On CBC radio on Canada Day, the co-host of the “Canada Day in the Capital” special from Ottawa interviewed Adrienne Clarkson, Canada’s Governor-General from 2000 to 2005, introducing her as someone who embodied the essence of Canada perhaps better than any other individual. Most of what Clarkson said was the sort of bland platitude one expects on such occasions. There was one notable exception—when Clarkson was asked to comment on America, and Americans. You could hear an edge come into her voice as she asserted that Americans are “too dumb” to even try to understand Canada.
She didn’t say that Trump is “too dumb….,” or even that “Trump voters are too dumb….” She said “Americans.”
The interviewer seemed to take that comment as unexceptionable—all in the spirit of Canada being “elbows up” against Donald Trump’s tariff and annexation threats.
Imagine the reaction if Clarkson had said that Chinese people are too dumb to even try to understand Canada. Or if she’d said that Nigerians are too dumb to even try to understand Canada. She would have been met with appropriate outrage.
At the moment in Canada, it seems that almost any level of anti-Americanism is given a pass.
A new Pew survey reports that the same percentage of Canadians (34%) have “a favorable opinion of” China, while exactly the same percentage have “a favorable opinion of” the US. When asked the same question in 2024 only 21% had a favorable opinion of China, while 54% had a favorable opinion of the US.
Does the US deserve to be regarded so unfavorably? Even those who are staunch opponents of the Trump regime and all it stands for—as I certainly am—should surely recognize that the United States remains a democracy. It’s a democracy under very serious threat, to be sure, but a democracy it remains.
Compare it with China, which has never had free and fair elections, which tightly controls almost all aspects of its citizens’ lives, which flouts international law with impunity, and which has confined over one million of its people in internment camps. Or compare it to Russia under Putin.
A just-released Nanos Research poll reports that, when asked “Which of the following feelings best describes your views towards Americans?”, 24% of Canadians chose “anger.” Again, this is not Canadians' feelings towards Donald Trump or towards the Trump administration; it’s Canadians’ feelings towards Americans.
It’s worth doing the math here. In the 2024 American election, 65.3% of the voting-age population actually voted. Of these, 49.81% voted for Trump. That means that 67.5% of voting-age Americans did not vote for Trump in the 2024 election.
A very great many of those 67.5% feel as much anger towards the Trump administration as do Canadians.
I would argue that, much as anger towards Trump and his administration is appropriate, we should do everything we can to rein in feelings of anger towards those who voted for him; in the long run, I think we’re well advised to try to keep open the lines of communication with the United States—and with Americans of all stripes—even when the American administration is as antagonistic as is that of Donald Trump. (I’m buying far less that’s “made in America” these days, but I haven’t given up travelling to the US and talking to Americans.) But even those Canadians who don’t want any contact with anyone who voted for Trump and/or who have decided to protest what the Trump administration is doing by renouncing travel to the US should surely recognize that all Americans do not deserve our condemnation.
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
Katharina Rout's edition of All Quiet on the Western Front
A few months ago we at Broadview Press published Katharina Rout's extraordinary edition of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front--a new translation that's been described as "informed, gritty, and evocative" and as "far more accessible" than earlier translations. Rout's translation seems to me to be far better not only than the decades-old competitors but also than the one other new translation--and the Rout edition includes a superb introduction and over 100 pages of fascinating historical documents. I put the case for the Rout edition forward early this year in a letter to The Atlantic responding to their review of a competitor--a review that did not mention the new Broadview edition.
In his article on Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (“The Warrior’s Anti-War Novel”), George Packer compares the new Kurt Beals translation from Liveright with the “frequently stilted and labored” A.H. Wheen translation from 1929, using a passage from just after the Kaiser has inspected the troops as an example. He gives the Wheen first:Our marketing team at Broadview has had a frustrating time getting the word out to the general Trade market about Rout's great new edition. The Atlantic was not the only major publication to have been fully informed about the book, only to ignore it in a review; a reviewer for the Wall Street Journal asked for a review copy after he'd been informed of the publication of the Rout translation--and then wrote a review of the competitor without ever mentioning the existence of the Rout translation. And Amazon, which is almost always bad at listing new editions of classic works correctly, has in this case been even worse than usual. At first Amazon didn't list the edition at all, and then, after endless efforts by our marketing team, they listed only the kindle edition--https://www.amazon.com/All-Quiet-Western-Front-Broadview-ebook/dp/B0DM9R7LDC. If you'd like a copy of the book, I'd highly recomend you order through your local bookstore--or direct from Broadview (https://broadviewpress.com/product/all-quiet-on-the-western-front/#tab-description). Broadview has published over 1,000 books in its 40 years; I don't think there's any question that this is one of the best--as well as one of the most important.Tjaden is quite fascinated. His otherwise prosy fancy is blowing bubbles. “But look,” he announces, “I simply can’t believe that an emperor has to go to the latrine the same as I have.”Here is Beals’ translation:Tjaden is completely fascinated. His mind isn’t usually so lively, but now it’s bubbling over. “Look here,” he announces, “I just can’t fathom that a kaiser has to go to the latrine just like I do.”Packer is on solid ground in rating Beals’ translation over that of Wheen. But he may not have known when he was writing the article that there is another brand-new translation of Remarque’s great novel; Katharina Rout’s translation was published in a Broadview Press edition 9 October 2024 in Canada, and 1 January 2025 in the United States—the day on which the German original entered the public domain in America. Rout’s (already widely praised) translation aims to be “blunter and more pared down” as well as more accurate than earlier translations. Here is how she renders the same passage—using just 30 words, compared to Beals’ 36 and Wheen’s 33:But Tjaden remains enthralled. His usually barren imagination is getting all worked up. “Look,” he announces, “I really can’t believe that the Kaiser must use the latrine just like me.”Rout includes in her edition over 100 pages of historical background materials—among them a number of documents that have never before been available in English.
