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The Internet thinks I want to see chess videos.  Which eccentrically is true, although it has been many years since I was actively mediocre at the board.  But it also believes I want to see Ontario government infrastructure ads, which suggests a misreading of the situation almost as gruesome as that of most governments.

The particular ad that got my attention, and my goat, is a slick little "Building Ontario" number that says "Infrastructure is more than just construction" then touts a new school, public transit and a hospital.  "It's how we build a strong community."  And you'll notice, at least if you're me, that Rashid Nezhmetdinov was an unappreciated attacking genius.

No, sorry, that was the chess video.  What you'll notice in that ad is that everything mentioned, in a soothing voice to cheery music, is governmental.  Evidently we don't build strong communities by volunteering, building a business or raising our own kids.  We do it through the state.

The ad doesn't argue these things.  It assumes them.  And that mentality could be building trouble because the state seems to be stretched well beyond its capacities without having any inkling that it is so, especially given a John Ivison column in Tuesday's National Post suggesting Canada could be in the early stages of a tax revolt.  He says an unexpected $2 billion drop in income tax revenue in Ontario "may have yielded the tax equivalent of a butterfly moving its wings in one jurisdiction and causing a tornado in another."

The Ontario numbers Ivison cites suggest that our governments are starting to slide down the back side of the Laffer Curve.  Yes, it's back, despite the chattering classes' persistent efforts to banish it through ridicule and denunciation, as though it were merely a matter of attitude whether excessive tax rates reduce revenue by stifling the economy and prompting active measures to avoid them.

Ivison argues that combined federal-provincial tax rates exceeding 50% in six provinces including Ontario and Quebec mark a significant psychological point beyond which avoiding the excessive tax burden becomes a priority.  But if so, it affects more than accounting.  It affects people's attitude toward the state, which for far too many Canadians has for far too long been one of indulgence.

Politicians are fond of the phrase "their fair share" when it comes to taxes.  But they never say what anyone's "fair share" is.  And more than 50 cents on a dollar doesn't strike almost anyone as fair, especially when it's them.  When the government takes more than half of every extra dollar you earn, it is not just hard to find the motivation given that you are probably already working hard and possibly also taking considerable risks in pursuit of income.  It also makes you feel abused and unappreciated.

For that reason, if there really is a tax revolt coming, it won't just affect taxes.  It will affect the ability of governments to spend, directly by reducing the money available and indirectly by reducing public intellectual and political support for ever-expanding government.

Such a development would bring serious trouble for our political class, because I see little evidence that they can even grasp the proposition that enough is enough, let alone that they could act on it.  The same day that Ivison's article appeared, a bewildered New York Times commentary on Germany's political paralysis approvingly quoted a German analyst lamenting the absence of a grand vision when "the German economy is thriving, meaning that the new government will be in the enviable position of having the financial means to develop projects and undertake reforms like never before."

Like never before?  Really?  An expansion of the state on a far grander scale even than from 1960 through 1990?  That's what you think current EU circumstances call for?  Yet which of our political parties does not also offer a grand vision of increased public activity and spending?

I do not think there is a province in Canada, or a nation in the West, where there is serious political or intellectual discussion about reducing the size of the state anything like the intellectual ferment we saw in the 1980s, however disappointing the results of Brian Mulroney, Mike Harris, or even Ralph Klein, Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan were in practice.  Except perhaps from a few outlying think tanks and weirdo journalists who spend their spare time watching old Mikhail Tal games.

Finance ministries and political war rooms may brush off this temporary dip in revenue.  The programs are beneficial and popular, and hence sustainable economically and politically.  But what if they're not?  A recent C.D. Howe Institute study saying "Canada's greying workforce will spell big fiscal trouble for future taxpayers" estimated that, among other things, "the present value of the unfunded liability for age-related social spending — amounts to $4.5 trillion."  It went on to make some prudent suggestions for staving off disaster which you can find on their website.  But are governments listening, or do they have their fingers in their ears?

If Ivison is right, this surprising Ontario fiscal news is just the beginning, and people in government should be making plans for the scenario in which revenue starts falling because the state is too big.  I don't ask them to like it.  But if it does happen and they're not ready, it will be checkmate, for them and us.  And it won't be fun to watch.

Photo Credit: Jeff Burney Loonie Politics

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.


The strategic brilliance of the staff and faculty of Wilfrid Laurier University really must be commended.  They've managed to turn a low-grade teaching moment into an international free-speech nuclear showdown.

