejudices of our society, the failure to understand the long-term damaging effects of violence. Victims of violence have not only been physically damaged but also emotionally traumatized, and as a result they often partially blame themselves. This trauma can also have a generational effect that is only now being investigated and understood.

One of the most frightening aspects of public violence is the way we give a pass to state-sponsored and supported violence and condemn those who struggle against it as 'trouble-makers' and 'low-lifes.' Just yesterday, activists from "Black Lives Matter" who were peacefully demonstrating against police violence were themselves treated with violence with little hesitation and a dearth of media coverage.  Overall, people are very ready to believe in the legitimacy of state-sponsored violence, and deeply unsympathetic to anyone who might fight back.

As long as we simply laugh at men like Rob Ford, or think of Trump's calls to violence as something 'folksy' rather than the serious acts of criminality that they are, we will be a long way from tackling our society's addiction to violence. As long as we automatically assume that police must be 'justified' in their use of violence, and treat domestic violence relatively lightly compared to other crimes, we are only confirming our lack of seriousness concerning the violence endemic in our culture. As long as we condemn bullying in our schools, yet ignore the way teachers bully and cajole our children, we will be failing to understand the ways we are inadvertently justifying violence. As long as we let our kids play Grand Theft Auto but avert their eyes from even relatively innocent acts of love, we will be condemning the future to more of the same. As long as we ignore violence against women or treat indigenous people as second-class citizens, the more we are demonstrated that we just aren't willing to grow up as a people.

When is Evil Banal?

It was, if memory serves, in relation to Eichmann that Hannah Arendt coined the now famous phrase "the banality of evil." Most of have seen more than one example of this idea in politics and everyday life. I always thought that it was a phrase that fittingly described Stephen Harper. He was a man with little or no charisma, he didn't seem to have any big vision, good or bad per se, he never seemed particularly bright to me, but was rather, like so many bad people, a very lucky person. He was ambitious, no doubt, but his ambitions always seemed petty to me and in the end seemed to be purely destructive tendencies driven by his own neuroses.

And many of us have known someone like this personally, someone who is actually unremarkable, seems fairly normal but is actually mean-spirited, selfish, and destructive for no particular reason other than some (perhaps deep-seated and undiscoverable) problem.

But evil is not always innocuous or banal. It often comes in larger-than-life, charismatic, individuals who somehow convince many people that their obvious nastiness is somehow an expression of something good. We often hear such people lauded by their supporters with the curious or dubious virtue: "he tells it like it is," or "at least he does what he says." I have always found this a strange kind of acclaim since doing what you say you are going do or 'calling'em like you see'em" hardly, in and of themselves, seem to be vitreous acts. I don't need to list all the terrible people who did what they said they were going to do. There are, of course, good people who are straightforward, but being straightforward (in and of itself) doesn't constitute a virtue, as everyone whose grandmother has purchased an horrendous new hat can attest.

But the real sad fact is that most larger-than-life evil people require an army of banally evil individuals in order to make their evil possible. Donald Trump may be fairly charismatic (if you like that sort of thing) and he certainly is larger-than-life, but many of his supporters are just average, drab, seemingly 'normal' people. I am not talking her about the loud-mouth, racists who thump passers-by. The media loves these types of people and gravitate toward them so we see them a lot. I am talking about the legions of quieter individuals who remain mostly in the background. These are people who have few ideas, no vision, little real experience of the world, and in most cases are shockingly short of common sense. But as banal as such people are, they are the real backbone of evil because they are the enablers without whom the larger-than-live evildoers could be no more than circus clowns.

When Harper attempted to enflame racist furor in order to win the last election, it was banal evil to which he was trying to appeal. The same is largely true of Donald Tump. Of course, he likes the loud-mouths and grandstanders; they bring him attention and enflame people. But he needs the average, quite individuals who hope to promote him to a real position of power where he can undertake evil that is not banal at all.

The "Melting-Pot" is Boiling Over. . . .

There has, understandably, been much talk recently about the potential decline of the US into genuine fascism. Strict discourse on such matters depends, of course, on how one defines the political ideology of fascism. Dr. Lawrence Britt, offers us a fairly straightforward definition of fascism here. There is little doubt in my mind that even sticking with such strict definitions, the US is currently edging toward genuine fascism.

At the very least, the US is falling toward a difficult and dangerous situation in which outright violence (that is to say, not simply systemic violence) committed by civilians in the name of a perceived nationalism, is taking the place of 'normal' political discourse. Not only has Trump begun to encourage and justify violence by his supporters, his supporters have upped the ante and begun to talk about carrying guns at rallies and voting booths, and killing opponents as a matter of course. As routine as violence has become in a country like the US, even those inured to such matters should be sweating a little more nervously of late.

The great American writer Sinclair Lewis once wrote a novel "It Can't Happen Here," in which he attempted to remind his fellow citizens how easy the slide toward fascism can occur and how vulnerable American was to this potential slide. Regardless of what happens from here, political historians will talk for a long time about the events we are seeing unfold. They give us a strange sense of unreality as we watch, much like we had here in Canada as Harper slowly attempted to pervert the history of this country gradually and from the inside. But, as they often are, events in the US are more intense and radical than they are in Canada, and this is like the Harper revolution on crack.