Letter to the New York Times: Alzhiemer's and a Whole-Foods, Plant-Based Diet
Back in late January I sent the following letter to The New York Times:
Charles Piller (“The Devastating Legacy of Lies in Alzheimer’s Science,” Jan. 24) writes that “despite decades of research, no treatment has been created that arrests Alzheimer’s cognitive deterioration, let alone reverses it.” The key word here is “created”; it’s quite true that researchers have not succeeded in creating new drugs that make a substantial difference. But a growing body of research suggests that lifestyle changes—in particular, adopting a whole-foods, plant-based diet—can make a substantial difference, not only in helping to prevent Alzheimer’s but also in many cases to arrest and even to reverse effects of the disease. The pharmaceutical industry has a great deal invested in persuading us that expensive drugs are the answer for health problems; in this area as in many others, lifestyle changes may be far more beneficial than expensive drugs.The research is not dubious, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-style medical research; it's for real. If you're interested, you can find out more online on sites such as nutritionfacts.org and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine site (https://www.pcrm.org/health-topics/alzheimers). Or, if you'd like to check out some of the original research, here are some places to start:
Dean Ornish et al., “Effects of intensive lifestyle changes on the progression of mild cognitive impairment or early dementia due to Alzheimer's disease: a randomized, controlled clinical trial,” Alzheimer's Research and Therapy, June 2024 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38849944/ (“Comprehensive lifestyle changes may significantly improve cognition and function after 20 weeks in many patients with MCI or early dementia due to Alzheimer’s Disease”)
Alzbeta Katanova et al., “Effect of a Vegan Diet on Alzheimer’s Disease,” International Journal of Molecular Science, November 2022 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9738978/ (“There is evidence indicating that a vegan diet could be beneficial in the prevention of neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease”).]
Letter to the Globe: Zoos
Marsha Lederman had written a good column about elephants in zoos. My letter to the Globe made an obvious point following up.
Re “Why are we still keeping elephants in zoos?” (March 22): Marsha Lederman writes movingly and well about “the suffering of animals, particularly from human causes”—and in particular about “a mother and her calf being separated.” “Why are we doing this?” she asks. Why indeed? And why, on so-called “farms,” are we still separating calves from their mothers so that we can drink the milk meant for the calves? Zoos are horrific places for non-human animals; factory farms (including dairy and egg operations) are far, far worse. A whole-foods, plant-based diet is better for our own health and better for the planet as well as infinitely better for other animals.
Letter to the Globe: Leaders' Debate Eligibility
There was a bit of a fuss during Canada's recent election campaign over the decision to exclude the Green Party from the leaders' debates. The Party had not met either of the percentage-related criteria set out by the Leaders' Debates Commission--the party's candidates for the most recent general election (2021) had not received at that election at least 4% of the number of valid votes cast; and neither, when the 2025 general election was called, had the party received "a level of national support of at least 4%, determined by voting intention, and as measured by leading national public opinion polling organizations, using the average of those organizations' most recently publicly-reported results." But in between those two points in time, the party had often polled above 4%. This was the letter that I sent to the Globe (and that it published April 21, under the heading "Fair Play"):
Re “Green Party says it is being silenced after commission disinvites it from leaders’ debates” (April 17): The current rules take no account of polling fluctuations over time. It would be fairer if parties that have polled over 4% at any time since the previous election be allowed to take part. Under those rules, both the Greens (which have often polled above 4% since the 2021 election) and the People’s Party of Canada (which polled above 4% in the summer of 2022) would have met the polling criterion. Perhaps small parties should be allotted less time than the larger parties to make their case—but allowing them at least some time to make their case surely serves the interests of democracy.
