Month: May 2017

All About Me, Politics

Political Views for May 2017

Posted on by Zach

Like many others who are a bit, um, obsessive when it comes to politics, I’ve long been a fan of the Political Compass. Most people are familiar with the differences between left wing redistributive and right wing capitalist politics. The observation underlying the Political Compass is that these aren’t the only salient axes of political disagreement.

In addition to the standard left-right economic disagreement, the Political Compass looks at the disagreements between libertarians and authoritarians. This second axis deals with the amount of social restrictions (or, from the other point of view, mandated social cohesiveness) a government imposes on its citizens.

The Political Compass breaks political parties (and the political views of individuals) into four quadrants: the authoritarian left (think centralized communism, e.g. Mao, Stalin), the authoritarian right (think socially conservative capitalism, e.g. Reagan, Thatcher), the libertarian right (think socially permissive capitalism e.g. Macron, Gary Johnson), and the libertarian left (socially permissive welfare states or regional collectivism, e.g. Corbyn, Stein).

It is common to see authoritarian policies coupled with deregulated capitalism and socially liberal policies coupled with more redistributive economic systems, a trend which causes many people to associate the economic left with libertarian social attitudes and the economic right with authoritarian social attitudes. One of the goals of the Political Compass is to allow people to disentangle these common correlations.

The categorization provided by the Political Compass is perhaps most useful when discussing less common political views, like nationalism and (economic) libertarianism. Many nationalists are actually very economically centrist – the nationalist and racist British National Party is economically to the left of the UK Labour Party. This makes it inappropriate to simply label these groups as “far-right”. They aren’t far right in the economic sense. They are instead very authoritarian, a characteristic most people associate with the economic right.

Libertarians are also occasionally referred to as extremely right. In this case, it is correct to make a comparison with other economically right parties, but important to remember that libertarians lack the social conservativism that defines most right-wing parties. The Libertarian Party in the United States might agree with the GOP on economics, but they’re more likely even than Democrats to oppose the militarization of police forces, the expansion of national security powers, or the war on drugs.

I’ve been a fan of the Political Compass for a long time. Recently I wondered how my political views (as measured by a political compass score) have changed over the past few years. Unfortunately, I don’t have any good records of where exactly the political compass put me in the past. All of I have to go on are my somewhat fuzzy memories, which I think put me on the extreme left-libertarian side of things (I believe the score was approximately -7/-7, far into the left-libertarian quadrant).

One of my great joys this past year has been reading year-old journal entries; this is the first time I’ve kept a regular journal, so having a written record of what exactly I did a year ago is still novel to me. Because of my journal, I’ve gained a lot of insight into how the past year has (and hasn’t) changed me. When I retook the Political Compass test recently, I was sad that I didn’t know for sure how I’d done in the past. With this in mind, I’ve decided to publish my results (and just as importantly, why I think I got them) yearly.

The Results

I scored -3.25 on the economic axis (this puts me firmly left of centre) and -6.56 on the authority axis (putting me deep in the social libertarian camp). Here’s how I stack up against the Canadian political parties (as assessed in 2015 by the Political Compass).

These results put me to the left of all Canadian political parties economically and very, very far from all of the Canadian political parties on civil liberties. The new score is in the same quadrant as my previous score, but is somewhat less extreme (especially economically).

Much more interesting (to my imagined version of a future me at least) than the fact of my score is the political reasoning that caused me to receive it.

Economics

I’m not surprised that the Political Compass put me more or less in the centre-left, because centre-left policies feel very much like part of my identity. Drawing on Joseph Heath’s definition, I would say that the centre-left is united by a belief that the government should primarily focus its economic interventions on solving collective action problems and fixing market failures and that the government should do this in a redistributive manner.

Adjacent to the centre-left on one side is the centre-right, which agrees with the centre-left on the purpose of government, but doesn’t advocate for redistributive solutions. One of the best examples of how this difference actually plays out is in healthcare.

The centre-left solution to the well-known market failures of health insurance is to mandate a national insurance scheme with non-actuarial premiums (premiums based on income, rather than on risk of requiring health care). The centre-right uses something like Obamacare’s individual mandate, which requires everyone to hold health insurance or pay an extra tax. In both cases market failure is corrected through government policy and the average consumer is better off. The main difference is in who picks up most of the price tag.

In general, it’s my utilitarian ethics that make me favour the centre-left over the centre-right, not a belief that one approach (or the other) leads to better economic outcomes. The utilitarian argument for progressive taxation is simple. Money has decreasing marginal utility – the more you have of it, the less each individual dollar matters to you. When dealing with essential services, I think it is most ethical to pay for them in the way that causes the least dissatisfaction, which in practice means progressive taxation.

The centre-left isn’t entirely opposed to regressive taxation though. I support regressive taxation if that’s what it takes to price an externality (e.g. carbon taxes are regressive, but another cost structure wouldn’t correctly price the externality) or if the tax leads to better outcomes (e.g. cigarette taxes are regressive, but reduce the incidence of smoking).

My disagreements with the hard-left are rarely about morality. In general, I am liable to agree with your average communist, anarcho-communist, anarcho-syndicalist, socialist, etc. about the moral necessity of reducing poverty. I disagree with the hard-left merely about what is practical or expedient. I oppose setting prices (whether it’s for rent, pharmaceuticals, or fossil fuels) because the “cure” of setting prices is so often worse than the disease the price-setting is supposed to fix. I do genuinely believe that a rising tide can lift all boats and worry that hard-left policies would sabotage the engine of growth that has lifted over billion people out of absolute poverty in the past few decades.

The main role I see for the government is offering insurance. There are a variety of insurance products that suffer from adverse selection – the tendency for only the highest risk individuals or companies to purchase insurance against for certain risks. We see adverse selection in deposit insurance [1], health insurance, unemployment insurance, welfare (which is basically poverty insurance), and pensions (which are best modelled as insurance against outliving your savings). In these areas, the government can easily address a market failure by mandating that everyone must buy insurance against the risk. This lowers prices the average price considerably, making it feasable for the average person to protect against rare events in a way that isn’t possible in a market with adverse selection.

I also believe that the government should be involved in correcting for negative externalities. Without some central body forcing market participants to pay for negative externalities, we see them become distressingly common. If companies and individuals had always had to pay for the carbon they dumped into the atmosphere, we would expect global warming to be far less advanced by now. Where the externality doesn’t compete too strongly with human health and flourishing (e.g. small amounts of pollution, carbon dioxide, etc.), I think it makes sense to price it rather than ban it completely.

I absolutely loath systems like cap and trade, where a negative externality is dealt with through a complicated bureaucratic process that incentivizes people to game the system wherever possible. Just one concrete example of how this sort of thing can go wrong: a lot of the carbon credits in the European exchange came from the destruction of a potent greenhouse gas, HFC-23, at refrigerant plants in India and China. Destroying this gas became such a lucrative market that more refrigerant plants opened to get in on the action. The refrigerants were just an afterthought and were dumped on the market, making air-conditioning cheaper (which wasn’t good for global warming in its own right). When European regulators realized the scope of the mess they had caused, they banned the sale of HFC-23 carbon credits. Now former producers are threatening to release their stockpiles of HFC-23 (equivalent to two billion tonnes of CO2 emissions, 2.7 times the yearly CO2 emissions of all of Canada) unless Europe pays them off. [EDIT: An earlier version of this post said “27 times” instead of 2.7 times. I messed up the math.]

There are other reasons for my rejection of the European model of government meddling. European safety regulations do make it genuinely harder to bring new products to market in Europe (compared to the US and Canada). Here I’m happy to make a trade off that favours more innovation. Europe generously subsidizes post-secondary education. I’d prefer if we instead made post-secondary education much less mandatory.

