That's so Canadian, eh?

Adriana Barton had such a damn fine story in my Globe and Mail today I have to admit it brought a tear to my eye. Her multi-page feature in the Focus section takes a close look at an outfit called "The Dudes Club." That's a sort of mutual support group for the most down and out of the down and outers in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

I spent a couple of days and nights in the neighbourhood about forty years ago. It was the kind of place where Lysol & Coke was a popular beverage among the older crowd and heroin was everywhere. It was rough then and the various cycles of new drug fads, crack, meth, what-have-you, haven't smoothed things out. Downtown Eastside is the end of the line, the end of the ride.

The Dudes Club (Dudes is an acronym for Downtown Urban Knights Defending Equality and Solidarity) is a bi-weekly get together that focuses on men's health issues. Not just the kinds of health issues around drinking Lysol and injecting drugs, but the psychological issues that give rise to those behaviours. By all accounts it is a very successful program.

A doctor by the name of Paul Gross seems to be the spark-plug of the operation. We are told that Dr. Gross, who volunteers his own time and serves as medical director, runs the program on a budget of $15,000 per year.

A few paragraphs later we get this;

Researchers at the University of British Columbia are evaluating the program as part of a three year, $270,000 study...

WTF?

As in WTF kind of a society are we when we scrape together $15,000 to fund a life-altering program that helps some of the most vulnerable among us, then find $90,000 per year to "evaluate" it?

That's so Canadian, eh?

Academic freedom still not dead in Canada

At least for those fortunate academics who are actually tenured, which is a fraction that gets a little smaller every year. Canada is still a few years behind the US in filling virtually all teaching posts with "adjuncts" or "sessionals," and God knows that "academic freedom" is a total non-starter for that crowd.

But for the lucky few on the grav.. oops, I mean the tenure track, the corpse of academic freedom rose zombie-like from the grave this week. John Montalbano, chair of the Board of Governors at UBC, fell on his sword for his perceived breech of the secret code of academic freedom.

Good!

This should give that .5% of the population who give a shit some cause for hope. Montalbano, who formerly made a living as a TV pitchman for the Chrysler Cordoba (remember those genuine Corinthian leather seats?), got to be the chair of the board of governors at UBC for the same reason anybody gets to that spot at any Canadian university; political connections and the old-boy network.

If you've followed the story at all, UBC, one of Canada's premier institutions of higher learning, has been going through a spot of turmoil. It's most recent president, one Arvind Gupta, quit after just one year into a five year contract. That's not necessarily a big deal in my book; hell, I've quit jobs midway through the first day!

Anyway, some lowly plebe in the (tenured, fortunately for her) ranks had the gall to suggest that Gupta was pushed out because he was less than welcomed by the aforementioned old boys club with political connections. In short order Professor Jennifer Berdahl was visited not only by a couple of Vice-Presidents of this or the other thing, but by Chair of the Board of Governors, Mr. Montalbano himself!

Seems many well-paid noses were askew at her insinuation that Mr. Gupta was squeezed out of his job due to his outsider status. He was deemed not a made member of Canada's post-secondary illuminati.

On the face of it, I initially assumed there had to be less to the story than met the eye. After all, brownish folks with third-world names have held top-drawer posts at other big schools, like York and Western and Waterloo.

But maybe those schools just stuck that brownish person in that post to fly the flag of diversity in full public view, while behind the scenes, it was still the old boys calling the shots...

Who knows?

New research upsets anti-union apple-cart

Professor Erwin Diewert of UBC is uncorking a research paper that upends the last fifty years of received wisdom on the subject of Canada's supposed "productivity gap" with the US.

There is not a business school or an editorial board in Canada that has not laboured long and hard to explain that gap, and without fail there are several common threads in those explanations.

• Canadian taxes are too high
• labour laws are too rigid
• the minimum wage is too high
• unions have too much clout
• all of the above conspire to drive the best and the brightest to greener pastures

So after hearing that same song from every think tank in the land for the better part of half a century, Professor Diewert comes along and claims that the "productivity gap" as we have come to know and fear it simply doesn't exist!

Taxes aren't too high after all.

Labour laws could stand to be tightened up a little.

The minimum wage could be higher.

Unions don't have enough clout.

Insofar as the "best and brightest" have sought out greener pastures, it's because of fear-mongering and not because of facts!

Thanks Professor Diewert!..

LET'S PARTY LIKE IT'S 1962!!!