Letters to the Globe: Supply Management
Canada's system of supply management, which protects farmers and smooths out prices in the egg, dairy, and poultry industries, has been the subject of considerable recent controversy. It keeps prices artificially high. It's not equitable; the majority of Canadian farmers do not enjoy the protection of supply management. And, as recent Order of Canada recipient and former civil servant Don Campbell pointed out recently on CBC Radio (The Current, July 10), it's bad for the economy as a whole:
I have long argued that removing supply management and instituting much higher cruelty-to-animals and environmental standards in Canada would lead not just to better conditions for the animals but also to indutries that were economically healthier. Animal-cruelty and environmental legislation for farms in the USA tends to be even more lax than it is in Canada, but there are many consumers in the US who are willing to pay more for eggs, poultry and dairy products that are produced with less cruelty and less harm to the environment. Demand for free-range eggs in the US, for example, far exceeds the supply. If all the egg, poultry, and dairy products produced in Canada had to meet a higher standard, we would surely be able to export more Canadan-produced products, while the US industry would be unable to meet the standards required in Canada, and thus unable to flood our market with cheaper products. The current high prices could be maintained, but the animals as well as the farmers would be receiving some protection. (If it were deemed that abandoning supply management would increase the cost of living for low-income Canadians, a "protein income supplement" could be introduced as an amount added to current payments to low-income Canadians. If so, however, it should be made clear that the supplement could also be used to buy tofu or "Impossible" burgers or vegan "cheeze" or vegan ice "cream" or oat milk. And the change could (and should) be accomoanied by a campaign aiming to make more people aware of the availability of other, reasonably priced protein-rich products (chick peas, lentils, kidney beans, etc.).
In any case, here are the letters on this issue I've been sending recently:
The Globe didn’t print any of these three, but I was pleased to see that it did print in its June 26 issue two responses to the June 21 editorial. In one letter, P.J. Nyman of Toronto writes about how Canada’s supply management system “keeps hens locked in cages by stalling progress on animal welfare. While nearly half the U.S. egg market is now cage-free, Canada is lagging far behind for the tenth year in a row. Canadian grocery retailers once pledged to sell only cage-free eggs by 2025, but our supply management system hinders this progress, keeping hens in outdated cages with no more space than a single sheet of paper each.” In a second letter, Jane Harris of Vancouver points out that the supply management system “was initially devised to protect small farmers but has evolved into one that enables and enriches large industrial operations (which no longer can even be called farms) where millions of birds are crammed into cages, can barely move and never see the light of day. It is the small number of true farmers who humanely raised “free range” laying hens that now deserve to be protected.”
We are a pariah on the international scene. This is not just a United States issue. This is an issue with the Europeans, it's an issue with the Australians, it’s an issue with the New Zealanders, it’s an issue with everyone. And what we are prevented from doing by virtue of our system [is] exporting. Canada should be one of the top three dairy product exporters in the world. Instead, we're comfortable in a declining market in Canada. We're now down to less than 10,000 dairy farmers. There were 140,000 dairy farmers in 1940. I remember a long time ago, the Canadian head of the National Retail Council said, do you realize there are more bureaucrats involved in supply management than there are farmers? And I think there's a certain truth to that.The main issue here for people like me is of course the way in which the animals who are at the heart of these industries are treated--and to my mind, any solution to the problems must involve addressing the issue of cruelty to animals.
I have long argued that removing supply management and instituting much higher cruelty-to-animals and environmental standards in Canada would lead not just to better conditions for the animals but also to indutries that were economically healthier. Animal-cruelty and environmental legislation for farms in the USA tends to be even more lax than it is in Canada, but there are many consumers in the US who are willing to pay more for eggs, poultry and dairy products that are produced with less cruelty and less harm to the environment. Demand for free-range eggs in the US, for example, far exceeds the supply. If all the egg, poultry, and dairy products produced in Canada had to meet a higher standard, we would surely be able to export more Canadan-produced products, while the US industry would be unable to meet the standards required in Canada, and thus unable to flood our market with cheaper products. The current high prices could be maintained, but the animals as well as the farmers would be receiving some protection. (If it were deemed that abandoning supply management would increase the cost of living for low-income Canadians, a "protein income supplement" could be introduced as an amount added to current payments to low-income Canadians. If so, however, it should be made clear that the supplement could also be used to buy tofu or "Impossible" burgers or vegan "cheeze" or vegan ice "cream" or oat milk. And the change could (and should) be accomoanied by a campaign aiming to make more people aware of the availability of other, reasonably priced protein-rich products (chick peas, lentils, kidney beans, etc.).