I care about dynamism, not out of a belief in trickle-down economics, but because I’ve become (almost against my will) something of a techno-utopian. While I don’t want to diminish the role that social change plays in building a more ethical society (for example, there seems to be no technological solution to racism), I’m increasingly convinced that we won’t be able to solve poverty and disease except with radically improved technology. It’s uncontroversial to claim better technology is necessary to eradicate disease, but I think it is a bit more of an ask to get people to believe that technology offers a solution to poverty, so let me explain.

Capitalism offers an excellent solution to the problem of resource distribution: give more to people who create value for others, encouraging positive-sum interactions. But the moral case for capitalism breaks down in the presence of wealth. When people can hoard vast amounts of value or pass it on to their children (regardless of what value those children create for anyone), the argument that this method of resource allocation is ethical falls apart.

I don’t know if we can convince many people to make do with less. I know that revolutions almost always seem to go poorly and that socialism has an atrocious record of allocating even the simplest resources to people who need them – for all that there are ways global capitalism fails developing countries, global communism seemed to do no better. Given a choice between socialism and capitalism, I’ll take capitalism. It at least has the good graces to only lead to famines when they’re caused by external conditions, rather than as a matter of course [pdf link].

Given my skepticism about radical redistribution, I’ve become convinced that the only way to eradicate poverty is to create such a plenty that everyone can be guaranteed a decent living. This is why I worry about the slow and steady European approach to growth. Extreme poverty is the greatest stain on our collective morality I can see, an unconscionable and despicable ender of lives. We can’t afford to wait a single extra day to destroy it.

(In the absence of the eschaton, there is a community of people dedicated to doing what they can to reduce the impact of poverty. I encourage everyone to check out the moral case for Giving What We Can, an initiative that encourages those who can afford it to donate 10% of their income to the charities that are able to use that money to most effectively save lives).

Authority

I view the government as having little business legislating morality. I’m happy to accept economic legislation. I’m happy for the government to make activities associated with poor outcomes (e.g. alcohol consumption) more expensive via taxes. I’m even happy to pay taxes, both of the regular and “vice” varieties. I accept that taxes are a coercive use of government violence and I don’t care. I’m not a deontologist. I view violence as likely to be wrong, but I’m actually fine with the threat of violence being used to force society wide cooperation on the sorts of things that we’d mostly agree to from behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance.

On the other hand, when we’re dealing with private, consensual behaviour (between people able to meaningfully consent), I can’t see any good that can come out of enforcing particular people’s versions of morality. I oppose most all blanket restrictions on the right of people to choose what to do with their bodies and oppose most especially restrictions on the ability of women to control their fertility. I oppose tighter restrictions on euthanasia. I oppose prohibitory drug laws (both out of a philosophical belief that people should be free to make their own decisions about their health, even bad ones, and out of a belief that prohibition increases crime and decreases access to treatment).

I even break with many other skeptics with my opposition to banning homeopathy or other widely accepted but empirically useless forms of placebo treatment. A friend has convinced me we’d likely see worse outcomes if we forced alternative medicines and their practitioners underground.

I think Canada’s free speech protections are inadequate and that we’re at risk of becoming a forum for libel shopping. I’ve become increasingly convinced that the only proper response to most speech is more speech, not violence (even state sanctioned violence, like arrest and imprisonment). I make an exception here only for credible threats (in the context of internet discussion, a credible threat is something like: “I will be waiting at ______, the place you work tomorrow and I’ll have a bullet with your name on it”, not “fuck you, I’m going to kill you”).

I think violent or hateful speech clearly marks someone as an unpleasant person to be around. Freedom of speech is inextricably tied to freedom of association; free speech rights can’t protect you from the social or reputational consequences of your speech. If you stop being invited to anything because of odious things you’ve said, you deserve it. No one has to offer you a platform for your speech. I see no responsibility to invite controversial speakers to events; doing so doesn’t “stand up for free speech”. Standing up for free speech merely requires we oppose violent responses to speech (including credible threats in response to speech) made by any actors, even the state.

Free speech is just one example of a right that is constantly under threat. Fair trials, access to housing without discrimination, and equal treatment under the law are arguably more important. I do support a central government enshrining rights and protecting people’s ability to enjoy these rights. The best quick heuristic I have for telling the difference between rights and legislated morality is that rights enumerate activities you should always be allowed to do, while legislated morality enumerates activities you will never be allowed to do.

I wish it was easier to tell when one person’s right becomes another person’s restriction. For me this feels intuitively simple, but maddeningly difficult to systematize. If you have a system, please share it with me. It will probably end up in my post next year.

My social libertarian streak comes from my belief in precedent utilitarianism. Precedent utilitarianism is basically a hybrid of rule and act utilitarianism. It acknowledges that many actions, especially those by taken by our government and leaders, set precedents that other people follow. Precedents you set are always transformed to the axioms of the people who witness them being set. If Prime Minister Trudeau were to remove a Supreme Court justice for being too conservative, the precedent he would be setting for future for conservative prime ministers wouldn’t be “it is okay to remove judges that are dangerously behind the times” (even if that was Trudeau’s explicit intention), it would be “it is okay to remove judges I disagree with”. I feel like the only way to avoid a horrible yo-yo of morality laws is to leave private morality as a private matter and respect that people have a variety of different beliefs and values.

I think that precedent utilitarianism looks favourable on human rights laws and I think Canada has an unusually good set of protected characteristics. I disagree with libertarians who find the human rights codes an unacceptable check on freedoms. I’m glad we have a set of protected characteristics that both protect vulnerable people from direct harm and protect society from tit-for-tat retaliation as various in-groups are threatened.

I do sometimes find my support for protected characteristics hard to square with my firm belief that the government shouldn’t enforce morality. I think that the precedent utilitarian argument for a government that doesn’t legislate morality but does vigourously enforce rights, including protection from discrimination, is probably best summed up by Scott Alexander in the essay In Favour of Niceness, Community, and Civilization. When the government stands up for rights, it is reminding people that they will be much better off if they avoid negative sum exchanges (like reciprocal discrimination) and instead focus on positive sum exchanges.

Delta

The change since I last took this test (2-3 years ago) is about +4 on the economic axis and +0.5 on the libertarian axis.

I think the change on the authoritarian/libertarian axis is driven by my increasing patriotism. All government is composed of trade-offs. I am such a product of the Canadian trade-offs that I could not countenance living long term (or raising children) in a country other than Canada.

Changes on the economic axis were driven by my changing opinions about socialism. A few years ago my thoughts were: “maybe this could work”. My current thoughts are more: “socialism: the correct answer for the post-scarcity future, where its propensity for famines will no longer be a problem”. A combination of In Due Course and Slate Star Codex convinced me that capitalism is our best bet for getting to that post-scarcity future.

Predictions

Looking directly at my current positions themselves, I don’t expect them to change much over the next year. Given that I recall feeling that way last time I took this test, I’m inherently skeptical of that intuition.

Taking just the past into account, I should expect my positions to change regardless of how I feel about them. Taking everything into account, here’s where I think I will be at the end of May 2018:

  1. I will have an economic score > -2.25: 50%
  2. I will have an economic score > -4.25: 80%
  3. My top level economic identity will still be “capitalist”: 80%
  4. I will have an authority score > -7.56: 70%
  5. I will have an authority score < -5.56: 90%
  6. My top level social identity will still be “libertarian”: 90%

Footnotes:

[1] Bank runs used to be a fact of life. Whenever anyone got hint of any trouble at a bank, they’d rush to it and pull all of their money out, to protect against losing it in the event the bank failed. Unfortunately, this often caused banks to fail, because everyone had an incentive to try and pull all their money out at the slightest hint of insecurity. If they didn’t, they’d risk losing it when other people ran to the bank to do the same. Old banks are imposing to give people a sense that their money is safe there. Ever wondered why bank runs just stopped happening in developed countries? Turns out it’s because the government started to insure deposits. Once you know that your money will be safe no matter what, you no longer have any incentive to withdraw it at the first sign of trouble. ^

1
Model, Politics, Quick Fix

Some thoughts on Canadian “family values” conservatives

Posted on by Zach

I’d like to expand on one of the points I raised yesterday about Canadian social conservatives and the sorts of things they can expect from Andrew Scheer, because I think the Canadian approach to “family values” conservatism is desperately under-theorized.

