Author: Linda McQuaig

In a real head-scratcher, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in June 2016 that sexual contact with an animal was legal, as long as there was no penetration.

Whatever uncertainty that created for Canadians is now gone. The Trudeau government’s new animal welfare legislation, passed by Parliament last month, stipulates that any sexual contact with an animal is illegal, and toughens up the rules against bestiality and other off-beat animal abuse practices.

One might conclude that, perhaps in response to increased public sensitivity, the government is cracking down on the worst mistreatment of animals.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

While the new legislation will help protect a relatively small number of animals from unwanted sexual advances from their owners, it provides no protection whatsoever for the hundreds of millions of animals living miserable, pain-filled lives trapped inside our factory farming system.

Most people can imagine that these animals experience some unpleasantness the last day or two of their lives.

But few people realize that — while there are some minimal regulations governing the transport and slaughter of animals — there are effectively no laws protecting their welfare during the rest of their lives.

The powerful factory farming industry has managed to keep its animal practices largely beyond the reach of government regulation.

Instead, in a classic case of allowing the fox to guard the henhouse, governments have handed the industry the power to draw up its own “codes of conduct” to govern how the animals in its custody will be treated.

These industry-written codes permit some brutal procedures, including common practices such as sawing off the horns of cows and the beaks of chickens — practices known to cause excruciating pain.

And Trudeau’s new legislation won’t stop any of this, according to U of T adjunct law professor and litigator Lesli Bisgould.

The new legislation is an update of legislation originally enacted in 1892 to ensure humane practices. Bisgould says the laws haven’t been strengthened much in the past 127 years — even though the family farm, where animals grazed in open pastures, has largely been replaced by today’s industrial farms, where animals are confined in cramped quarters, with pigs and cows often chained in crates and cages too small for them to even turn around.

Typically, these animals experience the outdoors for the first time — often after years of confinement — as they’re loaded onto trucks bound for the slaughterhouse.

“With increasingly mechanized operations hurriedly processing 700 million animals every year, the notion of humane practices becomes absurd,” observes Bisgould in her powerful book Animals and the Law.

The failure of our legal system to keep pace with the new reality of farming is at odds with the considerable evolution that’s taken place in popular attitudes toward animals.

While animals were historically seen as creatures with little resemblance to humans, modern scientists, starting with Charles Darwin, have identified a much closer connection between humans and higher animals. Darwin observed that the difference is “one of degree not of kind.”

According to the eminent anthropologist Jane Goodall: “Farm animals feel pleasure and sadness, excitement and resentment, depression, fear and pain. They are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined.”

Of course, animals can’t talk, compose piano concertos, or understand the laws of thermodynamics.

To their credit, however, they lack some of the worst traits found in humans — deceitfulness, cruelty, greed, sexual treachery. It’s hard to imagine an animal version of Jeffrey Epstein or Donald Trump.

Certainly the dividing line between humans and animals isn’t as clear as once believed. Yet the legal divide remains vast — on one side, humans enjoy extensive legal protections covering all aspects of our lives. On the other side, animals have virtually no protections, even against the infliction of extreme pain.

It’s hard to see much of a moral justification for this vast difference, beyond the fact that we make the rules.

In recent years, concern about animals has become something of a hot-button issue among progressives. And the Trudeau government clearly wants to be seen to be in sync with this wave — even as it leaves utterly unprotected hundreds of millions of animals trapped in horrendous conditions inside the secretive world of factory farming.

Originally published in the Toronto Star.

It’s possible that the world’s top climate scientists are lying.

If so, we can relax and feel confident that Justin Trudeau has dealt with the climate crisis in the appropriate way.

Although the prime minister approved the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline last month, he’s vowed to channel pipeline profits into clean energy projects. Compared to the Conservatives, Trudeau’s climate package, which includes taxes on carbon, seems reasonable and balanced — with a sweetener of environmental activism thrown in. (After all, it’s 2019.)

But if climate scientists are not lying, if they’re just honestly reporting their scientific findings, Trudeau’s package is a dangerous fraud — one that gives us a false sense that we can dramatically increase output from Alberta’s oilsands without seriously imperiling the world, and ourselves.

I’m inclined to believe the scientists. Convened by the United Nations, they reviewed more than 6,000 scientific studies and reported last fall that we have only about a dozen years left if we are to prevent truly dire climate conditions which go well beyond the kind of horrific wildfires, heat waves, droughts and floods we’re already experiencing.

To avoid this, the scientists on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called on the world to make urgent and unprecedented changes that would dramatically reduce our fossil fuel consumption.

The chances of the world doing so are, of course, slim.

