Opinions on Global Warming: to Take Action or Not

    This is just an initial posting on a topic that I will, no doubt, visit again and again during the course of my blogging career (hobby).  Global warming is a topic that is deriving a great deal of attention from people all over the world, and deservedly so.  Whether you are for or against taking action on global warming, you should be greatly concerned because scientists and politicians all over the world are talking about spending trillions of dollars and shifting corporate dominance from some industries to others by decree.  If governments take the action that scientists are urging it may greatly affect your wealth, what job you have and possibly even where you are able to live.  If they fail to take this action it may greatly affect your wealth, what job you have and possibly even where you are able to live.  In either case, moreover, it is no stretch to see that at least some parts of the world (maybe yours) are likely to be affected in terms of quality of life, national (political) power and susceptibility to war.  Island nations and coastal cities may or may not be inundated by rising seas.  Species of animals may or may not go extinct.  Populations may or may not have to shift geographically.  In short, whether or not the world's governments take action on global warming and, if they do, what action they take or don't take, IS IMPORTANT!

    Here, at the close of 2009, shortly after the close of (yes, I'll say it point blank) the ineffective, failed Copenhagen Conference, there is almost no scientific controversy over the clearly established fact that the world is warming climatically.  There is also no scientific controversy over the fact that some significant portion of this warming is due to anthropogenic factors (caused by human activities).  The only real controversy among scientists is over what number to put at measuring this anthropogenic portion and in how many degrees centigrade global temperature will be raised by some target date.

    In this short posting I would simply like to focus attention on the NEED FOR EVIDENCE, no matter what your position is.  I never cease to be amazed, truly amazed, when people arguing for or against taking action on any given postulation, be it political, economic, ecological or what have you, do so without consideration of or reference to the evidence.  Whether your views match mine, parallel mine or directly oppose mine, they will be of interest to me and have a chance of affecting my position only if they are accompanied by or refer me to the readily accessible hard evidence (not just some other 'experts' conclusion) upon which your views are based.  No matter who your favourite or most trusted authorities are, authority itself is not a scientific argument.  No evidence-based position becomes less respectable simply because it is favoured or put forward by a fool or a liar.  No evidence-based position becomes more respectable simply because it is favoured or put forward by a well liked and trusted authority.

    So, please people, present your evidence, or refer me to that accessible evidence, for whichever action or inaction you care to propose.  I find truly horrifying the amount of shear blather that is out there on radio, television and the net, which can never be considered anything other than blather simply because no effort is made to refer the listener to the evidence, or some readily accessible source of the evidence, for or against any particular position.

    My personal position on the reality of global warming, having reviewed a great deal of published evidence over the course of several decades, is that global climatic warming is incontrovertibly occurring.  In line with my comments above, I should either present the evidence here, or I should direct the reader to a reference for the evidence.  I will do so, very simply, thus: Go to the web-searching site of your choice (I like Google) type in "weather records" plus the name of the city, province and country of your choice.  You will quickly be presented with a list of numerous sites at which you can see, free of charge, the daily weather records of at least one weather station in or near that city. Compare those weather records with the long term, 30 year averages for the same site (a standard reference in climatology).  This requires no particular scientific education, just the ability to add, subtract and divide.  Weather, averaged over decades, equals climate.  Do this for weather stations all over the world and you will be convinced that, even though some sites  have cooled, globally the planet has warmed  measurably, especially in the far northern and far southern regions.  Case closed! Don't try to sway me with cracks about conspiracy theories or reference to some jerk who got caught in a lie.  Those comments are irrelevant.  All that really counts is the hard evidence for warming and that is readily available to anyone who cares to look, free of charge.

    Now, as to the case for how much of this warming is due to anthropogenic causes, I cannot express a firm opinion as I have not done a personal study and cannot put numbers to the mensuration of anthropogenic causes relative to the observed amount of global warming.  What I can say is this: We, as a species, are pouring billions of tons of carbon-dioxide and methane into the atmosphere every year (again a simple internet search of "tons of carbon-dioxide" or "tons of methane" will present a list of numerous sites that put hard numbers to this).  These gasses have measurable and measured effects as warming "greenhouse" gasses (the hard numbers freely and readily available on the net).  I would love to have someone explain to me, with evidence, how we can possibly do this year after year after year and not contribute significantly to the observed warming of the planet.  Please someone, if you read this and think you can present such an evidence-based argument, leave me a comment at the end of this posting; I would love to hear from you.