Yesterday I claimed that the main way that Harper pushed so-called family values was through economic incentives to have a 1950s-style nuclear family. Both income splitting and the Universal Child Care Benefit were designed to make it more feasible to have a single income family.

This is a radically different tack than taken by American family values candidates, who primarily exercise their beliefs by banning sex education, fighting against gay marriage and adoption, and restricting access to abortion [1]. The American approach attempts to close off all alternatives but a heterosexual, monogamous, child-producing marriage. The Canadian approach is to bribe people into this (and to drop the heterosexual part).

The cynical explanation for the policies pushed by Harper is that they represent a tax break for the favoured constituencies of the Conservatives. But this strikes me both as deeply uncharitable and uncorroborated by statements made by members of the Conservative Party.

At the Conservative Leadership Convention, the party devoted as much time to thanking J.P. Veitch (Rona Ambrose’s fiancé) as they did to thanking Rona Ambrose. They thanked J.P. for putting Rona’s career aspirations above his own and for his tireless support of her in her role as interim party leader.

Can you imagine the Liberals taking the time to thank Sophie Grégoire Trudeau for her work supporting her husband? The liberal individualistic notion of liberation tends to gloss over and thereby systemically devalue the work that supportive spouses do. To liberals (even many socialist liberals), work is where people go for self-actualization. Self-actualization can’t exist in the home.

There are sound reasons for this emphasis. While the Conservative tax breaks are gender neutral (and apply even to gay marriages), no one believes that the majority of stay at home spouses will be men. There certainly won’t be no men staying home – I consider myself generally more likely to stay home with kids than any partner I’m plausibly going to have – but they’ll be a minority.

As a free choice, the home is a reasonable option for many people. But as a prescribed social role, being stay-at-home mothers made many women incredibly miserable. Emancipation through work as the default seems to me as a not-unreasonable reaction to this trauma. But conservatives have ideological reasons to oppose the social structures that make dual-income families possible.

In Rona Ambrose’s farewell speech, she clearly articulated the core disagreement between Canadian liberals and conservatives. “Liberals believe in government”, she said, “but we believe in people”. I’d rephrase this slightly – liberals believe in institutions, while conservatives believe in individuals.

Viewed through this lens, it makes sense that Conservatives wish to return child-rearing to the sphere of the domestic. Key policies planks of Canadian leftists – like all day Kindergarten and $15 a day daycare – instead seek to further remove child-rearing from individual parents and move it into a formalized institutional system.

Both of these approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. It is beginning to look like starting school early may lead to inattention and hyperactivity. If daycare is like school, then proposals like $15 a day daycare have the potential to be incredibly damaging. With income splitting and child tax benefits, we could be encouraging parents to delay formal schooling, thereby avoiding the negative consequences associated with an early school start.

On the other hand, it’s uncommon, even with income splitting and child tax benefits, for one spouse to have an income that could plausibly support their entire family. $15 dollar a day daycare would be a boon to low-income families that are caught in the dual-income trap.

There’s no prescription here. I think some parts of the family values platform threaten to turn back important progress. I think other parts hint at a potential for better outcomes than we currently have. I will point out that it seems almost as if Canadian conservatives listened to liberals who pointed out that if they really cared about reducing abortion rates, they’d cover prenatal healthcare, maternity leave, and make it less expensive to raise a child.

I’d much rather have a political conversation about the amount of tax benefits we should give to people with children than I would about women’s right to choose, so I can’t help but be thankful that the Canadian Overton window is what it is. With Andrew Scheer elected as conservative leader and signalling no intention to wade into the debate over abortion, I think we really can call the Overton Window settled in its current configuration [2]. This leaves all Canadians with a question. How much do you think the government should subsidize nuclear families?

I’m not yet sure of the answer myself.

Footnotes

[1] I want to be clear that I’m talking about execution here, not beliefs. Canadian social conservatives believe many of the same things as American so-cons and vote remarkably similarly to their American counterparts when they’re in opposition. The key difference is how they behave when they’re in power. Nine years of Conservative governments (four of which saw the Conservatives as the majority party) brought no change in the legal status of gay rights or abortion in Canada. That would be unprecedented in America.  ^

[2] On Facebook, I said: “If the trend is that Liberals/NDP push [our] social policies of choice and the Cons don’t roll them back, then we still win in the long run.” I stand by that statement. I would prefer that Conservatives were as enthusiastic about pushing for positive social change as I am. Given that I don’t live in that world, I’ll settle for one where conservative politicians don’t to push back.  ^

Politics

Five Things I Learned from the Conservative Leadership Race (that all Canadians should take note of)

Posted on by Zach

Yesterday generic conservative Andrew Scheer was crowned leader of the Conservative Party of Canada in a nail-biting 14 ballot process. His margin of victory over the libertarian Maxime Bernier was less than 2%.

Reuters managed to get pretty much everything about this story subtly wrong, from the number of votes political observers expected – by the final week, most of us remembered that there were so many low support candidates that it would probably go to the very final ballot – to Scheer’s position in the party. Reuters has Scheer pegged as a social conservative, whereas people watching the race were much more likely to describe him as the compromise candidate.

The Conservative Leadership race was one of the high points of my engagement in Canadian politics. I haven’t been this engaged since the 2011 election (I was out of country for the 2015 election which limited my involvement to mailing in a ballot). Focusing so closely on this leadership race, I’ve was surprised (although I probably shouldn’t have been) by just how much politics goes on under the surface and just how little actually filters up through the media.

Sometimes the things that don’t filter up are silly. The media never really mentioned that Steven Blaney sent out an email with the subject line: “Should Allah kill all the Jews?”. This is understandable; Blaney never was a serious contender for the leadership and his ridiculous emails would have been a distraction. Many in the media also underestimated the number of votes for Erin O’Toole that would transfer to Andrew Scheer once O’Toole was eliminated. This was a harder mistake to make when you were getting emails from every candidate; from the emails that O’Toole and Scheer were sending me, it was obvious that their internal polling had picked up on this correlation. Paying attention to things like this are what let me correctly predict Andrew Scheer would win.

With this in mind, I’d like to report some the things I learned watching this race and this convention. These are things that may or may not be reported, but I think they are deeply important for understanding Canadian politics going forward.

1. No one knows what to do with ranked ballots

In my last post on the leadership, I guessed that the race would last a few ballots. This was a very silly prediction to make, because it was obvious who the first six candidates to be eliminated would be. It was also obvious that together they had less than 5% of the total support. For the convention to be over after that few ballots, the front runner would have to have more than 45% support. Polling clearly showed Bernier (the front-runner for most of the race) at only 30%, so there was no way that the thing could have been decided that quickly.

I wasn’t the only one who made this error. The Conservative Party forecasted we’d have final results around 6:00PM. Final results weren’t available until around 8:15PM. Some of this was attributable to a forty-five-minute delay caused by technical issues, but most of this was because the thing went to the very last ballot.