But that slim hope would be reduced to a thread by the Trans Mountain expansion, which would triple the pipeline’s capacity to transport the province’s heavy crude oil, one of the world’s dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuels.

That would be equivalent to adding 34 million cars to our roads, according to the environmental group Oil Change International.

Renowned U.S. climate scientist James Hansen has said if Alberta’s oilsands are fully exploited, it’s “game over.”

So Trudeau’s promise to direct pipeline profits to clean energy — as good as that sounds — is like allowing cigarettes to be sold to kids as long as tobacco companies make generous donations to cancer research.

Given the Canadian political landscape, Trudeau’s compromise may seem like the best we can do. But, as Winston Churchill once said: “Sometimes it is not enough to do our best; we must do what is required.”

By that standard, we’re failing miserably.

With climate change increasingly in the headlines, it’s easy to be lulled into believing the world is finally cutting carbon emissions. In fact, they continue to rise.

The climate has warmed roughly 1 C since the 1850s, and it’s expected to warm another half-degree, due to carbon already in the atmosphere. The big question is whether we can hold it to 1.5 C — a level of warming with severe but manageable consequences. At 2 C, it gets truly scary.

Ottawa admits Canada is far from meeting its carbon-reduction targets. This understates our poor performance.

A 2018 study published in the journal Nature Communications ranked Canada among countries with the world’s least effective climate policies. The study found that if Canada’s policies were adopted worldwide, global temperatures would rise by a disastrous 5.1 C by the end of the century. And that assessment was made before Trudeau approved the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

Given the potential catastrophe ahead, it’s amazing the subject is often discussed with detachment.

Economist Moshe Lander of Concordia University recently argued that, with the world moving toward a carbon-free future, Alberta’s oil should be extracted while there’s still time; “it’s sort of a now or never approach.”

This attitude — let’s dump every bit of carbon into the air while we can still make a buck from it! — reveals a stunning indifference to the enormity of the crisis we face, and the fighting spirit we’ll need to summon if we’re going to save ourselves and future generations.

Winston Churchill demonstrated that sort of fighting spirit when he vowed in 1940: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets …”

Imagine if he’d settled for: “We’ll do our best. But we have to balance the need to fight tyranny with the need to create jobs.”

Originally published in the Toronto Star.

We can see Doug Ford is a man who is comfortable swinging an axe through some of our most cherished social programs.

But to truly understand Ontario’s smiling premier — to look deep into his soul, as it were — we must consider why he is being so brutal.

He insists he has no choice, that the Ontario’s mounting deficits force him to cut the province’s budgets for health care, education, child care, libraries, legal aid, student loans, flood control, tree planting and anything else that moves, grows or matters in our lives. (A similar claim of necessity was made by the debt-plagued New Zealand government in the 1990s when it ordered the shooting of a newborn hippo at the zoo, explaining it couldn’t afford to expand the pen.)

Nevertheless, preventing debt from spiralling out of control sounds like a plausible explanation for Ford’s spending cuts — until one notices his tax cuts. That’s when it becomes clear the premier is, well, lying.

Let’s not forget that a deficit is simply the shortfall in the province’s budget — and it can be the result of too much spending or too little revenue.

The Ford government wants us to believe that Ontario’s deficit is caused by too much spending. But after years of stagnant social spending in Ontario, that’s a hard case to make.

Indeed, by any reasonable measure, Ontario is a laggard in social spending. As Ontario’s non-partisan Financial Accountability Office (FAO) notes, Ontario already has the lowest program spending (per capita) among Canada’s 10 provinces — before Ford’s spending cuts click in.

So pointing to Ontario’s ultralow social spending as the cause of Ontario’s deficit is about as credible as Donald Trump’s claim that his inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama’s.

If not spending, then what is driving Ontario’s deficit?

Again, the FAO provides some revealing clues, noting that Ontario also has the lowest revenue (per capita) of any of the provinces. While the provincial average for revenue (per capita) is $12,373, Ontario only collects $10,415 (per capita) — a significantly smaller amount.

Therein lies the dirty secret of Ontario’s deficit — too little revenue.

And Ford is making the problem worse by cutting taxes a further $3.6 billion a year, notes Sheila Block, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

Even Moody’s, the Wall Street credit rating agency, pointed to Ontario’s low revenue — and Ford’s tax cuts driving it lower — as the main deficit culprit when it downgraded the province’s credit rating last December.

All this suggests Ford is faking his concern about the deficit.

He harps on it to justify his spending cuts, but actually makes it worse by collecting less tax revenue. (Sadly, the media rarely focus on the province’s revenue shortfall, helping Ford perpetuate the myth that deficits are always a spending problem.)

Ford’s measures — despite his claim to be acting “for the people” — redirect resources from ordinary people to corporations and the rich.

