Fleming College students constructing a green building.

“No one would think it’s possible to have students with no construction experience making an entire selfsustainable building from scratch,” says David Elfstrom, a graduate of Fleming College in Peterborough, Ontario. But that’s what he and 25 of his classmates in the sustainable building design and construction program did in 2006, erecting an eco-friendly outdoor-living centre in five months.

Since the program began in 2005, Fleming’s students have raised three structures around eastern Ontario, including a food bank and a performing arts centre. Its goal is to produce graduates who have the skills and knowledge to create truly green buildings, and some of the program’s grads have already formed their own sustainable-building companies.

While green construction is gaining momentum throughout the country, most sustainable construction focuses on individual parts, such as solar-energy collection or water conservation. In this unique-in-Canada program, students and two instructors design, build and decorate a sustainable building—using earthen plasters, earth-bag foundations, straw-bale walls and natural paints.

Chris Magwood pitched the program to Fleming College in 2004 after close to 100 people applied for an unpaid, unadvertised apprentice position at his green construction company. “It struck me that if this many people wanted to work with my company for a season, there were a lot of people who wanted to push sustainable building into the mainstream,” he says.

The school signed on. Within months, Magwood was developing an intensive 20-week, hands-on program. The students, many with no construction experience, spent nine-hour days, five days a week, on-site, their nights filled with theoretical readings. “No one said it would be easy,” Magwood says.

The program’s first project was in Haliburton, Ontario, where the local food bank and thrift shop resided in a dilapidated storage garage. The municipality provided a construction site and money for building materials, and the class set to work. Five months and $120,000 later, the 4Cs food bank and thrift store had a new home.

Thanks in large part to solar panels adorning the building’s roof, the annual operating cost for the new building is less than what the old space cost in a month. On sunny days, the panels suck in enough energy to both power the structure and send surplus energy to the grid, to be used by the neighbourhood. While the building uses some conventional power for heating and electricity, energy bills have been dramatically reduced because of the store’s solar panels and radiant-floor heating. Like all of Magwood’s projects, the 4Cs site uses at least 50 percent less energy than a conventional building.

Still, the project is special for more than its environmental benefit and cost savings. “The community takes a fair bit of pride in it,” says Ted Scholtes, who sits on the food bank’s board. “We point it out to people because we have something unique.”

This year, 92 candidates applied for 26 spots in the Fleming program, and the college received several proposals from business and homeowners looking to get a sustainable building. Despite the program’s popularity, Magwood doesn’t expect similar ones to start appearing across the country. “I go to conferences and people are interested, but the field is still so new,” he says. “We’re a little ahead of the curve, and I think it will be a few years before the others catch up.”

Program graduate Elfstrom is more hopeful. “The success [at Fleming] is making other colleges think twice about their own programs,” he says. “There should really be more of this.”

[Editor’s note: this article originally appeared in the July-August 2008 issue of This. There have since been two more buildings built by Fleming students—a summer camp environment centre and a Habitat for Humanity residence.]

The success of the Fantasia festival in Montreal (which runs for almost three weeks in July), Toronto After Dark and the Calgary Underground Film Festival (now in its fifth year) indicates a growing level of interest, acceptance and even love for the form. But whether this is a good or bad thing usually depends on whether you were a fan before mainstream acceptance. In this post-Tarantino age, it’s getting damn hard to find very much that is truly underground any longer. Cult cinema ain’t what it used to be.

Isaac Alexander, who contributes to different science-fiction blogs and worked with the Seattle-based anime convention Sakura-Con, says, “When I grew up, I was a part of school clubs devoted toward science fiction/fantasy and anime. These clubs provided the ‘distribution’ to discover video programming from distant lands,” says Isaac. “Now, you just need to load up the internet and head to YouTube.”

Kier-La Janisse, who founded Vancouver’s infamous (and now defunct) horror film festival CineMuerte, pulls no punches in her assessment of this phenomenon: “I think the mainstream always comes knocking when anything underground proves to be viable to some degree, regardless of genre. Then they rip off the ideas of all the real pioneers, the people who took all the chances to prove that these types of films could work.”

