Stephen Harper is so relentlessly disciplined and careful with his words that he’s far less prone to verbal slips than, say, former U. S. President George W. Bush. However, he recently said something pretty strange in the course of answering a question about when it would be appropriate to address the “root cause” of terrorism, during a press conference he held with the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.

“I think, though, this is not a time to commit sociology, if I can use an expression,” Harper said. “These things are serious threats, global terrorist attacks, people who have agendas of violence that are deep and abiding threats to all the values our society stands for.”

Commit sociology? As if sociology were some sort of crime? Perhaps if he’d been speaking from a prepared text he would have said “indulge in sociology”, or something else that didn’t imply sociologists belonged in jail. Or perhaps he really did mean that sociological investigation of the causes of terrorism, if not of other matters, was morally suspect. It’s hard to know.

The rest of Harper’s answer, though, was all too clear:

“I don’t think we want to convey any view to the Canadian public other than our utter condemnation of this kind of violence, contemplation of this violence and our utter determination through our laws and our activities to do everything we can to prevent it and counter it,” Harper said.

Apparently Harper’s view is that terrorists don’t need to be understood, but only opposed. He really seems to believe that thinking at an analytical level, rather than a tactical one, is at best a waste of time and at worst a sin that one must not “commit”. I suppose this could be the result of being so wedded to a moralistic rather than pragmatic view of human affairs that attempting to understand the motivations behind a terrorist attack seems equivalent to justifying or at least excusing it: the idea of dispassionate analysis divorced from praise and blame may simply not compute as far as Harper is concerned.

To me the idea that condemnation is the only worthwhile response to a terrorist attack seems wretchedly myopic and anti-intellectual, not to mention simply foolish. How are Harper’s beloved RCMP supposed to adequately “counter” terrorists without understanding their motivations? It’s shallow and unskeptical to think that terrorists attack simply because they have “agendas of violence” (or, for that matter, simply because they feel “excluded”, although feelings of alienation must often be part of the mix). Those “agendas” arise for intelligible if sometimes eccentric reasons, and the grievances that ultimately drive them are generally real enough. The view that Harper should be conveying to the Canadian public is that root causes are well worth trying to untangle, if only to stand a better chance of nipping terrorist attacks in the bud.

Unfortunately, Harper doesn’t seem capable of appreciating that sort of logic. His natural combativeness, his seemingly instinctive desire to divide the world into “us” and “them” and fight hard against “them” until they finally collapse, gets in the way. This is why, even though I actually approve of some decisions that have been taken under Harper’s watch, I consider him temperamentally and attitudinally unfit for office. A man who can deal with the complexities of the world only in such Manichaean terms shouldn’t be making decisions that affect tens of millions of people.

On Friday, March 7, Ontario Green Party Leader, Mike Schreiner, is going to send Premier Wynne his party’s top priorities for the Ontario 2013 budget. He would like to know what you think.

1. If you had to pick just one thing, what would be your top priority for the budget?

• Modernize education by moving to one school board
• Move 2% of the transportation budget to walking and biking infrastructure right away
• Fund social assistance reform by cancelling electricity consumption subsidies
• Spur cleantech jobs with an investment tax credit
• Create a dedicated revenue stream such as road tolls to fund public transit

Please fill out the Green Party of Ontario questionnaire; tell Mike Schreiner what your priorities are.

Suggestion: “Modernize education by moving to one school board” should be the Ontario government’s top priority.

Ok, I admit it, I have on occasion watched our Parliament on television. I’m not proud of it, nor have I been particularly impressed with the often petty sniping that passes for debate in Canadian Parliament. It’s unseemly, embarrassing even.

What follows… is not that. What you are about to see is what I can only describe as a prolonged bone-crushing evisceration. Sometimes I am critical of feminists, sometimes I am critical of atheists, and sometimes I’m critical of people who participate in personal attacks. This brings together all three… and I’m just going to sit here with my mouth mostly shut.

This is, in the language of the Internetz, pure pwnage. If the Aussie PM is a fair sample of the women from down under, no wonder the men prefer to wrestle crocs. It’s less dangerous. If that is a feminist, I kinda want to be one, maybe, a little.

The House of Commons, as you’ve likely heard by now, has resoundingly defeated a curious motion from Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth that would have established a special committee of the House of Commons to study when a developing child “becomes a human being”. The motion was seen as a tentative step towards changing Canada’s legal status quo on abortion, which is basically that anything goes. To be a bit less facetious about it, Canada has no laws restricting the practice of abortion, so a pregnancy can be ended at any point up until birth. Subsection 223(1) of our criminal code says that a child is defined as a human being, in law, only “when it has completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother”. (In the rarefied thoughts of lawyers and parliamentarians, children apparently “proceed” from their mothers like Victorian ladies proceeding down a shady lane on a summer afternoon.)

I don’t want to see Canada’s legal status quo change, but I think the question of when a developing individual deserves to be thought of as human is a perfectly valid one. No objective answer is out there in the universe waiting to be discovered, but there’s much to be said for the exercise of considering different possibilities, hashing out their implications, and asking whether some seem to be more expedient, intuitively reasonable or morally desirable than others. From an atheist and/or secular perspective, it’s all part of a necessary process of continually re-examining and re-negotiating a host of issues that used to fall squarely within the domain of religious “truth”.

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Supporters of U.S. President Barack Obama sometimes get mocked for supposedly thinking of him as a virtual messiah, not just a politician. There’s at least one whole book that goes to town with this idea, and it didn’t take me long to find a couple of websites (Obama for Messiah and Is Barack Obama the Messiah?) specifically dedicated to it. I suspect that in most cases the derision is unwarranted. I’ve met a fair number of people from various countries who like Obama, including a few who really, really like him, and they’ve generally had intelligible non-messianic reasons for doing so. However, the man does attract more than his share of quasi-unhinged testimonials with an uncomfortably religious ring to them. The other day the Globe and Mail published a fine example of the genre from Judith Timson:

We have all in our own ways been stakeholders in the promise of the Obamas.

For it wasn’t just American voters who chose him to be “The One,” lining up for hours outside of polling stations four years ago, in Mr. Obama’s victory-night words, to “put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”

Silly me, I thought it actually was only American voters who got to pick American presidents. Maybe picking “The One” is different, although Timson doesn’t explain exactly how. Continue reading →

Like some half-legendary sea monster that spends the preponderance of its time cruising the lightless depths, the topic of Stephen Harper’s religious beliefs has recently broken the surface and made a rare appearance in mainstream Canadian newspapers. The first tentacle shot out of the water in the form of a Globe and Mail piece by Lawrence Martin, which picked up (somewhat oddly) on an article that had appeared in the Tyee back in March.

Apparently Stephen Harper belongs to something called the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CM Alliance), an evangelical Protestant movement that was founded in the United States in the late 19^th century and has since crystallized into a denomination. Taking his cues from Andrew Nikiforuk of the Tyee, Martin expresses concern that Harper’s religiosity might be partly responsible for some of his government’s more unsavoury characteristics:

Much has been made of the government’s muzzling of the science community, its low regard for statistics, its hard line against environmentalists.

Because Stephen Harper otherwise appears to be a clear-headed rationalist, there is some wonder about the motivation for these impulses, including the question of whether they are triggered by his evangelical beliefs. The Prime Minister is a member of the Alliance Church, more specifically the Christian and Missionary Alliance. The church believes the free market is divinely inspired and views science and environmentalism with what might be called scorn.

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