The spending cuts will save the province money so Ford can reduce corporate taxes, even though a decade of corporate tax cuts has failed to produce the promised additional business investment. Never mind. There will be more for corporations to distribute among their shareholders.

And, in the name of “protecting what matters most,” Ford is reopening a host of loopholes favouring high-income individuals — like the scam that enables business owners to “sprinkle” income among adult family members, who face a lower tax rate, even when those relatives don’t work for the family business.

In an op-ed in the Star earlier this week, Ford’s Treasury Board president Peter Bethlenfalvy insisted the government’s measures aren’t driven by ideology, just by math.

Well, here’s some different math. Another approach would be to actually address the province’s real deficit problem: its revenue shortfall.

The CCPA shows how this could be done — by cancelling Ford’s tax cuts, adding a very small increase in corporate and personal taxes (excluding those with taxable incomes below $50,000). The result would be a declining deficit, and the restoration — even expansion — of our social programs.

It could be called a budget “for the people.” But in this case, it would actually be true.

Originally published in the Toronto Star.

In the future, people will probably continue to marvel at how creatures with tiny brains once stalked the Earth unchallenged.

For now, however, billionaires reign supreme, with only a small stirring of dissent, led by the impressive U.S. congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC.

Maybe my Spanish isn’t good enough, but on a quick read-through of the Venezuelan constitution I couldn’t find the section where it specified that Venezuela’s president would be chosen by Canada.

I’m sure the section must be in there, however, because Canada exercised that power last week in recognizing Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president — even though the Venezuelan people had chosen Nicolas Maduro in national elections last year.

The Trudeau government, assuming a leadership role as host of the “Lima Group,” explained that Maduro is not legitimate because the national elections he won were flawed, allowing the presidency to fall to Guaido, the head of the national assembly.

(Similarly, once it has been established that the 2016 U.S. elections were flawed by Russian meddling, we can expect the Trudeau government to recognize Nancy Pelosi as the legitimate president of the United States.)

The turmoil in Venezuela has faded from the news somewhat this week, but the real action is just beginning. U.S. President Donald Trump has assembled a team of hatchetmen, including war-hawks John Bolton and Elliott Abrams, to work on regime change in Venezuela.

It was this team that set things in motion late last month with a phone call from Vice President Mike Pence to Guaido, pledging U.S. support “if he seized the reins of government,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Canada has called for a peaceful transition. But if the U.S. invades Venezuela to formally install Guaido, Canada will have played its part in teeing things up.

Washington has been focused on regime change in Venezuela since the charismatic Hugo Chavez won the 1998 election with massive support from the nation’s poor, and began redirecting the country’s oil wealth to health care, education and poverty alleviation. The privileged classes, who had managed the oil industry and siphoned billions out of the country, strongly resisted Chavez and later his successor Maduro.

As tensions escalated in the deeply polarized nation, the Trump administration imposed brutal sanctions that, along with falling world oil prices and economic mismanagement, have devastated the Venezuelan economy. Canada piled on its own sanctions which, while not as broad, lent credence to the idea that Venezuela deserved punishment.

The Trudeau government talks about restoring democracy to Venezuela, hoping to keep the focus off any suspicions that our involvement is helping Washington get control of Venezuela’s oil reserves, which happen to be the world’s largest.

One problem for Canada in confining the story to this “restoring democracy” narrative is that the Trump administration talks unabashedly about its keenness to open up Venezuela’s oil to development by U.S. oil companies, after years of it being under the control of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.

Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, showed this keenness in an interview last week on Fox Business when he said: “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”

This could amount to “massive opportunities” for U.S. oil companies, said Scott Modell, a CIA agent turned energy analyst, in an interview last week on CBC Radio’s “As It Happens.”

Modell added that Trump is relying on the support of ultra-conservative governments in Argentina and Brazil (both members of the Lima Group) to bring about regime change in Venezuela.

But Canada is useful in a different way. Unlike those notorious right-wing Latin governments, Canada under Justin Trudeau has cultivated an image in the world as a “rule of law” country, with Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland rhapsodizing about a rules-based international order in defiance of Trump’s unilateralism.

Her apparent willingness to “defy” Trump only adds to Canada’s credibility with many Western nations. No doubt this helped when Trudeau phoned a number of foreign leaders, including those of Ireland and Italy, to line up international support for Guaido.

This Canadian credibility could also provide some cover for Washington if it uses force to install Guaido. After all, it will be installing a regime that has been endorsed by law-abiding Canada.

And so the Trudeau government presents itself as championing international law, in defiance of Trump, even when it’s acting as Trump’s wingman.

Originally published in the Toronto Star.