She adds that a true aficionado is someone who works to locate low-quality versions of these titles. “When I want to watch Messiah of Evil or something, I watch a crappy VHS of it. I need the specialness—otherwise you’re just a consumer.”

A consequence of this contradiction is that films that do very well at bigger festivals like Fantasia or Toronto After Dark often err on the lighter side of the darkness. A case in point is an Austrian film called On Evil Grounds, which has screened in multiple festivals including the Calgary Underground Film Festival and Fantasia. On Evil Grounds is very much like a Tex Avery horror film (for those who don’t know the man, he was the looniest of the Looney Tunes animators). Bodily fluids erupt everywhere, and one doesn’t know whether to laugh or throw up. Maybe both. Since it is made for people to hoot and holler at, the film was a massive success at festivals.

Of course, festivals cannot live on love alone; you still need funding, and bums in seats. Certainly there is devotion from committed fans, the occasional bit of critical respect, even money. Well, sometimes. Bill C-10 is only the latest offensive that critics fear will deny tax dollars to films that are excessively violent without an educational value. You can have your bloody mayhem, but there better be a lesson buried at its centre. Despite the increased visibility and popularity of genre cinema, the festivals that program it don’t get much help from the Canadian government.

Try explaining to the Canada Council the educational benefit of films that depict maniacs hacking up boobalicious teenagers, and you get the picture. Or maybe you don’t, since many films simply don’t get shown. Brenda Lieberman, who runs the Calgary Underground Film Festival, says, “People often stereotype horror fans, which makes it less likely for sponsors to jump in.” CUFF has been growing slowly over the past five years, but the festival still struggles to break even, balancing more obscure offerings with crowd-pleasers.

If you really want to see weird stuff or, worse, show weird stuff to other people, you still have to do it yourself. I think it’s time I started a film festival.

Remember the good old days when Canadians used to think the government was supposed to help everyone share in economic prosperity and prevent anyone from shouldering the brunt of economic adversity? We thought we’d learned the bitter lessons about the perils of the free market from the Great Depression. A welfare state was needed to moderate the harsh forces of the market, with government programs that entitle all citizens to certain social and economic rights.

Today, the welfare-state programs of the 1960s and 1970s seem like a distant memory. Free marketeers have attacked everything from employment insurance to welfare to education funding.

One response of progressives to the shredding of the social safety net is the impulse to go back to where we were before the bad stuff happened. Remember the good old days, when most unemployed people could actually qualify for unemployment insurance? When the discussion was about how to fix or improve public services, not what price the government could get for auctioning them off? After losing so many fights over the decades to protect social programs, you can appreciate this nostalgia for the way things used to be. Wouldn’t it be great to have adequate income support programs again instead of having to rely on the not-so-tender mercies of seedy payday loan joints?

But nostalgia for the past overstates the virtues of the welfare state. Carleton University sociologist Janet Siltanen’s research shows that—even on its best days—the welfare state paradigm was far from paradise. Even in the “golden age” of the Canadian welfare state, politicians were long on rhetoric and short on substance. Income security programs were modest, and social programs were often not extended to everyone. Plus, a weak commitment to full employment meant that the Canadian government fell far short of placing the rights of citizens above market forces.

Some might argue that—despite its flaws—the Canadian welfare state of a generation ago is still preferable to today’s neo-liberal nightmare. But Siltanen argues that viewing the welfare state with rose-coloured glasses is not a great starting point for a new vision for Canada.

The welfare state paradigm was predicated on an agenda of redistribution: the idea that the government should take from the affluent to help out those who are struggling.

Under such a redistribution scheme, socially marginalized groups must fight over whose agendas will be supported from a limited pot of tax revenues. Groups that battle racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of discrimination are badly disadvantaged when it comes to determining who are the deserving beneficiaries. For them, the welfare state is not a paradise lost.