In any case, here are the letters on this issue I've been sending recently:
Re “Sacred Cow” (April 4): Gordon Pitts makes it sound as if New Zealand’s dairy industry is largely unregulated, and that climate is the key to the industry’s success: But it’s not climate that ensures New Zealand cows’ welfare. It’s legislation—legislation that sets higher animal welfare standards than anywhere else in the world (among many other things, requiring dairy farms to provide cows with shelter from the elements—yes, even in New Zealand there is inclement weather).
If Canada ever does decide to move away from supply management and encourage an “export mentality” for the dairy industry, we would be wise before doing so to ensure that Canadian cows are treated at least as well as those in New Zealand. People will pay more for dairy products from a country that they know enforces high safety and animal welfare standards.
Re “How to crack open Canada’s egg market” (June 21): No mention is made in this long editorial of the central fact about egg production: the eggs that humans eat are made not by industrial machines but by living creatures—birds that are horrifically treated throughout their short lives in almost all commercial egg operations, in Canada as in the United States. A humane set of policies regarding egg production would require all eggs sold in Canada to come from farms where egg-laying birds are truly treated well. But the notion that cruelty to animals should be addressed seems not to have occurred either to our federal or our provincial governments, any more than it has to the industry.
Re “We must protect supply management from the trade war” (July 16): The authors are appropriately sensitive to the plight of farmers, arguing rightly that, if we do abandon supply management, we should be prepared to help those farmers who find they cannot compete, so that they can “make new lives.” Yet the authors express no sensitivity whatsoever to the plight of the non-human animals involved. Indeed, they do not even acknowledge their animal nature; “each cow,” they write, “is effectively an investment that pays a dividend in milk.” No, it isn’t. Each cow is a living, breathing creature—and, under our current agricultural system, one that endures extraordinary suffering.
Regardless of whether or not we replace supply management, our laws regarding cruelty to animals need to be rewritten so as to include farm animals.
The Globe didn’t print any of these three, but I was pleased to see that it did print in its June 26 issue two responses to the June 21 editorial. In one letter, P.J. Nyman of Toronto writes about how Canada’s supply management system “keeps hens locked in cages by stalling progress on animal welfare. While nearly half the U.S. egg market is now cage-free, Canada is lagging far behind for the tenth year in a row. Canadian grocery retailers once pledged to sell only cage-free eggs by 2025, but our supply management system hinders this progress, keeping hens in outdated cages with no more space than a single sheet of paper each.” In a second letter, Jane Harris of Vancouver points out that the supply management system “was initially devised to protect small farmers but has evolved into one that enables and enriches large industrial operations (which no longer can even be called farms) where millions of birds are crammed into cages, can barely move and never see the light of day. It is the small number of true farmers who humanely raised “free range” laying hens that now deserve to be protected.”
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
Less Heat, More Light
I sent off this letter to The Globe and Mail last weekend:
To be fair to Smart, her piece is an op ed column, not a full-length article; this is a hugely complicated issue, and she could not possibly have addressed everything that’s in dispute. But she could at least have acknowledged that a great deal is in dispute, and that numerous reputable medical associations and government authorities elsewhere in the world now take a stance that is very different from that taken by most Canadian and American medical associations.
None of the authorities elsewhere in the world, thank goodness, has adopted the anti-trans tone of hostility that is the norm among the many Republican lawmakers in the US, who aim to ban outright all these treatments for minors. On the whole, countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Britain, and Australia are taking a nuanced approach--but they are putting legal restrictions in place for patients younger than 18. Sweden, for example, restricts the use of both hormone treatments and puberty blockers for those younger than 18 to very rare circumstances, while banning transition-related surgery* before the age of 18; Britain allows hormone treatments for minors while banning puberty blockers and transition-related surgery before the age of 18. In short, authorities in these nations and others have been significantly restricting access to these treatments for minors. And in these and many other countries, there continues to be a lively debate as to the benefits and/or harms of these treatments.
In their unquestioning acceptance of “gender affirming care” for minors, then, Canadian and American medical associations do indeed seem increasingly to be outliers.
It’s not only the treatments themselves that are under scrutiny; claims that teens are more likely to commit suicide if they are denied these treatments are also now widely disputed.
These studies come from accredited researchers; they’re not the product of anti-trans or anti-science zealots. Nor do the governments that have in recent years restricted such treatments for minors (in ways similar to those proposed by Alberta) in any way resemble the Trump administration, with its appalling willingness to allow anti-trans discrimination in employment, in military recruitment, and in other areas.