The intuition that the leadership race should be decided in a few rounds comes from party conventions that use delegates. The last two contested Canadian conventions with delegates both went to four ballots. But a mail in instant run-off system is very different from delegate convention. There is little opportunity to gather momentum and no opportunity for politicians to blink. In a delegate convention, Scheer could have panicked in the 11th round and conceded to Bernier in exchange for some cabinet position. The mail in ranked ballots gave him no such option.

Ranked ballots differ even more significantly from the American system of sequential primary elections. Primaries suffer from the standard problem of first past the post systems; you often only need a plurality to win. This benefits the front runner, especially when “the establishment” can’t coalesce around a single candidate. Ranked ballots give the establishment no choice but to eventually coalesce. If the Republican primary had been decided by mail-in ranked ballots, it seems very likely that Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz would have won instead of Trump.

In addition to talking heads used to other systems, ranked ballots also present a challenge to pollsters, who are used to asking people merely for the name of the candidate they most support. Even the polls that asked for multiple preferences rarely asked for preferences beyond third place. This can fall apart at the end of the convention when votes may have been transferred four or five times (e.g. from Raitt, to Chong, to O’Toole, to Scheer) or have skipped over some of the preferences (e.g. votes from Chong supporters who put Raitt second, O’Toole third, and Scheer fourth and saw their votes ultimately transferred to Scheer).

Kevin O’Leary claimed in the live convention coverage that he and Bernier had polled all the way down to the 10th choice (at ruinous expense). If this is true (and with Kevin, who knows), it’s likely that some of the other top fundraisers did this as well. That’s why I highlighted candidate’s emails as a vital tool for understanding the race. From their exhortations, I could often get an idea of the information they were going on.

If public polling can’t adapt to ranked ballots, then it will probably become necessary (for anyone who wants to correctly predict an election outcome) to spend more time reading the messages campaigns send to supporters to try and indirectly get high quality proprietary polling numbers. Unfortunately, reading emails and trying to figure out the information that went into them is much more of a black art than polling and it’s much harder to justify the information that comes out of it.

2. Canadian Conservatives aren’t Republicans

In Rona Ambrose’s farewell speech, she presented a narrative of Conservatives as defenders of the rights of women and girls. She pointed out that that first woman to serve in a cabinet was a member of the Conservative Party. She pointed out that the first (and only) female prime minister of Canada was a Conservative. She also talked about her work at the UN pushing for an International Day of the Girl and her work pressuring the government to admit Yazidi refugees fleeing religious persecution and sexual slavery at the hands of ISIL. When she mentioned that she’d forced the government to admit more refugees, she was given a rousing round of applause.

The stigma that sexual assault survivors face and the disgustingly high rate of sexual assault cases that are labelled unfounded were the focus of one section of one of the campaign debates. Luckily, there was basically no debate among the candidates on this issue. All of them pledged to improve police education and work to reduce the “unfounded rate”.

If you follow American politics, you might be surprised by things like this from a conservative party.

Canada and America are geographically and culturally proximate. It’s easy to pretend that the differences between the two countries are largely cosmetic. But when you do, you’re liable to get bitten in the ass by the iceberg of hidden differences.

Canadian conservatism is different than American conservatism. In the Conservative Party of Canada, you’ll get more votes calling for a carbon tax than you will if you call for increased screening of immigrants. Can you imagine that being true in America?

I don’t mean to claim that xenophobia and racism don’t exist in the Conservative Party of Canada. Kellie Leitch did get 9% of the vote. But for now, the xenophobic wing of the party is perhaps the least powerful part of the Canadian conservative coalition.

3. Social Conservatism is (kind of) alive and well

Unlike the xenophobic candidates, who did much worse than anyone feared, the social conservative candidates ran significantly ahead of expectations. Pierre Lemieux and Brad Trost had combined polling numbers of 9.5% right before the election. In the first round of voting, many of us were surprised to see that their actual support was a combined 15.7%. When Trost was eliminated in the 11th ballot, he had 14.3% of the remaining support (evidence that almost all of Lemieux’s voters went to him).

A year ago, the Conservatives voted to remove any policy on the definition of marriage from their platform. Social conservatives were outraged but impotent. Their higher than expected support for Trost and Lemieux was their way of reminding the party that they exist.

Unfortunately for those members, social conservative policies are a delicate topic in Canadian politics. The Harper doctrine was to avoid the risky issues (like gay marriage and abortion) that risked undermining his chances of winning elections, while cautiously advancing policies that supported two-parent nuclear families (even the gay ones).

At the start of this leadership race, when Andrew Scheer was asked about his views on gay marriage, his answer was all pragmatism. While he is personally against gay marriage, he said “I don’t think you’d find any legitimate Conservative leadership aspirant who would revisit that issue”. His position on abortion is similar.

In his victory speech, Scheer obliquely referenced these views. “There’s… some issues that will divide our caucus and divide our movement and that [don’t] enjoy widespread support in the general public, but there are other areas… that the entire conservative movement can get behind.”

Taken together, all of this signals that the Harper doctrine is alive and well. Social conservatives won’t be getting action on abortion or gay marriage but they can expect Scheer to do his best to strengthen what they consider a traditional family structure. If Scheer is prime minister, expect to see policies like income splitting that blatantly favour married couples, especially couples where one parents stays home with children.

Bernier wasn’t willing to provide even this, which is probably why social conservatives broke for Scheer in the end, giving him the victory. Social conservatives ultimately didn’t get everything they wanted, but it seems like they managed to get the best of their realistic options.

4. Caucus Support

Had Bernier won, I think his leadership would have looked a lot like Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the UK Labour Party. Both men have excessive amounts of ideological purity and a limited amount of support among the MPs of their party. This has made trying to control his party difficult for Corbyn and I see no reason why Bernier would have had an easier time of it.

Andrew Scheer is much more in the mold of Teresa May or Steven Harper. He has very strong support in the caucus; he was second only to Erin O’Toole in endorsements and is so similar to O’Toole on most issues that he should have no problem picking up O’Toole’s support.

The line “there’s been a rising tide of anti-establishment sentiment in recent elections” has become cliché. Everyone has heard a dozen times about how Brexit, Trump, and the French election prove that people are fed up with the political establishment.

Well, just as Canada was supposedly immune to the “rising tide of illiberalism”, we appear to be immune (for now) to the “rising tide of anti-establishment sentiment”. Andrew Scheer was very much of the political establishment. None of his policies represent a break with the policies of the Harper years.

This bodes well for Scheer’s ability to actually get shit done (and therefore poorly for the Liberals). Scheer understands how parliament works. He understands how the conservative caucus thinks. He’s young and energetic. He will hit the ground running and won’t complain to the media in six months that the job was much harder than he thought it would be.

Some of the above would have been true for Leitch or Bernier. None of it would have been true for O’Leary. Only time will tell if is better to be effective at managing a political party than it is to be “not a politician” or to have a clear ideology.

5. The Conservative Party of Canada is still Harper’s party

Steven Harper has been almost entirely absent from Canadian politics since his election defeat in 2015. It’s a startling change for the man who was the Conservative Party of Canada. For all of his flaws (and he has many), Harper was an ambitious and driven leader who decided on a goal and then moved heaven and earth to make it happen. He engineered the merger between the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and the Reform Party, won control of the resulting party, and then led it into five elections. In four of those elections, the party came out better than it went in.

In the Harper years, even cabinet seemed to be a mere extension of the Prime Minister’s will. The discipline with which cabinet ministers stuck to their script was occasionally farcical, like when Paul Calandra answered a question about Iraq with prepared remarks about an NDP fundraiser’s statements about Israel.

Maxime Bernier would have represented a break with the Harper legacy. He’s a committed libertarian with many policy proposals that differ from the sort of thing Harper would endorse, chief among them his pledge to scrap the Canada Health Act and end transfer payments to the provinces for healthcare.