Not that redistribution is a bad thing—far from it. And maybe we could sort out our oppressive prejudices enough to ensure that welfare state programs are not designed around the heterosexual male breadwinner household, and to ensure that many more groups (women and First Nations come to mind) receive the benefit of this redistributive vision.

But there are other problems with welfare-state-style income redistribution as a political agenda. Taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots occludes a bigger question: Why is it that the economy produces haves and have-nots?

This is a question about more than just income redistribution. Rather than relying solely on government to try to improve on an economic system that reinforces inequality, wouldn’t it be better if we had a more egalitarian economic system? If the economy weren’t creating such gulfs between rich and poor, there would be less damage for the government to fix.

This line of reasoning leads in a number of interesting directions—directions we don’t pursue if we are stuck in the past with the same redistribution mindset we had a generation ago. Siltanen poses her own provocative question: Who said markets are sacred? The market economy, with all of its imperfections, is not some force of nature; it is socially created. So for Siltanen and others, we should not just set our sights on a return to some imaginary, glorious past, but on creating a future where the economic system itself is up for debate.

It's time to rid our neighbourhoods of the green menace. Creative Commons photo by Robert S. Donovan.

From the first breath of spring, we North Americans dream of an expanse of green grass, a vast carpet that tickles our skin and stains our sundresses on which we can spend long, lazy days barbecuing and reading summer fiction. But our love affair with the lawn has got to stop.

Even pesticide-free, grass is an environmental menace. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates the footprint of fertilizing an acre of lawn equals a 700-kilometre car trip, and Statistics Canada found that gas-powered lawnmowers—which two-thirds of Canadians with lawns own—contribute to smog as much as driving from Saskatoon to Montreal. Kentucky bluegrass, which actually has its roots, so to speak, in Europe and the Middle East, is so ill-suited to our climate that it requires constant water and food (causing irate and impassioned CBC Radio listeners to vote it Canada’s worst weed). But lawns stretch across 32 million acres of the U.S., occupying more space than wheat, corn or tobacco. (There are no comparable numbers collected from Canada.) Who knew so much green space could be such bad news?

Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn (Metropolis Books, 2008), a project by artist and environmental designer Fritz Haeg, documents one solution to our yard woes. He turned lawns into farms, growing “edible landscapes” in three sites in the U.S. and one in England. Destroying the uniform lawns, to Haeg, is more than ecological: it’s revolutionary. “The monoculture … covering our neighbourhoods from coast to coast,” he writes, “celebrates puritanical homogeneity and mindless conformity.” Like Joni Mitchell’s hissing summer lawns, which represented control and repression in unhappy suburban marriage, Haeg’s work dismantles the way the lawn “divides and isolates us.”

Haeg’s projects defied that isolation, with communities collaborating on the antilawn designs. But for those of us with small green squares, going lawn-free doesn’t have to be complicated. The answers are easy to implement. Put down mulch so water stays in the soil. Compost and collect rainwater. Plant native species in abundant diversity: they won’t need much water and they’ll handle pests better (start with Evergreen’s native plant database). Plant trees: they are still the best carbon sinks we have. Get out your shovel, put on some sunscreen and let it grow, lawn-free, from there.

Peter von Tiesenhausen with one of his sculptures. Photo courtesy the artist

As you walk through Peter von Tiesenhausen’s land, artwork emerges as if summoned from the ground up. Ships and nests made of willow branches appear along well-worn paths. Statues carved from logs stand watch from between the trees. In Tiesenhausen’s studio, small canvases that resemble the cracked earth of recent droughts are propped across the window sill and sketches of aspen trees (drawn with aspen ash onto aspen pulp paper) hang along the wall.

Philosophically and aesthetically, it’s clear that the landscape and the art are inseparable, and since 1997, the Alberta visual artist has pursued this argument legally as well, taking the unprecedented step of copyrighting his land as a work of art.