    In summary: opinion, minus evidence, can be OK.  We should all feel free to express an opinion on many topics even if that opinion is based only on a feeling or a hope.  However, if the opinion takes the form of a recommendation for or against taking action on something as potentially life altering as global warming, base your opinion on hard and publicly accessible evidence or your opinion simply isn't worth the time it takes to hear it.

Welcome to Dilbertville

    Everybody has them: examples of situations from their own workplace that resemble a Dilbert© cartoon more than what you expect from reality.  I can think of examples from nearly every major organization I have every been a part of,  in University, in the museums and government organizations I have worked for and in the commercial businesses I have worked for, not least of which is the one I currently work for.

    Dealing with managers who only vaguely understand how the business they run works is a phenomenon that is as old as human organizations.  It has gone by many different names and has been expressed in many different ways, depending on the nature and complexity of the particular organization under examination.  In recent history, two contributing phenomena have been identified under the names "The Peter Principle" (see, for example, the 1969 book of that name by Lawrence J Peter and Raymond Hull) and the "Dilbert Principle." (see, for example, the 1996 book of that name by Scott Adams).

    There are reams of analyses of these principles as they relate to the management of organizations, so I will not venture into any such now, in this forum.  I will simply re-state, for those not already familiar with the terms, what, in general terms, they refer to.  The Peter Principle refers to the phenomenon by which people in an organization tend to be promoted to their own 'level of incompetence'.  In other words, if a person was found to be competant in his position he would be promoted to a more demanding position and, if he did well at that position he would be promoted to a yet more demanding position.  Eventually this person would reach a position (perhaps middle management, perhaps upper management) at which he proved himself to be at best uninspired and at worst incompetant.  There he would stay, as people are only seldom demoted to a lower position on the command chain,  By this means the corporation would eventually become filled with uninspired or even incompetant managers, with understandably deleterious results.  In the 1970's it was suggested by many who study the functioning of organizations that this principle describes a very real, very common and very great danger to the successful operation of our various institutions.

    The Dilbert Principle is a somewhat satirical variation of the Peter Principle which observes that, in modern organizations, the least capable people tend to be promoted to management because companies need their smartest people to do the useful work.  In the humourist Scott Adams' words: "It's hard to design software, but relatively easy to run staff meetings.  This creates a situation where you have more geniuses reporting to morons than at any time in history." (see www.dilbert.com).

    Having studied organizational psychology at university and having lived my life, I can personally attest to the fact that these principles describe very real human situations; that, although similar, they are separate phenomena and that both can be in operation in any given organization at the same time.  To these, however, I would add one other simultaneously operating factor which is also well known to anyone who has studied the operation of organizations.  In any organization in which a manager's position is not absolutely secure, said manager will tend to surround himself with sycophants and will tend to actively avoid promoting more competent persons that himself to positions from which that competent underling can threaten his managerial position (through replacement).

    Let all three of these principles run rampant in a single mid-sized organization, and you get something resembling the company I currently work for.  In this company, the producers of profit are skilled and licensed professionals who, traditionally, required something of a mix of science and art in practicing their trade.  Much of the work requires reasoned selection of target persons to focus on, from a very large database of company files, and the ability to convince those target persons within a very short time frame, to deal financially with the company.  Skill also came to play in deciding precisely when and how to follow-up with customers in order to preserve or even expand their business with the company.   Individual employees tended to produce easily measurable profit in direct relation with their skill level and would be financially rewarded with salary and commission accordingly.

    The geniuses or idiots (you decide which) running my company have decided to modernize using a software program which randomly selects files to focus on and arbitrarily limits discussions with customers to no more than five minutes.  Even more disconcertingly, they now refuse to allow any of the afore mentioned professional employees to decide when or how to follow up with a customer to make sure they continue to pay the company or to convince the customer to expand their financial business with the company.  Once a customer is paying the company there is to be no more contact with the customer unless the customer calls in or they stop paying the company all together, at which point that customer's file would go back into the pool from which random selection for contact would be made by the software package.  Moreover, the software now running the show makes up-to-the-minute reports on each employee so that the CEO can tell at a glance how many minutes an employee has been working and how many contacts they have made, as well as how many minutes each has paused the program to go to the washroom, lunch or for any other reason. Additionally, compensation for producing employees, as opposed to support employees, will soon no longer be based on how much money we bring in.  Rather, it will be based on how many calls each producer completes.  In other words, the employee who brings in very little money to the company, but who completes many contacts with potential customers, will receive greater compensation that the employee who brings in more money with fewer contacts.