Ideologically, Harper probably agrees with scrapping the CHA. But Harper was ever the ruthless pragmatist, always subordinating his personal ideology to the demands of getting elected. He wouldn’t have touched the widely popular CHA with a ten-foot poll.

Based on Scheer’s responses to questions about abortion and gay marriage, I can’t see him governing substantially differently than Harper. The Conservative party will continue Harper’s legacy of slowly and incrementally dismantling the Canadian welfare state, while avoiding nearly all contentious topics. With Scheer, Harper is effectively controlling the party from beyond the political grave.

I think I narrowly prefer Scheer to Bernier. Bernier seems unelectable, but if he were to win it would be an absolute disaster for the Canadians and provinces who rely on the Federal government for assistance. Scheer is probably more electable, but much more incrementalist. He represents a creeping threat to the welfare state, rather than an immediately existential threat.

I joined the Conservative Party to influence their leadership race away from high variance candidates, even those candidates who I thought would be safely defeated in the general election. Last year’s election in America taught me I couldn’t put my faith in certain candidates being “doomed outside the primaries”.

I’d have preferred Chong. But I think I can live with Harper era policies repackaged with a smile.

Literature, Politics

Book Review: Strangers in Their Own Land

Posted on by Zach

I just finished Professor Arlie Hochschild’s latest book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right”, a book some people are trumpeting as the one that explains Trump.

That wasn’t exactly how I read the book. I think Trump’s win is well explained by some combination of the “fundamentals” and the Comey Letter just before the election. I’m also wary of falling into the trap of drawing conclusions about America because Trump won. The result of the election could have been changed by dozens of random events. I’m following Scott Alexander’s advice and not basing my narratives off of which potential events happened to actually happen.

Besides, Trump is barely even in this book. He only appears in any substantive way in the last chapter and Prof. Hochschild doesn’t devote much ink to him. If you’re using this book to explain Trump, you’re going to have to do a lot of the work yourself.

At its core, Strangers in Their Own Land is an ethnography about a specific group of people with all of the advantages and perils that entails. We get to learn a lot about its subjects, but we have to be careful whenever applying any of its conclusions beyond the small group of people actually profiled.

Like any ethnography, Strangers in Their Own Land lives or dies by the interest the author can evoke in her subjects. Here, the subjects are a small group of Louisiana Tea Party members. Prof. Hochschild certainly managed to make me interested in them by using them as a lens through which to peer at the “Great Paradox” of American Politics: why do many of those who could most benefit from the government hate it so much?

I’ve forayed into discussions of the Great Paradox before. Like Prof. Hochschild, I’m skeptical of the purported “two rungs up” explanation of the paradox. It goes like this: yes, lower income counties tend to vote against government programs, but it is not actually the people on those programs (or their loved ones) voting against them. People relying on government programs rarely actually vote. Actual voters in Republican-leaning counties are better off and are voting solely for lower taxes.

By focusing Strangers in Their Own Land on pollution, Prof. Hochschild was able to sidestep this explanation. Pollution doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor – one of the more heartbreaking stories in the book is about a nine-year-old who died from a rare neuroblastoma, which everyone suspects was caused by pollution. Despite this, his well-off parents and well-off family friends continued to oppose the EPA.

A focus on pollution made Louisiana the obvious setting for this book. It’s one of the most polluted states in America and has some of the weakest and most ineffectually enforced environmental laws. Louisiana also has a very high rate of welfare use, which let Prof. Hochschild compare the two rungs up theory with alternatives (as she could count on finding people who were or knew someone on welfare).

In Louisiana, Prof. Hochschild found no one who was happy about pollution. The Tea Party voters she interviewed loved the outdoors. Many of them grew up hunting and fishing and almost all of them continued to cherish those outdoor pastimes in adulthood. It hurt them deeply to have no game to hunt or to be unable to eat the fish they caught. Yet still they opposed more regulations on pollution.

Reasons for this varied. Some believed that regulating pollution would hurt the oil and gas industry and lead to unemployment. They were saddened by the effects of pollutions on the environment, but they refused to put the environment ahead of other people.

Others believed that the government was (indirectly) responsible for pollution. They saw the government as protecting the worst polluters while coming down hard on any “little guy” who leaked even a tiny amount of gas from his boat. They believed that any additional regulations would be applied to them and their friends, not to the big companies responsible for the real pollution. They figured that the free market would disincentivize pollution well enough if the government could just leave everything alone and let it work.

Yet others were religious and figured that the world would not be around for much longer. They saw God’s commandment in Genesis 1:28 (“fill the earth, and subdue it”) as justification for any pollution in the interim. Even justifying pollution wasn’t very important for the faithful though; they cared far more about a rapture they saw as close to hand than they did about any worldly concerns.

No one that Prof. Hochschild talked to said: “yes, the government could fix this, but we don’t want them to”. Instead, she got responses like “the EPA would just use whatever power we gave it to take away our freedoms”, or “the government can’t help, it’s in the pockets of the polluters and hates the little guys like us”; none of the Tea Party voters trusted the government.

Prof. Hochschild was used to people distrusting certain government figures or departments, while still believing that good government was possible, necessary, and worth fight for. Here Prof. Hochschild saw people so used to incompetent, hostile, or distant government that they had given up hope that good government could ever exist for them. Prof. Hochschild immediately wanted to know how this could happen.

She found that religious people tended to see the government as usurping the traditional role of the church. They thought that ensuring the welfare of members of a community should be the responsibility of that community. With welfare, the government was destroying the bonds that held communities together. They viewed the liberal tendency to leave the care of the poor to a central bureaucracy as evidence of a terrible culture of neglect and moral bankruptcy.

Some adherents of capitalism saw the government as the enemy. To them, job creation and economic dynamism came from private enterprise, which the government stifled through bureaucracy, regulation, and taxes.

Other interview subjects saw the government as taking their money and giving it to people who were unlike them, people outside of their communities. They thought they’d done everything right, played by the book, suffered, yet still found prosperity elusive. They worked long hours for scant compensation, while not far away, the government was just giving away money to single mothers – who they viewed as hedonistic sinners who had far more children than was reasonable. Factually incorrect beliefs about the number of children people on welfare had or the percentage of the population that was on welfare were rampant in this group.

This isn’t to say that everyone fell into one of these categories. Many people combined beliefs. It actually reminded me of a point Joseph Heath made in light of the sex education controversy in Ontario – when social conservatives realize they can’t get the regressive solution they want (everyone forced to live by their values), they tend to swing to the other extreme and ask for ultra-liberal solutions. They may most prefer the government forcing everyone to have their values, but absent that, they’d rather the government force no one to do anything, so that it can’t force them to give up their values.

I should also mention that not all Tea Partiers ignored the consequences of pollution. Strangers in Their Own Land also profiles Tea Partiers who cared about pollution, viewed it as a pressing issue, and advocated for the Tea Party to make pollution one of its core principles. They echoed something I heard in some of the Conservative Party of Canada leadership debates: “conservation is a conservative principle.”

Still, it was hard to take the anti-pollution Tea Party activists too seriously. They want to solve a collective action problem with the free market. Solving collective action problems with the free market is a bit like doing surgery with a pizza cutter. It’s not that it’s impossible, strictly speaking. It’s just that there are ways of doing it (in this case, via government) that are far less messy and far more likely to give the desired outcome.

It’s hard not to feel like the conservatives in this book are being betrayed by the industries they stand up for. One of the Tea Partiers who actually cared about pollution cared because his house was ruined in the Bayou Corne Sinkhole. Even as he stood up against pollution, he continued to advocate for a freer market, fear the EPA, and vote Republican. All of this has counted for nothing with Texas Brine, the company responsible for the disaster. It continues to drag its feet on the class action lawsuit launched by residents.