You don’t have to go to right-wing media outlets to find out about this research; it’s been widely reported on in centrist or center-left media outlets such as The Globe and Mail, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.**
Strikingly, various organizations that unquestioningly support providing these treatments to minors have focused their attacks not on Republican lawmakers or on Fox News and other right-wing media outlets that have clearly provided biased coverage, but rather on The New York Times. GLAAD.org, for example, has run advertisements calling on the Times to “stop questioning trans people’s right to exist and access to medical care.” As you might expect, The New York Times has in fact never questioned trans people’s right to exist, and nor, except where children and teenagers are concerned, has it ever published anything suggesting that trans people should ever be denied any of these treatments. Indeed, the Times has been an outspoken defender of transgender Americans (see, for example, the Feb 9, 2025 lead editorial, “Trump’s Shameful Campaign Against Transgender Americans”). And the Times, it should be added, has also given a considerable amount of space to those who argue that minors’ access to treatments such as hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and transition-related surgery should not be restricted by any laws. (See, for example, Lydia Polgreen’s extended article criticizing Britain’s Cass Report, published in the Times under the headline, “The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids” [August 13, 2024].)***
Organizations such as GLAAD seem eager to paint anyone who does not share their position 100% as transphobic; the insults and misrepresentations at the other extreme are even worse. Republican Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, for example, has introduced in Congress a bill titled the “Safeguarding the Overall Protection (STOP) of Minors Act.” Couched in incendiary language (“castration procedures,” “gender mutilation procedures”), it would prohibit all forms of youth gender transition treatment at any stage. Such treatments, Marshall claims, are part of “the Left’s dangerous transgender agenda. Let’s call it exactly what it is: child abuse.”
Let’s set that sort of hysteria to one side and return to the arguments made by Katharine Smart. There are three of these. The first is an appeal to authority; she cites various associations in North America that support such practices. But one can appeal to other associations and other authorities; neither Sweden nor Britain allows transition-related surgery to be performed on patients under the age of 18. Are the North American medical associations right about this, or are Sweden and Britain right? Again, I just don’t know. Smart and the Canadian Medical Association may well be right. But I certainly think it’s possible that Sweden and Britain are right—and that the policies Danielle Smith and her Alberta government have adopted on this issue in Bill 26 may eventually be acknowledged everywhere to make more sense than those recommended by the CMA.
Raising even the possibility that Danielle Smith and her government might eventually be acknowledged to have been right about anything may in itself seem objectionable to some readers. And I can understand that. I’ve disagreed with just about everything Danielle Smith has done and has stood for since she entered politics, from her gung-ho support of the oil and gas industry and her discriminatory policies against solar and wind energy to her recent move to remove books with sexual content from school libraries.
But I think it’s vitally important—at any time, but perhaps more than ever in times as polarized as our own—to be open to the possibility that people whose political orientation is entirely different from our own can sometimes make the right decision, or do the right thing. I disagreed with just about everything George W. Bush stood for when he was the American president, but I thought then and I think now that he deserves considerable credit for launching the Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief in 2003. I disagreed with just about everything Donald Trump stood for during his first term as American president, but I thought then and I think now that he deserves considerable credit for his Operation Warp Speed initiative to develop vaccines quickly in 2020.
I disagree as well with the rest of what’s included in the Smith government’s Bill 26 (the other provisions of which include giving parents a veto on whether or not their children receive sex education in school, and giving parents a veto on their 16- and 17-year-old children choosing their own pronouns in school). But when it comes to the bill’s provisions regarding hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and gender-transition-related surgery (provisions that would prohibit hormone therapy and puberty blockers for patients 15 and younger, and prohibit mastectomies and genital surgery for those under 18)--I’m just not sure. Given what I’ve read of the recent research and of the stances taken in countries such as Sweden and Britain, I think there’s at least a chance that the Alberta government--a government whose policies I detest in just about every other area--may have gotten it right in this one area. Certainly Katharine Smart’s argument from authority, citing only those associations that have approved all these “gender affirming treatments” for teenagers and ignoring those that haven’t, fails to convince.
What of Smart’s other arguments? One of these is an argument from personal experience. Smart speaks of how carefully she listens to her patients, and of how she prescribes hormone therapy or puberty blockers to "only a small minority" of her under 18 patients; she attests from her experiences with her own patients that, "for the youth who do receive" those treatments, it's often transformational." There's no reason to doubt any of this. But one can accept Smart's anecdotal evidence in its entirety and still have doubts as to whether the course she recommends is the best way forward. Even from this one column one can infer that she is an extraordinarily caring, sensitive, and conscientious physician. Reports from other quarters, though, have made clear that Smart's approach is not always followed by others; some teenagers have been put on hormone therapy or puberty blockers with barely any questioning having been conducted. And other reports have made clear that, for some, gender-transition treatments at an early age have not been "transformational"--or at least, not transformational in a positive way. Certainly the personal experience of one physician with her patients--no matter how positive--should not be taken as conclusive.