    The software package controlling all of this, and client support from the software-owning company in the United States, was purchased for our company at a cost of millions of dollars by two cronies of our relatively new CEO.  These two have been placed in controlling positions immediately below and answering only to the CEO.  These three, in February of this year, placed all of our branches across the country on this system simultaneously, without prior testing.  How much intelligence would it take, even if you thought all of this was a good idea, to try the system out first in one branch, or even in one department of one branch, to test its efficacy and to work out solutions to any problems that developed, before committing all sectors of the company nation-wide and irreversibly to its control.  And problems there have been.  For the first several months we had huge amounts of down-time because one portion or another of the software was simply not functioning properly.  Anyone at any managerial level who complained too much was labelled an obstacle rather than an enabler and has been threatened with being fired.  Anyone who placed greater importance on pride in their work, as opposed to fear of loss of their income, has either been fired or has chosen to leave the company voluntarily.  These include people at every level from support staff to executive vice-presidents.  Our production (profitability) has dropped considerably but all remaining managers are on-board with the explanation that this must be the fault, somehow, of the licensed producers at the bottom of the command structure.  No explanation for how we could be at fault is ever proffered.

    So why do I continue to work for this company?  For me it is just a retirement job, a continuing source of mortgage money.  The work has become, especially of late, exceedingly mindless and boring but leaves me lots of time, including holiday time, for more intellectually stimulating pursuits.  So long as my income and holiday time stay high enough to accomplish that, I will stay.  In truth, I see a distinctly humourous side to it all, as would Scott Adams and his readers.  Something compels me to stay, if only to see what will come next.  I do wonder constantly, however, if that is likely to be much longer.  The current management, it seems to me, is likely only to make things worse, not better.  Each day when I go to work, I am truly in Dilbertville.

Senate Reform: Deletion? Simple Election? or Modified Appointment.

    I have always been a staunch supporter of the Canadian Senate as an integral and important part of our system of government.  I have always felt that we do need a forum of 'sober second thought,' preferably consisting of appointed, not elected, persons who are carefully selected from among the most intelligent, educated, open-minded and respected of Canadian citizens.  Our elected Members of Parliament are too much in the limelight of, and under the thumb of, rapidly changing and often poorly informed public opinion.  Without the check of an intelligent and well educated Senate to slow down the process of lawmaking, to re-think what our parliamentarians put forward as new laws or modifications to our constitution, to recommend vital changes to those laws and constitutional modifications, we would be very much in danger of having what would amount to little more than 'mob rule by proxy.'

    Remember, the Senate cannot stop laws or constitutional changes that Parliament wants, it can only force them to slow down and reconsider the potential ramifications of those bills, if enacted, despite how popular they may be temporarily with the public at large, or because of how unpopular they may be with the public.  To be sure, very few Members of Parliament would ever want to have to function without the Senate there as a potential scapegoat.  It is frequently enough a valuable ploy for an elected Member of Parliament to be able to vote for a temporarily popular bill that he or she knows to be ill-advised or unworkable in some way and to blame the 'killing of the bill' on that nasty old Senate.  What those parliamentarians know, but never talk about publicly, is that the Senate cannot kill a bill.  It can send it back only three times for reconsideration.  Even if the bill had to wait until the next sitting of Parliament, our MP's could send it back to the Senate and force it through then.  The Senate of Canada can delay a bill but cannot stop it from being enacted.

    Although there are ill-advised calls heard now and then for elimination of the Senate, I believe most Canadians understand how vital a role the Senate plays in protecting us from our own impetuousness, or that of our elected representatives.  Laws and constitutional changes, after all, should function and function well, over long periods of time, in order to foster a stable, healthy society.  They are far too important to leave them subject to, or requiring, overly-frequent 'tweeking' in response to temporary changes in the public whim.

    In the last couple of decades, however, there have been increasing calls, especially in my native Alberta, to move to an elected Senate.  I have always been opposed to an elected Senate because I felt it would then become little more than a rubber-stamping extension of our elected Parliament.  Far from enabling better government, this would simply do away with the greatest value of the Senate which, as stated above, is to enable reconsideration of Parliamentary bills by worthy people who are not subject to necessarily impending re-election and, resultingly, rapidly fluctuating public whim.

