Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - February 14, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 FRIDAY FEBRUARY 14, 2025 Ideas, Issues, Insights Donald Trump’s modest proposal I N A Modest Proposal, the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift suggested a way for the poor to ease their economic plight: sell their children to the elite for food. “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourish- ing and wholesome food…” This was intended as hyperbolic satire, mock- ing how the wealthy in 18th century England and Ireland treat the poor. It wasn’t intended as an instruction manual. But Republicans south of the border and Con- servatives to the north have taken its main theme, the wealthy enriching themselves at the expense of the poor, to heart. Just weeks into his new term, U.S. President Donald Trump and his henchmen have taken a wrecking ball to America’s government. It is too soon to assess all the damage, but among the early casualties are the Department of Education, the U.S. Agency for International Development, science funding agencies, the Na- tional Oceanographic and Atmospheric Adminis- tration, and National Parks. In the crosshairs are the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps feed more than 40 million of Amer- ica’s poor, and Medicaid which provides health insurance for more than 70 million low-income Americans. And much more. Medicare, social security; how far will he go? And why is Trump so desperate to gut the fed- eral government? He needs to pay for tax cuts, soon set to expire, that benefit millionaires and billionaires. America is one of the most unequal countries in the industrialized world. The bottom half of the American population, ~170 million people, had in 2024 a combined wealth of just under US$4 trillion. By comparison the roughly 800 in the bil- lionaire class in 2024 were worth US$6.7 trillion. Billionaires are not the one per cent. They’re not the 0.1 per cent. They are the 0.0002 per cent. And their wealth is half again as much as the bottom 50 per cent. Think about that. And Trump wants more. He’s slashing gov- ernment services to fund the biggest tax cuts in American history. The rich get richer, the poor kicked to the curb. In our country, right-wing lobby groups such as the Fraser Institute and Canadian Taxpayers Federation fetishize America’s economy. Their productivity is so much higher, and their per capi- ta GDP so much more, they say. We must be more like Americans, they say. No we don’t. We need to be less like America. Their greater overall wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few. And it’s about to get worse. The right-wing lobbyists rail against income redistribution as inherently evil. And it can be. Especially when you rob from the poor to give to the rich. Income redistribution in the opposite direction, reducing grotesque levels of income inequality is a virtue. To answer the obvious question, yes, income is far less concentrated at the top in Canada than in America: economists use the Gini index to mea- sure this. According to the CIA factbook, Ameri- ca’s Gini index is 41.5, Canada 33.3, Scandinavian countries the high 20s. The danger for Canadians is that Trump’s agen- da emboldens Maple MAGA followers. Conser- vatives salivate at the thought of massive budget cuts to pay for their own Trump-style tax cuts. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has boast- ed he’ll slash federal spending. But other than eliminating the CBC and fewer federal workers, he won’t tell us what he’ll cut. So what is on the chopping block? Obviously, recent programs from the Trudeau- Singh partnership — e.g., $10-a-day daycare; den- tal care; the national school food program — will be the first to go. The Canada Child Benefit will likely not survive unscathed. Provinces can expect transfer payments to be slashed with cuts to their two big-ticket items, health care and education, unavoidable and big. Federal science funding will be cut and so too anything related to climate change or environ- mental protection. We can’t have regulations to protect our air and water blocking new oil and gas development. What makes the blood run cold is that a Cana- dian prime minister with a majority government has more power than even Trump to implement radical change. Trump faces possible opposition in the House and Senate, if not now, then two years from now after the midterm elections, when Americans ren- der their verdict on the Republican revolution. The winners in this new world of unrestrained selfishness are those who already have much. They demand more. And as Elon Musk has showed, they’ll weaponize their wealth to get their way. Franklin Roosevelt was right when he re- marked, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” Republicans south of the border, and Conserva- tives to the north will fail this test — miserably. Scott Forbes is an ecologist at the University of Winnipeg. From puppies to pigs, commodifying animals causes suffering THE price of goods isn’t the only concern when it comes to looming tariffs between Canada and the U.S. As the two countries routinely send livestock across the border, animal advocates are con- cerned about what could happen should there be a backlog of pigs and cows on either side. Will the excess be culled? Will the rest have to endure even longer transport times to alternative mar- kets? But you won’t see much political consideration or industry discussion of these welfare worries. And media coverage is likely to stay focused on the rising cost of beef and pork, rather than the suffering of cows and pigs. This is largely because, both legally and cul- turally, animals in North America are treated as mere property. Whether farmed and killed for food or bred and sold as pets, our commodifica- tion of animals has fostered exploitative systems that allow profits to trump pain, and our desires to trump their welfare. As we learned during the COVID-19 pandemic — when slaughterhouses riddled with ill workers could not keep up with the steady inflow of ani- mals — the meat industry is not built to prioritize animal welfare when supply chains are disrupted. At the time, animals on some farms in Canada and the U.S. were mass culled, some by horrific methods such as sealing up barns and pumping in heat (not permitted in Canada), or gas (permitted in Canada), known as “ventilation shutdown plus.” According to the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association: “Unscheduled (emergency) depop- ulation may occur as a result of animal disease outbreaks, vehicular accidents, or events that result in lack of living space for animals such as unanticipated loss of markets, loss of slaughter capabilities or the inability to transport animals due to infrastructure or weather issues.” Market changes and loss of slaughter capabili- ties are certainly possible if tariffs are imposed. But this treatment of living beings as dispos- able and replaceable is just part of doing business when your product is commodified animals. And this is not exclusive to