Smart's third argument is one of overarching principle; she argues that medical matters should be between “the doctor and their patient. Full stop.” She ends by warning of a slippery slope, suggesting that if the Alberta “precedent is left to stand, the care and treatment that you need may be next.”
But do we in fact as a society accept that all medical matters should be entirely left up to the doctor and the patient? For most medical matters, we do indeed accept it. But what of a Jehovah’s Witness teenager who is adamant that they do not want a blood transfusion? In Quebec in 2017, a court decided that a health center should be allowed to give a 14-year-old blood transfusions, against her own wishes; the judge ruled it lawful to protect patients against their own wishes when a decision had the potential to irreversibly alter the patient’s life. Many Jehovah’s Witnesses would I’m sure argue that, when psychological and spiritual health are taken into account, blood transfusions do not have any health benefit—and some doctors who are also Jehovah’s Witnesses would surely support that view. What of the practice of female circumcision (aka “female genital mutilation” or “female genital cutting”)? In Canada and in many other countries of the world we agree that the practice has no health benefits; many in Somalia, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia would I’m sure disagree—including many doctors and many young women.
I should make clear that I am not defending the Jehovah’s Witness view of blood transfusions or the horrific practice of female genital mutilation. I raise these examples merely to show that our society does not in fact accept that all medical matters “should be between the doctor and the patient. Full stop.”
Why are these issues so important? They’re important, first of all, because they affect the mental and physical health of a significant number of young people. It’s vitally important that we do everything we can to get it right when it comes to the question of what practices are likely to give those young people the greatest benefit and/or cause them the least harm. But it’s also important simply because it’s become such an inflammatory issue in so much of the world—and one that, rightly or wrongly, has become tightly entwined for many people with overall political and ideological orientation. The level of hostility—and the impulse to shut down reasoned debate—is staggering. On the left, it’s become common to label those who advocate any level of caution in gender therapy for minors as transphobic. On the extreme right, it’s worse; people such as Daily Wire host Michael Knowles call for the eradication of “transgenderism”: “For the good of society,” Knowles declared in 223, “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely—the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”
In such a climate, it’s understandable that many have become scared to voice an opinion—even an opinion as tentative as this sounds like an area in which more research needs to be done. Some conservatives have been scared of being condemned by the likes of Senator Marshall and Michael Knowles if they do not sound off viciously against trans rights generally. Not a few on the progressive left have been scared of being condemned by the likes of GLAAD.org if they raise questions as to the appropriateness of hormone therapy, puberty blockers, or surgery in the context of “gender affirming care” for minors.
Clearly these are difficult issues, and extraordinarily complicated ones; conducting the necessary research is fraught in all sorts of ways. But we need that research to be conducted—and lowering the temperature of public discourse will surely make it easier for that to happen. We need less heat, more light. Much as I may doubt her conclusions, Katharine Smart is clearly one who aims to bring light rather than heat to these controversies; this blog post is written in the same spirit.
Re “There’s no place for politicians in the medical exam rooms of the nation” (July 7): Katharine Smart condemns Alberta’s proposed restrictions on puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and “top surgery” for minors. She argues with the Canadian Medical Association that minors, like other patients, should be allowed “to make the best decisions for their own health,” and asserts that such treatments help young people “thrive.”
Smart does not address the arguments of any of the authoritative recent studies from countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Britain, and Australia that have concluded the opposite: that the potential harms to minors from such treatments outweigh the benefits. In its unquestioning acceptance of “gender affirming care” for minors, Canada is quickly becoming an outlier.
I’m neither a doctor nor a researcher, but I do know that ignoring the case your opponents have made does not make it go away.It’s a letter I’d like to expand on; I’ll do that now.
To be fair to Smart, her piece is an op ed column, not a full-length article; this is a hugely complicated issue, and she could not possibly have addressed everything that’s in dispute. But she could at least have acknowledged that a great deal is in dispute, and that numerous reputable medical associations and government authorities elsewhere in the world now take a stance that is very different from that taken by most Canadian and American medical associations.
None of the authorities elsewhere in the world, thank goodness, has adopted the anti-trans tone of hostility that is the norm among the many Republican lawmakers in the US, who aim to ban outright all these treatments for minors. On the whole, countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Britain, and Australia are taking a nuanced approach--but they are putting legal restrictions in place for patients younger than 18. Sweden, for example, restricts the use of both hormone treatments and puberty blockers for those younger than 18 to very rare circumstances, while banning transition-related surgery* before the age of 18; Britain allows hormone treatments for minors while banning puberty blockers and transition-related surgery before the age of 18. In short, authorities in these nations and others have been significantly restricting access to these treatments for minors. And in these and many other countries, there continues to be a lively debate as to the benefits and/or harms of these treatments.