    Of late I have had to rethink my position on this.  One example of why is the recent appointment of Mike Duffy to the Canadian Senate and his subsequent behaviour as an appointed Senator.  His boorishness, overbearing manner, ultra-partisanship and lack of transparency with regards to his immensely bloated expenditures out of the public purse make him an embarrassment to all well-meaning Canadians of any political stripe.  I hasten to add that, although Duffy is not the model of all of our Senators by any means, neither is he the only example of the depths to which our current system of appointment by the Prime Minister (who himself gains his position through a 'first past the post' party system that leaves huge sections of the Canadian population unrepresented or poorly represented in Parliament) has sunk the nature and manner of our governance.  In fact, in the last year alone Stephen Harper, the most authoritarian, controlling, secretive and ultra-Conservative Prime Minister that Canada has ever had, has appointed twenty-seven new Senators in an unprecedented orgy of partisanship.

    In order to function in a healthy manner for the benefit of all Canadians, Senators must be selected in a  more publicly structured and less partisan way.  After all, even ultra-Conservatives must realize that a time will come, as it has before, when the public psyche will swing to the left again and a more leftish Prime Minister will then be in a position to load up the Senate with patronage appointments of his favourite political hacks.  Elections and Senate appointments are not sporting events to be temporarily celebrated in terms of winners vs. losers and then forgotten (although I suspect many people, unthinkingly, tend to regard them this way).  This is how we are ruled and governed in every public aspect, and in a great many private aspects, of our lives.  IT IS IMPORTANT to every Canadian whether or not he thinks much about it.

    I too would now like to see the system for the selection of our Senators modified.  My preference would be to maintain the system of Prime Ministerial appointment, but to restrict his or her selection to a pool of elected possibles.  Elections within each Province and Territory could be held at set intervals and a group of several candidates elected by popular vote.  This would require that the candidates be able to convincingly support their own candidacy with public discussions of what their qualifications are, how they think on various issues, and why they feel they are better suited to a position of checking the power of Members of Parliament than to simply running for office as a potential Member of Parliament.  From this pool of elected candidates the Prime Minister would still have the serious input of selecting which of the candidates from each region actually become Senators.  This is not the forum in which to go into the fine details of how this system would work, but it may readily be seen that some such system would better function to satisfy the wishes and needs of the Canadian populace yet still conform to a large degree to the Prime Minister's inevitably partisan desire for wielding some controlling influence on the Senate.  At the same time, it would eliminate the worst excesses of our current system of rewarding unsuitable and even incompetent party hacks with patronage appointments on the public purse.

    I urge all Canadians to think about this seriously.  Don't be blasé about our governance and don't fall into the trap of letting our Senate become just a pack of elected 'Yes Men' (and women) for whatever major political party happens to hold sway at any given time.  I urge you further to talk openly about this with friends and colleagues.  Talk about it, e-mail and blog about it, and let's start pressing our politicians to get more serious, not just about reforming the Senate, but about reforming it in such a way that it becomes more valuable in its intended function, not less so.

Canada's Failing Democracy

    Democracy can be loosely defined as "rule by the people."  We, in Canada, call ourselves a democracy with great self-satisfaction.  Of course, democracy doesn't mean the people have to participate in a referendum on every question or every action taken by the government.  Ours is a parliamentary democracy in which our elected representatives make those decisions for us and we, in theory, can hold them accountable for their decisions at election time.

    This only works well, however, if we do let them know, in no uncertain terms, what we expect, what we like and what we do not want, frequently between elections.  When our politicians make poor or harmful decisions we should let them know immediately through letters, public protests, internet blogs, etc.  Elections themselves occur too infrequently to be the only check and balance tool we use.  In Canada, the system is severely broken and it is our (the people's) fault.

    Politicians continually get away with inaction, where action is required, and with wrongful action where different action is required.  By the time the next election roles around the politicians have, all too easily, distracted most of the population with hand-picked "platform issues", usually couched in the most general (and thereby unaccountable) of terms such as 'fighting poverty' or 'fixing the economy' or 'creating prosperity through jobs."  Following the election, they all too easily get away with simply ignoring their platform promises or watering them down  to some pathetic ghost of their original selves.

    The Harper Conservatives promised to make government more open, but have practiced the most secretive and unaccountable government we have had in Canada since World War II.  They promised to protect Canadian sovereignty in the arctic, but have done nothing concrete to ensure that sovereignty while Russia, Denmark and the U.S.A. have all taken concrete steps to encroach upon our sovereignty. They promised to ensure more jobs and job security, but continue to tie Canada's employment fate too tightly to the plateauing (if not failing) American market and western dirty oil while doing almost nothing to take advantage of the burgeoning behemoths of China and India and the far more secure job creation powers of low carbon energy sources. They promised to set Canadian elections to set dates in order to avoid unnecessary elections being arranged at the whim of some political party or parties for no other reason than the polls' indicating they might increase in parliamentary seats held at that particular time.  Then what does Harper do last fall but ignore his own proposal and call an election nobody but the Conservatives wanted simply because they 'scented' (incorrectly) the possibility of a majority Conservative government at that time.