Further to this point, Prof. Hochschild dug up a damning report, prepared at the behest of the California Waste Management Board by some very fancy (and expensive!) consultants. The report identifies communities that won’t complain about “locally undesirable land use” (LULU), with the goal of identifying these communities so polluting (and property value lowering) activities can be more easily sited. Protests are very inconvenient for construction, after all.

Communities identified as ill-suited to resist LULU are:

  • Composed of long-time residents (who are unlikely to want to move away)
  • Small
  • High school educated
  • Catholic
  • Without a culture or history of activism
  • Involved in “nature exploitative occupations” (e.g. farming, ranching, and mining)
  • Conservative
  • Republican
  • Primarily peopled by advocates of the free market

The communities where Prof. Hochschild did her research hit basically every single one of these criteria. This prompted some introspection on her part, as realized that one of the ways that her home of Berkeley is able to avoid substantial pollution is by foisting the negative externalities of modern life (like pollution) off onto communities like those in poor, rural Louisiana.

The back of the book purports to contain an analysis that shows that communities where people are more conservative (and more likely to believe that pollution isn’t a problem) are more polluted. I’m cautious of adopting the conclusions from it though, because conclusions are all it contains. From those, it’s clear that multiple hypothesis could have been easily tested [1] but unclear whether or not this was specifically controlled for. Without being able to look at the raw data or see the analysis methodology, I can’t tell if the correlation is likely real or a statistical artifact.

I will beg the question for a bit though, because Prof. Hochschild treats the correlation as real and spends some time explaining it. I think her explanations are interesting enough to talk about, even if they may be based on a flawed analysis.

Prof. Hochschild doesn’t put willingness to endure pollution down to the poor ignorant workers being deceived by the big dastardly corporations, a change from leftist discourse that I found refreshing. Instead she focuses on stories and teams.

Prof. Hochschild believes that the people of the south are (in general) conditioned to look forward, towards what were historically the planter elite and are now the resource extraction executives. They want to be like the most fortunate people in their communities and so support the same things they do. When liberals tell them they should be looking backwards and trying to help people less fortunate than them, this feels like an attempt to enforce foreign feeling rules. They feel like they are being told that to be respectable or good, they must perform concern or other emotions that don’t feel genuine [2].

I’m using forward and back deliberately here. This is the book that coined the “standing in line” metaphor for the anger of white working class Americans. In this metaphor (called by Prof. Hochschild a “deep story”; a story that feels emotionally true), there is a long line stretching to the top of a hill. Just beyond the brow of it lies the American dream. The line is moving slowly (or perhaps not moving at all) and the people in it are weary from their waiting.

Despite this, they stand there, patiently waiting their turn. But something terrible happens. There are people cutting in line! From the interviews she used to construct this metaphor, Prof. Hochschild identified the line cutters as African-Americans using affirmative action, women taking traditionally male jobs, immigrants working more cheaply than American whites are willing to, and (somewhat amusingly) pelicans, protected by environmental laws that were killing jobs. While the people standing in line expected the government (personified by Barack Obama) to do something about the line cutters, they were horrified to instead see President Obama helping and supporting them.

I want to make it clear that this isn’t something that either Professor Hochschild or I believe is literally happening. When it comes to the actual suffering of the people interviewed in this book, Professor Hochschild is inclined to blame big business interests, while I think the blame belongs more to a changing economy and automation (there is of course significant overlap between these two causes). When it comes to pollution, we’re in agreement that Louisiana would really benefit from tougher environmental laws coupled with more rigorous enforcement of its existing regulations.

Even though I believe there is no real displacement, no cutting in line, this metaphor seemed to resonate with many of the Tea Partiers interviewed in this book. To those people, the government is betraying them, working against them for another team. This makes them utterly incapable of trusting the government (with the exception of the military) and makes them incredibly defensive of people they do feel are on their team, like Louisiana’s petrochemical industry, one of the few sources of jobs that feel ennobling for them in the state.

Like I mentioned earlier, the communities where Prof. Hochschild conducted her research also relied heavily on the government. Nearly everyone Prof. Hochschild interviewed was on some form of welfare, had been on some form of welfare, or had a family member who was currently or had in the past been on some form of welfare. No one was particularly happy about this though. People did what they had to survive, but there was much more honour in going it alone. They viewed work as inherently ennobling and accepting anonymous charity as shameful, the sort of Calvinist curse that seems to be common on the American psyche.

This actually reminded me of a topic that frequently popped up on Freddie de Boer’s now deleted blog [3]. Freddie was constantly worried that conspicuous consumerism was ruining the left. Freddie was apt to point out that there is a class of modern leftist that acts as if the important political projects of the left can be accomplished if they only signal their “woke” views hard enough, signalling primarily accomplished by consuming the correct media. Imagine, as an example, someone who is enthusiastic about Hamilton as if it were a meaningful political or institutional blow for leftist interests.

For both “woke” consumerist leftist cliques and Tea Party libertarians, the best off are able to buy virtue (or at least status), while the less fortunate have the misery of want compounded with the misery of failing to live up to an ideal that is predicated on a certain amount of disposable income (Hamilton tickets aren’t cheap, after all).

As much as the standing in line narrative has gotten air time, I want to caution against believing it as a universal motivating factor in Trump’s voters or working class whites more generally. Because this book is more an ethnography than anything else, it would be improper to take its conclusions, conclusions made about very small group of Tea Party activists and apply those conclusions across a country as varied and vast as the United States.

Strangers in Their Own Land doesn’t include polling data; it’s unclear how many of the people who supported Trump share the “deep story” presented by Prof. Hochschild. Remember, many of Trump’s voters decided at the last-minute and many of those last-minute voters voted more against Clinton than for Trump (due to Comey’s letter).

One hint that the views expressed by Prof. Hochschild’s subjects are niche comes from their near complete abhorrence of government programs. Polls of the American public mark this view as an anomaly, even in a country that voted ~46% Republican. In 2015, 83% of Americans said Social Security was very important. 77% said the same thing about Medicare, and 75% said it about federal aid to public schools. A “mere” 73% said the military was very important. It would probably be incorrect to take the views of the Tea Partiers who want to cut these programs and represent them as common.

It’s also important to remember just how much of Trump’s victory came from evangelicals voting solely (or mostly) out of the belief that Republicans stand against abortion. 81% of evangelicals (who comprise a full quarter of the US electorate) voted for Trump. We don’t need some new narrative to explain why groups like this voted for the Republican nominee; they’ve voted reliably for Republicans in every election that Pew has stats for.

Despite my quibbles, Strangers in Their Own Land was a fascinating portrait of the deep divisions in America and Prof. Hochschild was an excellent narrator. She consistently fought to react with empathy, even to people she disagreed with on virtually everything. When a woman named Madonna told her that she loved Rush Limbaugh because he stood up to Femi-Nazis, Prof. Hochschild (the feminist writer who coined the terms “emotional labour” and “the second shift”) invited her out to lunch because “it seemed like it would be interesting”. Nowhere in this book did Prof. Hochschild exhibit scorn or a sense of superiority.

I think it’s important to note that Professor Hochschild hasn’t sold this book as a complete explanation for Trump. That’s on a media that desperately wants a single easy story to hold on to. Strangers in Their Own Land doesn’t contain that singular story, but it does hold one fascinating piece of it.

One thing that may have helped Prof. Hochschild connect with the Tea Party members she interviewed was her own rootedness. The clash between cosmopolitan (multicultural, migratory, and individualist) and local (homogenous, traditional, and community-oriented) values was every bit as on display as the clash between right and left. Reading the acknowledgments section, I was struck by just how rooted in Berkeley Prof. Hochschild is. She has a small legion of friends and acquaintances and (one assumes) a deep web of interdependency with them.