In their unquestioning acceptance of “gender affirming care” for minors, then, Canadian and American medical associations do indeed seem increasingly to be outliers.
It’s not only the treatments themselves that are under scrutiny; claims that teens are more likely to commit suicide if they are denied these treatments are also now widely disputed.
These studies come from accredited researchers; they’re not the product of anti-trans or anti-science zealots. Nor do the governments that have in recent years restricted such treatments for minors (in ways similar to those proposed by Alberta) in any way resemble the Trump administration, with its appalling willingness to allow anti-trans discrimination in employment, in military recruitment, and in other areas.
You don’t have to go to right-wing media outlets to find out about this research; it’s been widely reported on in centrist or center-left media outlets such as The Globe and Mail, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.**
Strikingly, various organizations that unquestioningly support providing these treatments to minors have focused their attacks not on Republican lawmakers or on Fox News and other right-wing media outlets that have clearly provided biased coverage, but rather on The New York Times. GLAAD.org, for example, has run advertisements calling on the Times to “stop questioning trans people’s right to exist and access to medical care.” As you might expect, The New York Times has in fact never questioned trans people’s right to exist, and nor, except where children and teenagers are concerned, has it ever published anything suggesting that trans people should ever be denied any of these treatments. Indeed, the Times has been an outspoken defender of transgender Americans (see, for example, the Feb 9, 2025 lead editorial, “Trump’s Shameful Campaign Against Transgender Americans”). And the Times, it should be added, has also given a considerable amount of space to those who argue that minors’ access to treatments such as hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and transition-related surgery should not be restricted by any laws. (See, for example, Lydia Polgreen’s extended article criticizing Britain’s Cass Report, published in the Times under the headline, “The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids” [August 13, 2024].)***
Organizations such as GLAAD seem eager to paint anyone who does not share their position 100% as transphobic; the insults and misrepresentations at the other extreme are even worse. Republican Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, for example, has introduced in Congress a bill titled the “Safeguarding the Overall Protection (STOP) of Minors Act.” Couched in incendiary language (“castration procedures,” “gender mutilation procedures”), it would prohibit all forms of youth gender transition treatment at any stage. Such treatments, Marshall claims, are part of “the Left’s dangerous transgender agenda. Let’s call it exactly what it is: child abuse.”
Let’s set that sort of hysteria to one side and return to the arguments made by Katharine Smart. There are three of these. The first is an appeal to authority; she cites various associations in North America that support such practices. But one can appeal to other associations and other authorities; neither Sweden nor Britain allows transition-related surgery to be performed on patients under the age of 18. Are the North American medical associations right about this, or are Sweden and Britain right? Again, I just don’t know. Smart and the Canadian Medical Association may well be right. But I certainly think it’s possible that Sweden and Britain are right—and that the policies Danielle Smith and her Alberta government have adopted on this issue in Bill 26 may eventually be acknowledged everywhere to make more sense than those recommended by the CMA.
Raising even the possibility that Danielle Smith and her government might eventually be acknowledged to have been right about anything may in itself seem objectionable to some readers. And I can understand that. I’ve disagreed with just about everything Danielle Smith has done and has stood for since she entered politics, from her gung-ho support of the oil and gas industry and her discriminatory policies against solar and wind energy to her recent move to remove books with sexual content from school libraries.
But I think it’s vitally important—at any time, but perhaps more than ever in times as polarized as our own—to be open to the possibility that people whose political orientation is entirely different from our own can sometimes make the right decision, or do the right thing. I disagreed with just about everything George W. Bush stood for when he was the American president, but I thought then and I think now that he deserves considerable credit for launching the Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief in 2003. I disagreed with just about everything Donald Trump stood for during his first term as American president, but I thought then and I think now that he deserves considerable credit for his Operation Warp Speed initiative to develop vaccines quickly in 2020.
I disagree as well with the rest of what’s included in the Smith government’s Bill 26 (the other provisions of which include giving parents a veto on whether or not their children receive sex education in school, and giving parents a veto on their 16- and 17-year-old children choosing their own pronouns in school). But when it comes to the bill’s provisions regarding hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and gender-transition-related surgery (provisions that would prohibit hormone therapy and puberty blockers for patients 15 and younger, and prohibit mastectomies and genital surgery for those under 18)--I’m just not sure. Given what I’ve read of the recent research and of the stances taken in countries such as Sweden and Britain, I think there’s at least a chance that the Alberta government--a government whose policies I detest in just about every other area--may have gotten it right in this one area. Certainly Katharine Smart’s argument from authority, citing only those associations that have approved all these “gender affirming treatments” for teenagers and ignoring those that haven’t, fails to convince.