Daniel Marans and Ryan Grim have written an interesting article on how the Trump phenomenon could fall into traditional fascist violence. "Extreme political movements like Trump's" they say, "often go hand-in-hand with street violence. But organized militias like Hitler's Brown Shirts and Benito Mussolini's Black Shirts don't spring up overnight. They evolve."

And, in retrospect, we have seen that evolution over the past fifty years in America. As the demographics have changed, we have seen diversity become the norm in American society and many whites have resented this process as they see their traditional entitlement and power slipping away. I think that there is an irony in this fact because I think that it has evolved directly from the US notion of a social 'melting pot.' Many white Americans had a vision that diversity would mix society together such that they would still live in the same society they had always known, just simply one that had people of colour still "towing the line" of traditional "white values." Ironic too is the way conservatives here in Canada have maligned and attacked policies of "multi-culturalism," because I suspect it has been such policies that have actually prevented the white population from feeling too entitled and waking up suddenly, as many have done in the US, feeling as though they have been "taken over." In other words, while many Canadians have grown gradually accustomed to a diverse society, many white Americans have been "taken by surprise" by what they perceive to be a suddenly changing demographic. I understand this process empirically because when I grew up in the US, it was clear to me that immigrants and "non-whites" were simply expected to "integrate" into US society. When I came to Canada still in my youth, I experienced a very different attitude. Though racism was still evident, I saw that there was a much greater expectation that there was strength and enrichment in diversity and that we could celebrate different cultural aspects and still unite together. This issue is exactly why, when Harper and his minions tried to stoke the flames of racism as a way of getting reelected, they were considerably less successful than someone like Trump could be.

What happens in the next few months and years in the US is anyone's guess. Fascism doesn't happen with a sudden coup or the election of an autocrat. It begins years before when a nation lets its anger, bigotry, and hate take over its political discourse, a tendency which inevitably slides into violence.

The sad state of the NDP. . . .

Today on the CBC Morning radio program in Ottawa Robin Bresnahan interviewed Robin Maclachlan, former NDP staffer and spin doctor, about the coming NDP convention, the confidence vote that will take place there, and the general question of 'renewal' in the Party. This interview was a classic example of political double-speak and gobbledygook, a typical meaningless conversation that, ironically, verified the very irrelevancy of the NDP that Mr. Maclachlan claims that he fears. First of all, let's make something clear - Robin Maclachlan is, to begin with, the very personification of what is wrong with the NDP; he is a typical politico, a talking head, a middle-aged (if youngish) white man in a suit who has raised to the level of an art form the practice of saying absolutely nothing. Like most of the upper echelon of the NDP policy wonks and strategists, Mr. Maclachlan wouldn't know innovation or renewal if it dropped on him from the sky; which, incidentally, is exactly what it would take for any positive change in the tired, calcified party that has become the NDP.  Anyone who has seen an NDP convention in action understands that this party is like the other major parties in Canada (and much of the Western world): a top down organization in which nothing even hits the convention floor unless the leaders so decree it. In my mind it is a tragic irony for this Party to retain the word "democratic" in its name because that is simply not how it operates. And this problem was demonstrated not only by Robin Maclachlan's double-speak but by the fact that he carefully crafted his discourse to largely disregard the need for new leadership in what he says is an important 'need' for renewal.

What is clear, or should be clear, is that the NDP does, indeed, need renewal if it is to remain relevant. But what is also clear is that renewal means not only getting rid of the present leadership of the NDP, it means wiping the slate clean of people like Maclachlan, Anne Mcgrath, Brad Laviegn and their ilk. The failure of the NDP is both rooted in the top-down party structure and the hopelessness of its leaders and spokespeople, but it is also rooted in the fact that the NDP is saying almost nothing about the real crises facing our country and the world. People like Robin Maclachlan sound just like the spokespeople of the Liberals and the Conservatives because he is just another comfortable, mainstream, middle-class, largely braindead wonk who is either too afraid to face the truth or too thick. From an economic point of view, Canada (as well as global capitalism) is in a crisis of distribution. The total failure of our governments to ensure that wealth is properly distributed through the socioeconomic system means not only massive inequality (political, social, and economic) in society, but it actually means a breakdown in the system itself. But the NDP, the party that one would expect to be the very voice of this crisis, said nothing during the last election, and continues to say nothing of this issue. Ironically, Bernie Sanders is saying considerably more about these issues than any mainstream Canadian politician. If the NDP really wants to renew itself and become relevant once again, it needs to face up to the real issues in our country, not the meaningless garbage that the corporate establishment hegemony 'allows' us to talk about such as vague issues of "middle-class" pain and the tinkering with established socioeconomic status quo. The last election demonstrated that the NDP, though slightly more progressive than the other parties, is not interested in talking about real solutions to the inequalities in our system because that means a real and radical change in discourse; it means saying point-blank that there is a growing crisis in capitalism itself. But the NDP doesn't seem to want to talk about these issues any more than any other party.

Robin Maclachlan and other NDPers will go to Edmonton in a few weeks talking about renewal and change, and they will change nothing, the will renew nothing. It will emerge still a top-down party with a terrible (Harper-like) leader, where nothing of the grassroots issues make headway and no one talks about the underlying issues that are creating the crises we face. It is fine to say we are in favour of a national pharma-care program or a national child-care program, but those things won't mean anything until we face up to the distribution crisis that was created by the Liberals and the Conservatives over the past forty years.