Prof. Hochschild seems to be neither migratory, nor caught up in the atomization of society. Several of the people she interviewed directly critique this atomization and its corresponding effect on the breakdown of systems of mutual aid and support. Prof. Hochschild, by virtue of her position in a vibrant community (as well as her previous work that has touched on atomization) was well positioned to understand these critiques of the contemporary cosmopolitan.

I know that myself (and many other cosmopolitan-leaning liberals) have begun to feel the pain that can come with our migratory impulses. I abandoned a graduate degree, in part because it took me away from a community I had grown to love. For all that I often found myself completely disagreeing with the Tea Party members profiled in this book, I was glad to find that I might be able to talk with them about the benefits of community. I’m not sure if that would be enough of a starting point to convince them of anything substantial – rootedness and community are just one axis of (dis)agreement, just one part of the story – but it’s where I would start if I ever had to build a bridge to these strangers in their own land.

Footnotes

[1] Specifically, Prof. Hochschild looked for correlations between agreement with the statements “people worry too much about progress harming the environment”, “industrial air pollution is dangerous to the environment”, “the U.S. does enough to protect the environment”, and “Some people think that the government in Washington is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and private businesses”, political affiliation (Democrat/Republican), and pollution rates. Her analysis found that agreement with the statement “people worry too much about progress harming the environment” (as well as membership in the Republican party) was correlated with relative risk of being exposed to toxic chemical release. Because I don’t even have the P values these were significant at, let alone knowledge of how they corrected for multiple comparisons and how many comparisons were attempted, I have to treat the correlation as liable to be caused by chance. ^

[2] I think Prof. Hochschild could have done a bit more analysis around feelings rules, because in my experience, they cut both ways. As far as I can tell, there seem to be one set of local feelings rules and another set of cosmopolitan feeling rules. Cosmopolitan feelings rules emphasize charity and welcoming the stranger, while local feelings rules emphasize responsibility to family and community. In both cases, it is grating to feel compelled to pretend to emotions that aren’t genuine. ^

[3] I can’t find any remnants of Freddie’s blog that make the point I’m ascribing to him, but if you want to get an idea of the tone of it, I’ve found an excerpt from the post “Our Nightmare”, which talks about a different way he feels the left is under threat. Freddie is an excellent writer, and I do recommend checking out his current blog, The ANOVA. ^

Biology, Politics

Medicine, the Inside View, and Historical Context

Posted on by Zach

If you don’t live in Southern Ontario or don’t hang out in the skeptic blogosphere, you will probably have never heard the stories I’m going to tell today. There are two of, both about young Ontarian girls. One story has a happier ending than the other.

First is Makayla Sault. She died two years ago, from complications of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She was 11. Had she completed a full course of chemotherapy, there is a 75% chance that she would be alive today.

She did not complete a full course of chemotherapy.

Instead, after 12-weeks of therapy, she and her parents decided to seek so-called “holistic” treatment at the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida, as well as traditional indigenous treatments. . This decision killed her. With chemotherapy, she had a good chance of surviving. Without it…

There is no traditional wisdom that offers anything against cancer. There is no diet that can cure cancer. The Hippocrates Health Institute offers services like Vitamin C IV drips, InfraRed Oxygen, and Lymphatic Stimulation. None of these will stop cancer. Against cancer all we have are radiation, chemotherapy, and the surgeon’s knife. We have ingenuity, science, and the blinded trial.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. If they are profiting from the treatments they offer, then they are profiting from death as surely as if they were selling tobacco or bombs.

Makayla’s parents were swindled. They paid $18,000 to the Hippocrates Health Institute for treatments that did nothing. There is no epithet I possess suitable to apply to someone who would scam the parents of a young girl with cancer (and by doing so, kill the young girl).

There was another girl (her name is under a publication ban; I only know her by her initials, J.J.) whose parents withdrew her from chemotherapy around the same time as Makayla. She too went to the Hippocrates Health Institute. But when she suffered a relapse of cancer, her parents appear to have fallen out with Hippocrates. They returned to Canada and sought chemotherapy alongside traditional Haudenosaunee medicine. This is the part of the story with a happy ending. The chemotherapy saved J.J.’s life.

When J.J. left chemotherapy, her doctors at McMaster Children’s Hospital [1] sued the Children’s Aid Society of Brant. They wanted the Children’s Aid Society to remove J.J. from her parents so that she could complete her course of treatment. I understand why J.J.’s doctors did this. They knew that without chemotherapy she would die. While merely telling the Children’s Aid Society this fact discharged their legal duty [2], it did not discharge their ethical duty. They sued because the Children’s Aid Society refused to act in what they saw as the best interest of a child; they sued because they found this unconscionable.

The judge denied their lawsuit. He ruled that indigenous Canadians have a charter right to receive traditional medical care if they wish it [3].

Makayla died because she left chemotherapy. J.J. could have died had she and her parents not reversed their decision. But I’m glad the judge didn’t order J.J. back into chemotherapy.

To explain why I’m glad, I first want to talk about the difference between the inside view and the outside view. The inside view is what you get when you search for evidence from your own circumstances and experiences and then apply that to estimate how you will fare on a problem you are facing. The outside view is when you dispassionately look at how people similar to you have fared dealing with similar problems and assume you will fare approximately the same.

Dr. Daniel Kahneman gives the example of a textbook he worked on. After completing two chapters in a year, the team extrapolated and decided it would take them two more years to finish. Daniel asked Seymour (another team member) how long it normally took to write a text book. Surprised, Seymour explained that it normally took seven to ten years all told and that approximately 40% of teams failed. This caused some dismay, but ultimately everyone (including Seymour) decided to preserver (probably believing that they’d be the exception). Eight years later, the textbook was finished. The outside view was dead on.

From the inside view, the doctors were entirely correct to try and demand that J.J. complete her treatment. They were fairly sure that her parents were making a lot of the medical decisions and they didn’t want J.J. to be doomed to die because her parents had fallen for a charlatan.

From an outside view, the doctors were treading on thin ice. If you look at past groups of doctors (or other authority figures), intervening with (they believe) all due benevolence to force health interventions on Indigenous Canadians, you see a chilling litany of abuses.

This puts us in a bind. Chemotherapy doesn’t cease to work because people in the past did terrible things. Just because we have an outside view that suggest dire consequences doesn’t mean science stops working. But our outside view really strongly suggests dire consequences. How could the standard medical treatment lead to worse outcomes?

Let’s brainstorm for a second:

  • J. could have died regardless of chemotherapy. Had there been a court order, this would have further shaken indigenous Canadian faith in the medical establishment.
  • A court order could have undermined the right of minors in Ontario to consent to their own medical care, with far reaching effects on trans youth or teenagers seeking abortions.
  • The Children’s Aid society could have botched the execution of the court order, leading to dramatic footage of a young screaming indigenous girl (with cancer!) being separated from her weeping family. Indigenous Canadians would have been reminded strongly of the Sixties Scoop.
  • There could have been a stand-off when Children’s Aid arrived to collect J.J.. Knowing Canada, this is the sort of thing that could have escalated into something truly ugly, with blockades and an armed standoff with the OPP or the military.

The outside view doesn’t suggest that chemotherapy won’t work. It simply suggests that any decision around forcing indigenous Canadians to receive health care they don’t want is ripe with opportunities for unintended consequences. J.J.’s doctors may have been acting out of a desire to save her life. But they were acting in a way that showed profound ignorance of Canada’s political context and past.

I think this is a weakness of the scientific and medical establishment. They get so caught up on what is true that they forget the context for the truth. We live in a country where we have access to many lifesaving medicines. We also live in a country where many of those medicines were tested on children that had been stolen from their parents and placed in residential schools – tested in ways that spit on the concept of informed consent.