    Yet, do Harper and his Conservative government face protest from the public for these failings?  No, the response is almost silent complacency, not because everyone, or even some vast majority, agrees with their record on these matters, but because we, by and large, find it too difficult, too time consuming, too embarrassing to speak out clearly and let the government know we are not happy.  It is much easier to sit back and say "we'll have our say in the next election."  Of course, elections themselves are a bother and cost more than ten tax dollars for each citizen so even those who are unhappy with the government tend to say "the last thing we need is another election right now,"  And what do the polls show about what the Canadian populace thinks about their government?  Polls taken just before and just after Mr. Harper's recent public recital, in which he sang a Beatles song and played the piano, indicate a huge upsurge in Harper's popularity as a political leader!!!  He doesn't have to perform well as a leader week by week and month by month, he simply has to perform moderately well, on a particular night, as a stage entertainer?  The answer to this last question is apparently, and to the great shame of all Canadians, yes!  I'll say it again, Canada's political system is very badly broken and it's our own fault.

Future Human Evolution?

    I remember my mother, when I was about 10 years old, saying words to the effect that: "... many thoughtful, wise, educated people suggest that humanity has stopped evolving now ... that we evolved this far over the last three to four billion years but have now reached where we were 'intended' to reach in biological terms."  She stated, furthermore, her belief that our future evolution would be in terms of cultural change, not biological change.  These words had a deep effect on me as they both gave me deeper insight into my mother's character and beliefs and, at the same time, distanced me further from her.  To my mother, although she was not stating this as unquestionable dogma, the lack of future biological evolution in humanity was a comforting thought which helped to unify her educated belief in science and evolution with her "fuzzier" Christian faith in the presence of a God who wanted us to live forever, after death, in heaven.  I suspect most people of faith share some similar version of this belief.

    I have heard what amounts to the same view expressed by many atheist and agnostic friends, colleagues and acquaintances.  They do not share my mother's belief in a teleological universe ruled by the plan of an intelligence intending to create us by means of evolution, but neither do they seem to be able to envisage a future in which evolution continues to operate on humanity in any meaningful way.  They do not even foresee our deliberately manipulating the genes of our children and their children's children's children in any great way other than minor tinkering with factors such as aging or general susceptibility to various diseases.  In short, almost everyone I know seems to believe that evolution has all but ceased forever to operate on humanity.

    To me that concept evokes a sense of sadness, if not outright horror.  To suggest that we would not, could not or should not evolve further sounds to me more like a prison sentence than an affirmation of our present glory.  I do not mean to suggest that I believe in a ladder-like 'upward' directionality to evolution; I do not believe that.  What I do envision and hope for is a future in which humanity will change to meet myriad challenges in myriad environments, perhaps on many different worlds throughout the universe.  Resultantly, I foresee us developing into myriad different forms, mental as well as physical. Science fiction tends to portray 'more evolved' intelligences as little more than modern human intelligences with a few fancy skills added, such as teleportation or telekinesis or telepathy.  But why should our descendants not change mentally as drastically as we have changed from our most ancient ancestors?

    My mother viewed us, in comparison with our distant descendants, as grandparents in comparison with adult grandchildren.  These grandchildren, in her view, would have different experiences and more advanced knowledge, but would remain comfortably familiar both in physique and in mentality.  In contrast, I view us in comparison to our distant descendants as bacteria might be compared to worms, worms compared to lizards or as lizards compared to modern humans.  Perhaps, among at least some of our descendants, should they manage to avoid total extinction, some form of multi-unit intelligence might arise, functioning analogously to the way individual cells in our bodies function together to create what seems to each of us to be a single thinking creature.  Should we be any more horrified by that possibility than an intelligent bacterium should be at the existence of a modern, multicellular human?

Packs, Cliques and Growing Up (Too) Slowly

    Have you every really examined and thought about the inter-personal dynamics in your office (workplace)?  I have come to the sad conclusion, not only from my own experience, but from reams of stories told to me by others about their workplaces, that most people, whatever their education, ethnic background or way of life, have a mentality that is very destructive to the proper functioning of that workplace.  There is a kind of mentality which gets its opinions largely from the opinions of whoever they are surrounded by.  They don't like mixed messages; they prefer 'purity' of message.  Therefore, they work to build exclusive cliques of like-minded people so that the opinions and messages they receive are not disturbing to them.  Opposition is always disturbing to such a mentality.