animals farmed for food. The breeding of animals for the pet trade is also peppered with problems, particularly here in Manitoba. The recent case of a ferret-breeding mill in Melita is just one example. The ferret mill was exposed last month by advocacy group Animal Justice for horrendous conditions including “shoddy sheds packed with caged ferrets, with piles of urine and feces under- neath the cages,” it says in a statement. “Ferrets at the facility suffered from diseases such as distemper, having limbs gnawed off by predators, and are killed when they’re no longer useful by being gassed to death in a makeshift box,” it adds. As previously reported by the Free Press, Win- nipeg lawyer and director of legal advocacy for Animal Justice, Kaitlyn Mitchell said, “This is a result of the province failing to oversee breeding facilities.” Unlicensed breeders, including backyard dog breeders and puppy mills, have increased thanks to a “chronic” lack of oversight. Manitoba ceased licensing breeders over a decade ago. But this lack of oversight of breeders doesn’t only lead to cruel conditions for commodified animals. It also contributes to the problem of overpopu- lation. Companion animals, much like farmed animals, are also at the mercy of supply and demand. How- ever, in the case of pets no one is overseeing the numbers and shelters and rescues are left to deal with the result. With breeders churning out dogs, cats and other animals without any consideration for current populations, shelters and other groups are then inevitably inundated with more animals than they can accommodate. This leads to financial strain, difficult decisions and animal suffering. Of course, for animals bred for food there are no shelters (aside from the rare sanctuary) — in times of surplus or not. There is only certain death, whether on the farm or in the slaughter- house. But let’s remember, we are talking about living beings here. Whether it’s a puppy or a ferret, a chicken or a pig, these are sentient individuals who want to live, who deserve humane treatment and who exist for their own purposes. The commodification of animals teaches us that these individuals exist only to serve our needs, a mindset that dulls our collective compassion and weakens society’s ethical standards. The lives of anyone should not be for sale — animals included. Not as products in a pet store, nor as pawns in a trade war. Jessica Scott-Reid is a Winnipeg journalist and independent animal advocate. She is also the misinformation correspondent for Sentient. Standing up to the United States RECENT events have thrown Canadian re- lations with its economically more powerful southern neighbour into sharp relief. Most commentators appear shocked by the U.S.’s use of bully-boy tactics to get its own way. But that should not surprise anyone. They tried that over a century ago in a now mostly-forgotten dispute over water use. After a tense standoff, Canada prevailed when the Americans backed down. Around the turn of the last century, the United States set its eyes on the waters of the St. Mary River which rises in the U.S. and flows across the international boundary from Montana into Alberta. Canadian irriga- tion schemes depended on water from the St. Mary River. American corporations contended that Canada had no right to this water since the river rose in the U.S., and therefore its waters were the property of the United States. United States’ water law west of the Mississippi generally holds that the person who appropriates water first has the right to continued access and its use. The U.S. government argued that laws affecting water use did not apply to trans-boundary issues, and it proposed to divert the water from the St. Mary River to feed a planned irrigation scheme in eastern Montana. To do this, they wanted to divert water from the St. Mary River into the Milk River, which also rises in the U.S. and flows north into southern Alberta, before it curves southward and re-enters the United States. If the U.S. were to proceed with this scheme, irrigated agriculture in Alberta would have been devastated. Canada pro- tested that water use in the western United States was based on the right of prior appro- priation and so the U.S. was legally obliged to honour that principle and not in any way impede the flow of the St. Mary River into Canada. The U.S. countered that such laws did not apply internationally, so Canada had no legal right to American water and the United States intended to proceed with its project to divert water from the St. Mary River into the Milk River where it would eventually re-enter the United States. Clearly, the U.S. had no interest in a negotiated compromise. Faced with an economic catastrophe to southern Alberta’s agriculture, Canada took a strong stance. Refusing to back down, Canada threatened to construct a canal in Alberta designed to intercept any water diverted into the Milk River and redivert it back into the St. Mary River, where it would continue to supply Canadian irrigation projects. To convince the Americans that this was no idle threat, Canada surveyed a 72.4-kilo- metre diversion canal and began its con- struction. By any standards this was a massive undertaking: it was nine metres wide and capable of holding more than two metres’ depth of water. By 1904 most of the canal’s first 25 kilometres were flooded. Surveying and construction crews worked feverishly to complete the remaining stretch of canal. Where roads cut across the canal, and with no time to build the necessary bridges, dyna- mite charges were placed, ready to blast out the obstructing roads and let the rediverted water flow freely into Canada. The U.S. blinked first. Realizing that the Canadians were deadly serious, they agreed to negotiate trans-boundary water allocation. These ne- gotiations eventually resulted in the Bound- ary Waters Treaty of 1909 and the creation of an International Joint Commission to adjudicate any future water disputes. Was this a gigantic bluff on Canada’s part? Maybe. The diversion would probably not have worked, since parts of the hastily built canal cut though gravel and sand deposits. It is almost certain that most, if not all, of the diverted water would have seeped into the ground long before it reached its desti- nation. It would have brought Canada little economic benefit. But the thinking then, it seems, was “If we can’t have the water, then neither will you!” The results of this dispute can still be seen in the landscape of southern Alberta near the town of Milk River, where sections of the completed canal, still mostly dry, serve as a visible reminder of the importance of a strong stance when dealing with a more powerful adversary. Danielle Smith should take note. John Lehr is professor emeritus with the Department of Geog- raphy at the University of Winnipeg. ALLISON ROBBERT / THE WASHINGTON POST The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. is shown in silhouette. There are dark days ahead in America for those who aren’t in the most privileged billionaire class. SCOTT FORBES JOHN LEHR JESSICA SCOTT-REID ;