Tiesenhausen made the decision after years of legal battles with oil and gas companies that wanted access to the deposits of natural gas that sit just beneath his 800-acre plot of land. Under federal law, Alberta landowners have the rights only to the surface of their land. The riches that lie beneath are generally owned by the government, which can grant oil and gas producers access so long as the companies agree to compensate landowners. This compensation is usually for lost harvests and inconvenience, but, Tiesenhausen reasoned, what if instead of a field of crops these companies were destroying the life’s work of an acclaimed visual artist? Wouldn’t the compensation have to be exponentially higher?

“I’m not trying to get money for my land, I’m just trying to relate to these companies on their level,” says Tiesenhausen from his home near Demmitt, Alberta. “Once I started charging $500 an hour for oil companies to come talk to me, the meetings got shorter and few and far between.”

Tiesenhausen is in a unique position to understand both the realities of industry and the value of the natural world. As a young boy working on the family ranch, his daily job of surveying the cattle left him with an intimate understanding of the family’s land. He left school at 17 to work in the oil fields and eventually found himself in the Yukon in the early ’80s, digging away at surface gold mines. Before he committed to being a full-time artist in 1990, he worked crushing boulders in Antarctica while building an airstrip through the permafrost.

Today, Tiesenhausen is an artist, an active member of his community and a somewhat reluctant environmental icon. “I’m just a guy that likes to have an exciting life,” he says earnestly. “I went to the gold fields, worked in Antarctica, but what I found was that staying at home and making art was the most exciting my life ever got.”

In 2003, he presented his copyright argument before the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board, which told him that copyright law was beyond its jurisdiction and he would need to pursue that in the courts. So far that hasn’t been necessary. The oil and gas companies have since backed off, even paying for an expensive rerouting of pipelines, and have yet to bother testing his copyright.

This fall, Tiesenhausen will get a chance to comment on the oil industry through his art, rather than the law. He’s been invited to the Gallery Lambton in Sarnia, Ontario, to create a yet-to-be specified new work in response to the 150th anniversary of North America’s first commercial oil well.

1. Create your own “pure” water by investing in an at-home water filtration system. Get a water-quality report from your municipality to see if there are any contaminants you need to be aware of (usually only an issue in rural settings) and to find out whether you need a point-of-entry unit that will filter all water before it’s distributed through your house, or a smaller unit that treats water once it’s out of the faucet.

2. Pick up a stainless-steel water bottle to carry that tap water in. With the safety of reusable plastic bottles in question for containing bisphenol A (BPA), a suspected hormone disruptor and carcinogen, it’s time to ditch that “indestructible” Nalgene bottle in favour of a shiny, metal version. Bring it everywhere.

3. Pass on overpriced bottled water when you’re out to eat and request a glass of free ice water instead. No need to be afraid: Canadian tap water is more rigorously screened than the bottled stuff.

4. Lobby to make tap water more convenient. Contact your city council and ask to have more drinking fountains and water spigots installed around town.

5. Create a bottled-water-free bubble at your school or office. On World Water Day in March, 2008, the Polaris Institute launched a campaign to discourage bottled water use on Canadian campuses in an attempt to reject the commodification of one of the world’s most precious resources. Visit PolarisInstitute.org for more details and talk to your powers above to create your own tap-water-only zone.

6. Donate your autograph to the cause. Head over to Article31.org and sign a petition asking the United Nations to declare access to potable water a human right.

7. Do the math. A litre of tap water in most Canadian municipalities costs less than a tenth of a cent, whereas a litre of bottled water can cost $1 or more. The switch should be a no-brainer.

“I know what I wanted to tell you,” she said both times, “so-and-so died.”

The first unfortunate object of forgotten conversation was a dear old great aunt in Vancouver I hadn’t seen in a decade. The second was my childhood family doctor, whose last prescription for me was filled at least 20 years ago. My mother is the meticulous and dedicated reporter of demise in our family. She spreads the detailed news of death and disease, and these are usually the lead stories in any call from her. In this, she shares a curious simpatico with a writer of whom both she and I are fond, Michael Ondaatje.