    They do not like to think that other groups (cliques, mentalities), who are not similar enough to be part of their clique, are valid or have valid, though opposing, views and opinions.  Therefore they engage in constant self-reinforcement through both positive and negative means.  On the positive (not necessarily good) side, they engage in frequent and overly dramatic praise for anything done, said or worn by other members of their particular clique.  On the negative side, they engage in frequent 'back-stabbing' whisper campaigns of character assassination against any other person, not of their clique, who has the misfortune (or poor taste in their view) to make his/her opposing opinions publicly known, even if only overheard from a distance.  To this mentality, any opposing view must, as quickly as possible, be pointed out to the rest of the clique and the offender quickly converted, conscripted or ostracized.  The ostracized will be subjected to general character assassination.  Conscripts are weaker mentalities who are conscripted through the threat of ostracism and character assassination.  Converts, though usually not large in number, serve to reinforce the view that they, the clique, are correct and 'pure' in their views, else why would anyone convert?  In my experience, most people, whatever their age, education, ethnicity or professed philosophy or religion, are of just this sort of exclusionist mentality.

    We all know the above to be the usual state-of-affairs among young teenagers.  We write it off as the result of immature individuals trying to figure out what they believe as they are, often for the first time in their lives, exposed to serious discussions of some of the great problems and issues of human society.  But why would this situation continue to govern the workplace dynamics among so-called mature adults?  Can we simply write it off here as "Because most adults aren't really all that mature."?  I don't think so; that simply begs the question of how to define maturity or 'when does a person reach adulthood'.  We are a social 'pack animal'.  Why would so many feel the urge to engage in social dynamics which can seriously harm or destroy the general pack dynamic in the workplace, thereby harming or risking harm to the work itself, not over questions directly related to the work, but over matters which do not directly relate to or affect the work at all?

    When so much of what we love about our society and our lives can be shown to have resulted from the interplay of social diversities, why do the majority continue to fear and loath that diversity so much.  I've always found that diversity of opinion is something to be actively sought.  Far from threatening my opinions, opposition helps me to correct and refine my opinions and, of course,  many many millions of people around the world feel the same way.  Why do the majority reject diversity of opinion so strongly?  Any ideas on the matter would be very welcome.

Coalition Governments in Canadian Politics

    Currently, in Canada, we have a do-nothing, minority Conservative Government which appears determined not to do anything until it can form a majority government; a position the Canadian public, thankfully, has to-date been unwilling to give them. What we are left with is a continuously unstable parliament in which the governing party will not take major action and the various opposition parties cannot effectively take action. This situation will not change until we get leaders who have the maturity and genuine public interest it takes to work in coalition with a majority of the elected Members of Parliament, rather than serving only their own selfish and narrowly-defined party interests. Whatever his drawbacks (and I suspect they are far fewer than Harper's), Michael Ignatieff at least has the proven ability and willingness to form and work with a coalition government of all of the opposition parties.

    Rather than deriding him for this ability and fear-mongering about coalition, as Harper and his cronies have been doing, we should be praising Ignatieff and the other opposition party leaders for showing just the kind of maturity and co-operative spirit that leads to good, effective parliamentary action in service of Canadians, rather than of the agenda of any single party. Let's be very careful, as concerned Canadian voters, not to forget that our parliamentary, party-based system of government has the ability to form coalition government deliberately built-in. It is our last defense, other than through armed insurrection, against our own bad government. Michaelle Jean did Canada no favour in granting Harper a 'stay-of-execution' late last year.

    In order to form a coalition government, a majority of the duly elected members of Parliament must come together with the intention of working co-operatively with each other to govern the nation. What else is any majority governing party than just that? A coalition government, given our current party breakdown in Canadian politics, cannot consist, as our current Conservative government does, of a minority of those elected members. A coalition government is, thereby, far more democratic and inclusive in its makeup and in its actions. Let us as Canadians reject the Conservatives' fear-mongering about the other Members of Parliament elected by Canadians to represent them. A coalition government may not be as un-defeatable as a majority government, but that can be seen as a good thing, requiring that our governance be based on a more inclusive cross-section of the wishes and expectations of Canadians. I recommend that we embrace the concept of a coalition government as much to be preferred over any minority government and over some majority governments that we have had in the past or may have in the future.