You see, what happened was teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd showed a TVO clip with a debate about gender-neutral pronouns that included University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson.  Someone complained to the university and Shepherd was reprimanded under the WLU's gendered and sexual violence policy.  Then she was dragged before a panel of faculty and raked over the coals for nearly an hour.

On that panel was her supervising professor Nathan Rambukkana, another professor, Herbert Pimlott, and Adria Joel, the acting manager of gendered violence prevention and support at the university.

The panel, led by Rambukkana, started by assuming Shepherd was one of Peterson's students (she never was) and continued in fairly quick order until Hitler was dragged in.  The faculty show that they have plenty of familiarity with the popular figures on the dingbat right, by naming several.*  The worst part is when Rambukkana says, quite earnestly, Shepherd was in violation of bill C-16, which was the absurd bullshit conspiracy Peterson himself was peddling months before.

We know exactly how things went because Shepherd recorded the meeting.  You can hear the whole thing for yourself over at the National Post.  Naturally, WLU and Rambukkana decided that, once everyone knew exactly what happened in that room, they should apologize.  So they did.

But by waiting so long, they allowed the public debate on their actions to activate the worst parts of our society.

Take our friend Peterson.  Here's a guy raking in tens of thousands of dollars every month built initially on his idea that he wouldn't use the preferred pronouns of LGBTQ people.  In essence, he was being asshole, unwilling to be even halfway decent to the people around him, and indignant that people would ask him to**.  And in the way these things go, instead of calling him what he is — which, again, is an asshole — and left him to blather in a corner, he was turned into some kind of martyr for free speech when UofT mulled censuring him.  This is, of course, the worst thing you can do.

But we keep repeating it.  This strategy of going bananas every time he shows up is only working for Peterson, not against him.  The intention behind his censure was good — he was being cruel to vulnerable people — but the outcome was bad — it made him famous.

So this latest episode of a massive faculty overreaction at Laurier played right into the narrative that he's built up around himself.

If one of the adults had stopped for a even a second to see how far this thing had gone from reality, none of this would be happening.  If her professor had decided to handle the complaint like a reasonable person and just talked to his TA about the complaint, he could have avoided the kangaroo court, and likely solved the problem right there.

In his apology, Rambukkana, goes on at great length to say how much better he could have done.  But he also takes a lot of time to tell Shepherd what she did wrong though the process.  As if that moment was now, in an open letter, to make the points he should have made weeks ago, in private.

The initial failure here was a teaching assistant playing a clip in a seminar that seems to have been outside what the course called for.  As people with actual experience as TAs have pointed out, Shepherd was going beyond her responsibilities by adding her own material in.  How far is up for debate, but the clip she showed wasn't part of the professor's plan.  Fair enough.

If some adult at the university — say, her designated mentor â€” had just said, "Hey, you shouldn't do it that way next time, one of your students found it very troubling," this whole thing could have been avoided.  It would be a story of a professor-in-training learning a teaching lesson, which isn't a story at all.

It doesn't matter if the TA made the first mistake, the people who knew better have the responsibility to do right by everyone.  Instead, they decided to railroad Shepherd, and not back down until massive public pressure made them realize they were in the wrong.

Now the wet-brained right has picked up on the whole sorry tale.  And after finding a new martyr, they've predictably turned some of their rage onto the very people the faculty were trying to protect.

Instead of a story of bonkers international free-speech-crushing university bureaucracy, it would have been a story of a professor doing his goddamned job.  Instead of waiting until a full recording came out to apologize, one of the adults could have realized they were being absurd.  Instead of feeding an insatiable army of trolls, there would have been nothing.

But none of that happened, because nothing makes sense anymore.  The right gets to claim its won another argument and the left fights about who's most wronged, and the world burns a little more.

Great work, everyone.  Really great.

***

* In at least one instance, Pimlott drops Hitler, Peterson, and Richard Spencer in quick, rambling succession.  It's one of the most hilarious examples of academic wordsalad I've ever seen, so transcendental it can only be read as comedy.

** As @moebius_strip, a post-secondary math instructor, put it to me: "In the midst of the current controversy, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that a post-secondary instructor is probably in the top quintile if they can remember all their students' names by the end of the term.…I should emphasize that this stuff literally never comes up in my classes.  I don't need to know my students' gender ID.  I address them all using the pronoun 'you.'"

Photo Credit: Wilfrid Laurier University

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.