Is there another writer anywhere who makes sickening violence and death into beauty with such regularity and skill? I hear someone shouting—perhaps wailing—Atwood!, and indeed, Peggy and Mike can be justly seen as the twin pillars of Canadian moroseness. Why bring a character’s life to a satisfying conclusion amid doting pets and darling grandchildren when you can murder, beat, maim, dismember, explode or burn them beyond recognition? But while Atwood hurts her characters as object lessons in the indifference of the universe, Ondaatje’s cruelty has the air of fetish about it. It is violence for art’s sake. His is a stunningly beautiful landscape of suffering.

In Divisadero, the reigning Governor General’s Award champion, Ondaatje cripples one character with childhood polio, has a horse kick the stuffing out of the same girl and her sister, induces a father to attack and nearly murder his daughter’s lover, and has that same daughter stab and almost dispatch the attacking father.

Later in the book, the almost-murdered lover is beaten into amnesia by some gambling colleagues and must undergo a second round of recovery and recall. As well, a literary flashback takes us through the life of a French poet who is blinded in one eye when glass shards pierce his cornea, and who later witnesses his one true love die of diphtheria. In an Ondaatje novel, not even a poet is allowed a life of quiet. Then again, this is the same writer who flung a nun from the Bloor Street viaduct, blew up a nurse with a roadside bomb and forced a lovestruck archeologist through the agonies of body-wide third-degree burns.

When we were younger, my writer friends and I made a game of Ondaatje sightings around town. Someone had spotted him in a liquor store, buying a wine that screamed of excellent taste. Another had a long, uncomfortable conversation with him at a book launch. Yet another is proud to report he used the urinal beside Ondaatje’s not once but twice in his travels. In each instance, the tellers of the tale escaped literary harm despite their proximity to this genius of personal disaster. So far, Ondaatje has not clubbed a character with a wine bottle, talked one to death or had him painfully assaulted during urination.

I note a brand-new Coach House title, Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig, brings potential bio-terrorism to the Toronto subway. Helwig’s characters drop to the tiled platforms in delightfully Ondaatjean style. Of course, Ondaatje began his career as a Coach House author. Is Canada’s hippest small press the source of all this pain and morbidity?

In my student days I edited and handmade a literary magazine called ink, and we printed the covers and trimmed the final books at Coach House. I did the trimming myself on their diabolical-looking industrial book cutter, an awesome machine that can straighten the edges of 20 magazines or more with one precise machine-driven cut. I never passed my fingers beneath the blade without visualizing the horrible damage it could visit upon me.

Once, deep in concentrated trimming, I was interrupted by someone standing beside me. A voice asked me to trim a pile of Brick magazine covers. As I handed back the trimmed pile, Michael Ondaatje gave me, and the deadly cutting edge, a grateful smile. I realize now I’m lucky to have escaped with my life.

The website “When Will Amy Winehouse Die?” reads like a macabre count-the-jellybeans contest. How many days does a junkie have left to live? Leave a guess, and a “pre-condolence,” like this one: “It’s not like you didn’t see this coming.” (This commenter chose July 11, 2008.) “We’ll miss you,” pre-eulogizes another, with a slightly more optimistic expiration date of March 11, 2011. If you’re correct, you’ll take home an iPod touch—presuming the gadget doesn’t fall into obsolescence first—and you’ll be crowned “Mr. or Mrs. Death.” “Amy is on her way out,” the site reads. “As the world is profiting from this decline, we thought it only fair that you should profit from it too.”

The same company runs the same contest for Britney Spears—this one for a PlayStation 3. It also hosts a half-dozen Europe-based websites for those looking to see pictures of Angelina Jolie’s tits or watch videos of guys wiping out on their Girls motorcycles. On the Winehouse death page, thousands have left their guesses alongside pictures of the singer in decline. Many entrants, it seems, have chosen their own birthday, with comments attached. “Thanks for the iPod!” one reads. Several say: “Die, bitch.” Others riff on Winehouse’s own lyrics: “You should’ve gone to rehab. Yes Yes Yes!”

