Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - August 10, 2024, Winnipeg, Manitoba THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A9 SATURDAY AUGUST 10, 2024 Ideas, Issues, Insights Minnesota — hardly a bastion of hard-left socialism Y OU don’t have to be a Manitoban to know that our neighbours in Minnesota are not being oppressed by radical socialist tyrants. If you’re paying attention to U.S. politics, you have no trouble knowing why I am beginning our weekly visit with these words. I wasn’t in Minnesota this week. But I was in the U.S. celebrating a birthday. Ev- ery year at this time, the Adler family celebrates my birthday at my favourite restaurant on the planet — Sinatra, in Las Vegas. Frank Sinatra was one of the first superstars I interviewed, around the time of my 20th birthday. It should be no surprise to people who know me that half a century later I would be enjoying a birthday dinner at a restaurant where everything about the food and beverages and music and art are dedicated to Francis Albert Sinatra. It’s impossible to spend time in Vegas without watching some TV news in the hotel room. And it’s impossible to do that without noticing the clumsy demolition job Republicans are trying to do on the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, who has been chosen by Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ nominee for U.S. president, to be her running mate. Guest after guest, especially on Fox News, pre- tended that our Minnesotan neighbours are being governed by a radical socialist — and some even say communist — tyrant. How can anyone from Manitoba spend time with friends and neighbours in Minnesota and believe their beautiful state is run by tyrants of any stripe? You may think the world of our Minnesotan friends and still not know at they are among the most educated Americans on the planet. Accord- ing to an online education platform Guru 99 that scores this data, Minnesota is No. 2 in the United States for having an educated population: “Only 5.8 per cent of the entire population don’t have a high school diploma, the average SAT score is 1225, one of the highest figures in America.” Minnesota is also considered among the top five happiest states in the U.S. and among the top five for being business friendly. You don’t need to spend much time in the Twin Cities to notice how many head offices for corporations are located there. The area is home to 15 of America’s Fortune 500 companies. They include Target, General Mills and 3M. I could do several columns about the quality of health care in Minnesota, home to some of the world’s best medical teams, including the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. But the point of this visit is not to tout the exceptional standard of living enjoyed by those in the state. I simply want to point out the absurdity of the Trump campaign. It’s true they are befuddled by not having Joe Biden to run against. But attempting to portray Walz as a hard-left tyrant is taking the Trump campaign to a political destination that is histori- cally bizarre. It should be noted that Tim Walz didn’t just become the governor of Minnesota last night. He was elected to the state’s top office in the election of 2018 and then re-elected two years ago. Before that, he had served in Washington, D.C. as con- gressman from his district in southern Minnesota for a decade. Presumably, if Tim Walz was a radical socialist or communist, our well-educated neighbours would have noticed something fishy a long time ago. I always want to bend over backwards to be fair, even with those whose views may be diametrical- ly opposed to mine. In doing a bit of homework on why some conservatives working with Trump are so down on Tim Walz, I discovered that he signed legislation to ensure that children attending Minnesota public schools are fed two meals a day. And because of Gov. Walz’s administration, fam- ilies earning US$80,000 or less are being given free tuition at state colleges in Minnesota. In 1957, I officially became a refugee from com- munism. I want to assure you that my parents and I did not escape the country of our birth because Mum and Dad were troubled that the government of communist Hungary was making sure that I would never go hungry for food or education. To our Minnesota neighbours: keep up the good work. Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. charles@charlesadler.com The protection of politicians in Canada THE recent assassination attempt against former U.S. president Donald Trump reminded us of the history of political violence in that country. It brought out a sense of moral superiority among some Canadians. We see ourselves as the “ peace- able kingdom.” Unlike the U.S., our political culture is not the product of revolutionary and civil wars. Four presidents have been assassinated, but not one prime minister. Restrictions on firearms are con- tentious, but more accepted in Canada. In general, our political culture is less individualistic, with less widespread, less intense anti-government sentiment. These historical differences have been shrink- ing over time as cultural developments spill over the border into Canada. Polarization, anger and violence seem to be contagious. Being a politician in Canada has become a less respected and increasingly a dangerous occupation. Polls indicate that over 60 per cent of Canadians do not trust politicians, with the highest levels of mistrust targeted at federal party representatives compared to provincial and municipal politicians. The abuse of politicians is rising and takes many forms, both online and offline. There are verbal attacks on the motivations, character, appearance and ideas of politicians. Women are disproportionately targeted, including in the form of sexist language and bullying. Legitimate protests staged at constituency of- fices and the private residences of politicians can descend into threatening behaviour and property damage. With increasing regularity, individuals utter threats, especially online, of physical vio- lence, even death, to elected representatives and their families. The cost of protecting politicians is rising dramatically. Earlier this year, the sergeant-at-arms of the House of Commons, Patrick McDonell, who is re- sponsible for security, told a parliamentary com- mittee that his office opened 530 files on threats to MPs in 2023. There were just eight such files in 2019. A report from the public service warned such threats were being “normalized” and the commissioner of the RCMP suggested that the force might need new tools to deal with problems. In 2020, a Manitoba man drove his truck though the gates of the prime minister’s residence hoping to confront Justin Trudeau. In the 2021 election campaign, Trudeau was pelted with gravel. Chrystia Freeland, the finance minister, was ver- bally accosted in a public setting. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre told the media that his wife and family have received death threats. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has been the victim of racist slurs and was harassed while campaigning. After the Trump shooting, Canadian Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc reported that the RCMP would be extra vigilant in protecting the prime minister and other party leaders. It may be possible to strengthen security for the dozens of party leaders at the national and pro- vincial levels of government, but it is impossible to provide continuous police protection for the remaining 300-plus MPs, 105 senators, and the hundreds of elected provincial representatives across the country, including the 57 MLAs in Manitoba. I am particularly interested in what is hap- pening in terms of the growing need for greater security for constituency offices. Such offices are meant to be visible, open and accessible to mem- bers of the local community. It is here that an important part of the repre- sentation process happens. There are regular office hours when elected politicians and their staff listen to the opinions and concerns of their constituents. Problems that constituents are hav- ing with government, especially with the bureau- cracy, are addressed and often resolved. There is also a symbolic aspect to such encoun- ters. Constituency service allows community members to put a human face on government. It demonstrates that governments can be respon- sive. Individuals who deal with their local represen- tatives typically have greater trust and confi- dence in politicians than people who have not availed themselves of constituency services. If the current threat environment worsens, more tradeoffs between the safety of politicians and their clients and the openness and accessi- bility of the constituency service process will become necessary. Here are several examples of the dilemmas involved. In January 2022, police were called to the constituency office of a Manitoba NDP MLA to deal with a threatening individual. In January 2024, a constituency worker in Nova Scotia was attacked, leading to unsuccessful calls for fund- ing of a second staff person to increase safety. In the same year, Pierre Poilievre’s call for carbon tax protests at Liberal and NDP constituency of- fices led to warnings for staff to lock office doors and have their mobile distress buttons available. Enhancing security for politicians and their employees involves a risk assessment of individ- ual cases. Possible security measures for constit- uency offices include: the creation of a protective buffer zone, CCTV cameras, training on security matters for staff, the provision of panic buttons, coating on windows to prevent shattering, an elec- tronic entry system, waiting areas without loose items, and the availability of a secure inner office. It is unfortunate that such precautions are needed. Disrespect, threats and violence add to the numerous factors which discourage good peo- ple from entering politics. Heightened security measures limit the use of constituency offices as community resources. Politicians, their advisers, the media and the public need to stand against the growing toxic political culture. Paul G. Thomas is professor emeritus of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba. Democratic by nature IF all that mattered is economic growth, then Sheikh Hasina would still be in power. She has ruled Bangladesh for 15 years, during which the country’s per capita income more than tripled. Yet she has been overthrown by the very same students who stood to benefit most from her remarkable economic achievements. Hasina fed their anger by reserving a large proportion of the government jobs (30 per cent) for young people from fam- ilies whose older members had fought in the Independence War (from Pakistan) of 50 years ago. Yet 400 people, almost all of them stu- dents, laid down their lives in the protests against her increasingly arbitrary rule, and it’s not really worth dying for a slight- ly better chance at a cushy but not very well-paying job. They also talked about democracy, by which they really meant equality, or at least equality of opportuni- ty. That’s also what motivated the two- thirds of Venezuelans who cast their votes against tyranny last week. They may yet succeed in forcing the ruler, Nicolás Maduro, to give up and go into exile too, because fairness is a basic human value. Only a third of the world’s people live in countries that can be called democratic, but practically every autocratic regime in the world also claims to be democratic. In principle (although not yet in practice) it is the default human political system. We are talking about the nature of “human nature” here, and the key point is that it has a history. It changes over time in response to changing circumstances, but there is a detectable theme running through it for at least many tens of thou- sands of years. Human beings belong to the primate family, most of whose members live in smallish groups (rarely more than a hun- dred). They have strongly graded hierar- chies like those in our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees. There is a boss who rules by force and by fear but also by mak- ing alliances, and there is constant turmoil as other would-be bosses rise and fall. By and large, that is the primate condi- tion. It was presumably once the human condition too — but all the ancestral human groups we know about lived in absolute equality. We know this because the last genuine hunter-gatherer bands survived long enough to be studied by the first anthro- pologists. They were all dedicated to equality, even to the extent that they auto- matically co-operated to bring down any individual who tried to set himself above the others. How did that come to pass? Early human beings were still living in quite small groups, but they were already intelligent enough to realize that the mon- key-king model served nobody’s interests except the king’s. They also had language, so they could conspire together. The revolution may have happened once and spread, or it may have happened a thousand times in different bands, but the human default mode became egalitarian. It must have remained that way for at least thousands of generations, because equal- ity and fairness have become universal human aspirations. Unfortunately, when we went into the first mass societies 5,000 years ago, we had to revert for a long time to our other, older heritage of brutal hierarchy. Early mass societies could not be egalitarian: there was no way for large numbers of people to meet and talk and decide togeth- er. That situation prevailed until we devel- oped mass communications a few centu- ries ago. That technology made it possible for us to decide things together again as equals, and as soon as we got it (just print- ing, at first), our long submerged but never forgotten “democratic” values re-emerged as well. That’s what the American and French revolutions were about. That’s what the Bangladeshi and hopefully the Venezuelan revolutions are about now. These are not random events. They are part of a long but promising process of reclaiming our real values. Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. CHARLES ADLER PAUL G. THOMAS GWYNNE DYER CHARLES REX ARBOGAST / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Democratic vice-presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz welcomes Democratic presidential nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris, at a campaign event Aug. 7 in Eau Claire, Wisc. ;