When we are reminded of the crimes committed in the name of science and medicine, it is tempting to say “that wasn’t us; it was those who came before, we are innocent” – to skip to the end of the apologies and reparations and find ourselves forgiven. Tempting and so, so unfair to those who suffered (and still do suffer) because of the actions of some “beneficent” doctors and scientists. Instead of wishing to jump ahead, we should pause and reflect. What things have we done and advocated for that will bring shame on our fields in the future?

Yes, indigenous Canadians sometimes opt out of the formal medical system. So do white hippies. At least indigenous Canadians have a reason. If trips to the hospital occasionally for people that looked like me, I’d be a lot warier of them myself.

Scientists and doctors can’t always rely on the courts and on civil society to save us from ourselves. At some point, we have to start taking responsibility for our own actions. We might even have to stop sneering at post-modernism (something I’ve been guilty of in the past) long enough to take seriously its claim that we have to be careful about how knowledge is constructed.

In the end, the story of J.J., unlike that of Makayla, had a happy ending. Best of all, by ending the way it did, J.J.’s story should act as an example, for the medical system and indigenous Canadians both, on how to achieve good outcomes together.

In the story of Pandora’s Box, all of the pestilence and disease of the world sprung as demons from a cursed box and humanity was doomed to endure them ever more. Well we aren’t doomed forever; modern medicine has begun to put the demons back inside the box. It has accomplished this by following one deceptively simple rule: “do what works”. Now the challenge is to extend what works beyond just the treatments doctors choose. Increasingly important is how diseases are treated. When doctors respect their patients, respect their lived experiences, and respect the historical contexts that might cause patients to be fearful of treatments, they’ll have far more success doing what it is they do best: curing people.

It was an abrogation of duty to go to the courts instead of respectfully dealing with J.J.’s family. It was reckless and it could have put years of careful outreach by other doctors at risk. Sometimes there are things more important than one life. That’s why I’m glad the judge didn’t order J.J. back into chemo.

Footnotes:

[1] I have a lot of fondness for McMaster, having had at least one surgery and many doctors’ appointments there. ^

[2] Doctors have a legal obligation to report any child abuse they see. Under subsection 37(2)e of the Child and Family Services Act (CFSA), this includes “the child requires medical treatment to cure, prevent or alleviate physical harm or suffering, and the child’s parent refuses to consent to treatment”. ^

[3] I’m not actually sure how relevant that is here – Brian Clement is no one’s idea of an expert in Indigenous medicine and it’s not clear that this ruling still sets any sort of precedent, given that the judge later amended his ruling to “make it clear that the interests of the child must be paramount” in cases like this. ^

Falsifiable, Politics, Quick Fix

May CPC Leadership Race Update

Posted on by Zach

A friend asked me what I thought about the candidates in the leadership race for the Conservative Party of Canada. I found I had more to say than was strictly reasonable to post in a Facebook comment. I posted it anyway – because I’m sometimes unreasonable – but I found I also wanted to record my thoughts in a more organized manner that’s easier to link to.

Right now, I think there are a few meaningful ways to split up the candidates. You can split them up based on what block of the party they represent.

The way I see it, you have:

  • Michael Chong representing the wonkish Progressive Conservatives
  • Maxine Bernier and Rick Peterson representing the wonkish libertarians
  • Steven Blaney and Dr. Kellie Leitch with a more nativist message
  • Lisa Raitt, Andrew Scheer, and Erin O’Toole running as unobjectionable compromise candidates
  • Andrew Saxton and Chris Alexander running as clones of Steven Harper
  • Pierre Lemieux and Brad Trost running as social conservatives
  • Deepak Obhrai running against xenophobia

It might be possible to collapse these categories a bit; unobjectionable compromise candidates and Harper clones don’t have that much difference between them, for example. But I think I’m clustering based on salient differences in what the candidates are choosing to highlight, even when their policy positions or voting records are very similar.

I’ve also been clustering based on ability to win the thing. Here I think there are two clear groups: the haves, and the have-nots. In no particular order, the haves are: Chong, Bernier, Leitch, Raitt, Scheer, and O’Toole. The have-nots are everyone else. I’d give 20:1 odds against any of the have-nots winning.

There are a few things I can infer about the haves based on all the emails I’ve been getting from them.

Chong (polling at 4% in the first round) is hoping that he signed up enough people and is enough people’s second/third/nth choice to win. That currently feels pretty unlikely, but we’ll see. I’d bet on Chong at 12:1 odds.

Raitt (5%), O’Toole (11%), and Scheer (22%) are fighting viciously for the post of compromise candidate, with varying degrees of poll and debate success (Raitt has done much better in debates than her polling suggests). Given the bitter divisions in the party, I personally think the race will go to one of these three on the third or fourth ballot, but I’m low confidence here. More emails in the past few days have attacked Scheer, so between that and his poll numbers, he’s the one I think most likely to win. I’d bet on Scheer at 3:1 odds, O’Toole at 10:1 odds, and Raitt at 12:1 odds.

Bernier (31%) is the current front runner, but I personally expect him to have a lot of trouble picking up subsequent round votes, even with O’Leary’s endorsement. I really wish there was more polling of second and third round intentions in this thing. Without those data, I’m going to put Bernier as second most likely to win, with betting odds of 4:1. I would very quickly change my tune if I saw any evidence he had strong support in the latter rounds.

Leitch (8%) has her own very dedicated cadre of um, “very patriotic” (read: virulently xenophobic) supporters. She also has a lot of people who hate her. Is that >50% of the party? I’m not sure. From her last email (where she urged everyone to consider at least ranking her), I think her internal polling is showing that it isn’t. Reading between the lines, I think her campaign thinks she won’t pick up many 2nd or 3rd votes but that she might have staying power into the late rounds. It seems like her strategy is to win on the 7th, 8th, 9th, or even 10th ballot after everyone else is exhausted. For this reason, I’d recommend she be left entirely off the ballots of anyone who joined the party to pick good candidates. I’d even at this point recommend leaving Bernier on the ballot as a last-ditch Leitch stopper. I do think Leitch is suffering from losing all that free air time to O’Leary and from the loss of her campaign manager a few months ago. He seemed to be able to reliably get her in the news in a way that her new campaign manager has been unable to replicate. I’d take Leitch at 10:1 odds.

Given all this I’d order the candidates from most to least likely to win thusly: Scheer, Bernier, O’Toole, Leitch, Chong, Raitt.

I diverge slightly from the polls of first round intentions because:

  • I think Bernier lacks second and third round support in a serious way. I especially expect him to suffer in rural ridings, where I’m given to understand supply management is popular.
  • I have Raitt below Chong because I think she is the weakest member of her bloc. If someone else in her bloc isn’t winning, I think it would signal a serious weakness in the bloc itself, such that she shouldn’t be in a position to be beating anyone.

When it comes to my personal ballot, I plan to rank nine candidates in the following order: Chong, Raitt, O’Toole, Scheer, Obhrai, Bernier, Saxton, Alexander, Peterson. I’m ranking each candidate based on their respect for the environment, their votes on Bill C-279 (protecting gender identity) and the Woodworth Committee (redefining when life starts), any relevant experience they have in politics or adjacent fields, the tone they’ve struck, their overall level of wonkishness, how much policy information they have on their websites, and their level of bilingualism

I’ve sprinkled this post with betting odds. I’m willing to risk up to $100 on bets about have-not candidates winning and $100 on bets about the other candidates. The only requirements I have for betting are that you must have access to Interac or PayPal (for fund transfers) and you must be willing to post publicly that you’re betting with me (preferably including the odds you’d have put on the event we’re betting on). I’ll add details about any takers in the comments of this post.