It may be less overtly cruel than the putting a bet on when Amy Winehouse will die, but a lot of celebrity journalism appears to be a countdown to death. We watch bad girls like Winehouse stumble before us under the 24-hour surveillance of paparazzi. Lindsay Lohan gets drunk and disorderly, and crashes her car. Britney Spears is photographed without panties while the world debates whether she’ll commit suicide. Gossip blogger Perez Hilton registers another million hits, and the Bratz Pack keeps the party going.

Though her anti-rehab anthem sold more than fi ve million albums and made her an international star, Winehouse has, of course, been to rehab several times. Who hasn’t? B- and C-listers air their traumas on the latest reality show, Celebrity Rehab. Exclusive centres seem more like resorts than hospitals, with yoga, shiatsu and garden parties. Hospitalization is no longer shameful. It is trendy.

Star Magazine: rock bottom, indeed

But while the young women who are famous bad girls—Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton—check in and out of treatment, they seem unconcerned with redemption. Rehab always seems like someone else’s choice, the advice of publicists perhaps, and our suspicions are confirmed when a week later they’re up to no good again. They remain willful and unapologetic, refusing to conform to any sense of how women are “supposed” to act. They won’t be victims, patiently suffering in silence, and they aren’t trying to be anyone’s sweetheart. We can try to make them stay in rehab, but they say, “No, no, no.” “I told you I was trouble,” Winehouse coyly sings, “You know that I’m no good.” When the world yells, “Behave,” they only give us the finger and march, empowered, toward their own death.

As viewers of this spectacle, we’re caught between pity and condemnation. “How sad,” we say, that young women are cruelly targeted by the media, contorted by our demands that they be innocent but not childish, sexy but not slutty. We may hope they get the help they need, but most of the time, we’re less generous, believing they are getting what they deserve. They are getting paid; it’s not our fault they are too stupid, and obsessed with fame at any cost, to get their lives on track. We claim to worry about their health—hence the constant supervision of weight, pregnancy, reckless sexual behaviour. After all, don’t they know that they are role models? Rarely, if ever, do we allow that this is how they choose to live, that they don’t want to be Grace Kelly and they aren’t interested in our approval.

Society as a whole once held celebrity as the paragon of what we all could be: glamourous, rich, witty, beautiful. Scandals were kept out of the press, often by the press, infidelities buried, abortions arranged; we knew little of the excesses and depressions stars faced when there was no one around to watch them. America’s Sweetheart could be our dream, even though we knew nothing about her at all—in fact, because we knew nothing about her at all. Now, America’s Sweetheart is an album by Courtney Love, another debauched rebel rockstar.

In February, New York magazine published photos of Lindsay Lohan re-enacting Marilyn Monroe’s famous “The Last Sitting”—taken just weeks before her death in 1962—a creepy homage to a woman who pioneered the now well-worn path of sexy self-destruction, performed in front of the camera for all to see. Critics charged that the photos eroticized and exploited Lohan’s own downward spiral. “They are sexual, funereal images,” wrote Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times, which “ask viewers to engage in a kind of mock necrophilia.” These eerie photos link beauty and death, equating glamour and sickness, connections that are usually well hidden or airbrushed out.

Never before has so little been kept private; now everything is published, and every inch of women’s bodies scrutinized. As David Denby wrote in the New Yorker last fall, “every part of a star’s existence, including the surgical scars and the cellulite deposits, belongs to the media—and to the public.” Rumours that Britney is pregnant are dashed when the paparazzi snap a shot of her period-stained panties. Amy Winehouse’s damaged skin is shown in high magnification on UK news sites. She is diagnosed publicly, doctors showing up in the media to speculate about cause and treatment. “Notorious junkie failing to keep up with beauty regimen,” one headline read in June. Another article calls her “a shadow of her former smooth-skinned self.”

These photos show that the illusions that prop up celebrity culture—flawlessness and mystery—can fail. What could be more subversive in an industry based on beauty than to be publicly ugly? There is a kind of bravery here—however nihilistic—that these bad girls refuse to be our royalty, to play the role of demure ingénue. “In a nation of finger-wagging, name-calling, letter-writing, comment-posting, mean-spirited, stalking busybodies,” writes Heather Havrilesky in Salon, “maybe the crotch flash is the ultimate subversive act.”

Like them or hate them, the bad girls have an honesty to them that is difficult to find elsewhere. They do what they want, sleep with whom they choose, and refuse to be guided by a morality that’s not of their own making. As Lakshmi Chaudhry writes in The Nation: “[Paris] Hilton, Lohan and their peers represent a radically new generation of celebrities who receive attention—or more precisely notoriety—because they violate rather than perform traditional modes of femininity, especially when it comes to matters of the heart.”

They “no longer feel the need to hide their appetite for pleasure, status and attention behind a giggle or a teary smile,” she writes. “It is progress—of a sort.”

I didn’t enter a guess about Amy Winehouse’s death, or Britney’s either. I’ll wait until the end to see how the story plays out. And while we, the viewers, may be all-too focused on watching these women self-destruct, the situation isn’t entirely hopeless. Today’s bad girls are tearing down the feminine ideal instead of just redefining it. It is progress. We’ll get there in the end—but it will take more than 12 steps.

Onward, Stephen Harper: lead us to the socialist utopia! If you follow the right-wing punditry you’d think comrades Harper, Obama, Brown, and the like are leading us along that slippery slope to—gasp—socialism. Not that any of these leaders has a nice word to say about socialism; they don’t. But the more alarmist fringes of the right wing depict the government response to the economic crisis as a Trojan horse. As the government becomes involved in forestalling economic calamity, they say, opportunists will exploit this crisis to promote a creeping socialist agenda.

This whole hysteria stems from one of the most bizarre, but effective, misconceptions the right wing has been able to perpetuate in public discourse; the idea that “big” government is a left-wing agenda.

In their backlash against the welfare state, right-wingers reviled government as a stultifying force that smothered good old capitalist ingenuity with taxes, regulations, and social programs. Downsizing government became a neo-liberal mantra. Thus a perniciously convenient equation was promoted: big government equals socialism, while small government equals capitalism.

But “big” government is not easily categorized as a left or right agenda. The size and range of activities of government oscillate for lots of reasons. Sometimes government gets bigger in response to popular demands (say, the creation of new social programs). But sometimes government gets bigger to pander to business. Business elites love government programs that provide cheap loans (so many of which never seem to get repaid), train workers, subsidize research and development, or promote exports on the government’s dime. Ironically, the patron saint of big government is arguably Ronald Reagan, who enormously increased government spending (and left a legacy of public debt) to feed the military machine.

The term “big government” persists as a schizophrenic double standard. New programs that help the bottom line of business are endorsed by the business punditocracy as wise investments in competitiveness. Government programs that help the bottom lines of the rest of us are pejoratively denounced as “big government.” Hello, Orwellian doublespeak! What is good for business is in the public interest, while what is good for anybody else is just the self-serving whining of special-interest groups. The current economic crisis has shifted rhetoric, but this wacky double standard persists. Card-carrying opponents of big government have squeamishly conceded that government must intervene big time before capitalism hits the fan.

These crusaders against big government are now obliged to do some fancy rhetorical footwork. Their new lingo focuses on “where to draw the line.” Judicious government intervention is supposed to reinstate the previous economic status quo—okay, maybe with a few new regulations to prevent further corporate shenanigans from making a bad economic situation worse. Just make sure nothing permanently shifts power away from business.

What is the right’s ideal fiscal stimulation plan? Use public money to rescue business, while imposing painful concessions on workers. Of course, this requires the überOrwellian feat of deflecting any blame for the economic crisis from management to workers. (Unbelievably, spin doctors have proven remarkably successful in their attempts to blame auto workers for Detroit’s problems). Better yet, attack unions. If unions are on their knees, workers will be much less likely to win back some of what they have sacrificed if their employers recover.

But if government action extends beyond restoring the former economic status quo to embrace some notion of a greater public interest, it is deemed to have “crossed the line.” If you argue that public money carries with it the obligation to pursue something beyond a narrow pro-corporate agenda (say, dealing with economic inequality or meeting environmental goals) then get ready to be unfavourably compared to Josef Stalin.

The Harper stimulus plan is crafted to steer well clear of “crossing the line.” Sure, under intense pressure from the opposition, the Conservatives increased spending (although not as fast, or as much, as Conservative spinmeisters would have you believe). But what is the government spending money on? Things like infrastructure. Business groups are okay with that: they have been crying out that aging infrastructure is hampering Canadian competitiveness. But making meaningful repairs to the gaping holes in unemployment insurance is the last thing Harper wants. After all, a stingy EI system helps keep the balance of power tilted in favour of employers.

Since Harper has been able to spend money that supports his corporate allies, his right-wing credentials are intact. But any government that dares to spend money that really helps those who are suffering the most is castigated as “socialist.”

We need to move beyond labels that have hidden and unhelpful political meanings. Rhetoric is a funhouse mirror (seriously— does anyone really believe that Harper’s last budget means he has moved to the left?). The key is to analyze who benefits from government action—not to get mesmerized by buzzwords the pundits and public relations war machines are throwing around. This is not about big versus small government, or more versus less spending. It’s about looking at each policy to see the real agendas behind the labels.

Although Flaherty claims to have introduced a budget that is “Canada’s response to the challenge of our time,” many groups, including the Centre for Policy Alternatives, are saying Flaherty’s plan is “too little too late.”

This had us wondering if anyone, or anything, will benefit from the almost $40 billion stimulus package being pumped into our economy over the next two years. Here’s what we found.

Tax Cuts

Personal income tax reductions will give Canadians of all economic stripes between $21 to $53 a month extra to play with. But this $2 billion per year in tax cuts is essentially just a shallow crowd-pleaser that’s widely seen as an ineffective way to jump-start the economy. Instead, the government should have pumped that money into health care, for example, where it could have created more than three times as many jobs as broad-based tax cuts.

Mid- and upper-class homeowners

The 15 percent home renovation tax credits, for renos between $1,000 and $10,000 and available only until February 2010, will benefit only those who happen to have extra money to spend on redecorating.

Infrastructure

The government plans to throw $12 billion over the next two years into infrastructure, mostly through construction projects. But while this is a major job-producing move, it benefits sectors that are still largely dominated by men, leaving women out in the cold in terms of job creation. And while the government likes to boast that its stimulus package equals 1.9 percent of the GDP, CPA economist David MacDonald points out that that figure includes the matching funds that provinces and municipalities are expected to put up for infrastructure, meaning the feds are effectively counting “what other people are spending.”

Unemployed Canadians

Though only 40 percent of unemployed Canadians can access EI, no really significant EI reforms were made in the budget, with the stimulus package granting a mere five extra weeks of available benefits for the unemployed. And of the 1.5 billion set aside for retraining, only one third is available to unemployed Canadians not accessing EI.

Parents needing childcare

Under the stimulus package, low-income parents are able to earn a little more under the Canada Child Tax Benefit, but those earning less than $20,000 will see none of the increases they might have hoped for.

First Nations groups

Although the $1.4 billion allotted to First Nations communities for skills training and on-reserve housing might seem impressive, off-reserve First Nations people won’t benefit from much of this cash.

Affordable housing

Although the government is putting $1 billion over two years into social housing renovation projects, accessing these funds requires a 50-50 commitment from the provinces, a demand that may be difficult for poorer provinces to meet and may mean they miss out on housing they need the most. This money also can only be spent on already in-place affordable housing units—no new units are part of the stimulus plan.