What of Smart’s other arguments? One of these is an argument from personal experience. Smart speaks of how carefully she listens to her patients, and of how she prescribes hormone therapy or puberty blockers to "only a small minority" of her under 18 patients; she attests from her experiences with her own patients that, "for the youth who do receive" those treatments, it's often transformational." There's no reason to doubt any of this. But one can accept Smart's anecdotal evidence in its entirety and still have doubts as to whether the course she recommends is the best way forward. Even from this one column one can infer that she is an extraordinarily caring, sensitive, and conscientious physician. Reports from other quarters, though, have made clear that Smart's approach is not always followed by others; some teenagers have been put on hormone therapy or puberty blockers with barely any questioning having been conducted. And other reports have made clear that, for some, gender-transition treatments at an early age have not been "transformational"--or at least, not transformational in a positive way. Certainly the personal experience of one physician with her patients--no matter how positive--should not be taken as conclusive.
Smart's third argument is one of overarching principle; she argues that medical matters should be between “the doctor and their patient. Full stop.” She ends by warning of a slippery slope, suggesting that if the Alberta “precedent is left to stand, the care and treatment that you need may be next.”
But do we in fact as a society accept that all medical matters should be entirely left up to the doctor and the patient? For most medical matters, we do indeed accept it. But what of a Jehovah’s Witness teenager who is adamant that they do not want a blood transfusion? In Quebec in 2017, a court decided that a health center should be allowed to give a 14-year-old blood transfusions, against her own wishes; the judge ruled it lawful to protect patients against their own wishes when a decision had the potential to irreversibly alter the patient’s life. Many Jehovah’s Witnesses would I’m sure argue that, when psychological and spiritual health are taken into account, blood transfusions do not have any health benefit—and some doctors who are also Jehovah’s Witnesses would surely support that view. What of the practice of female circumcision (aka “female genital mutilation” or “female genital cutting”)? In Canada and in many other countries of the world we agree that the practice has no health benefits; many in Somalia, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia would I’m sure disagree—including many doctors and many young women.
I should make clear that I am not defending the Jehovah’s Witness view of blood transfusions or the horrific practice of female genital mutilation. I raise these examples merely to show that our society does not in fact accept that all medical matters “should be between the doctor and the patient. Full stop.”
Why are these issues so important? They’re important, first of all, because they affect the mental and physical health of a significant number of young people. It’s vitally important that we do everything we can to get it right when it comes to the question of what practices are likely to give those young people the greatest benefit and/or cause them the least harm. But it’s also important simply because it’s become such an inflammatory issue in so much of the world—and one that, rightly or wrongly, has become tightly entwined for many people with overall political and ideological orientation. The level of hostility—and the impulse to shut down reasoned debate—is staggering. On the left, it’s become common to label those who advocate any level of caution in gender therapy for minors as transphobic. On the extreme right, it’s worse; people such as Daily Wire host Michael Knowles call for the eradication of “transgenderism”: “For the good of society,” Knowles declared in 223, “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely—the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”
In such a climate, it’s understandable that many have become scared to voice an opinion—even an opinion as tentative as this sounds like an area in which more research needs to be done. Some conservatives have been scared of being condemned by the likes of Senator Marshall and Michael Knowles if they do not sound off viciously against trans rights generally. Not a few on the progressive left have been scared of being condemned by the likes of GLAAD.org if they raise questions as to the appropriateness of hormone therapy, puberty blockers, or surgery in the context of “gender affirming care” for minors.
Clearly these are difficult issues, and extraordinarily complicated ones; conducting the necessary research is fraught in all sorts of ways. But we need that research to be conducted—and lowering the temperature of public discourse will surely make it easier for that to happen. We need less heat, more light. Much as I may doubt her conclusions, Katharine Smart is clearly one who aims to bring light rather than heat to these controversies; this blog post is written in the same spirit.
*In rejecting Alberta's approach, Smart does not specifically mention transition-related surgery, though that is very much one of the foci of the Alberta legislation. Most defenders of unrestricted "gender affirming care" for minors have little to say about the practice of performing mastectomies on minors who want to transition, other than to say that the practice is very rare. Perhaps so; frustratingly, neither American nor Canadian official statistics are available. In the United States, the news agency Reuters conducted its own study several years ago and reported that in a three-year period, 2019–2021, 776 people younger than 18 had had mastectomies in connection with gender dysphoria. In Canada, the National Post reported in 2023 that over 300 Canadians under the age of 18 had undergone such treatment. No one knows the totals in 2025—but no one denies that such surgery has been legally unrestricted in most North American jurisdictions, and that it does continue to be performed on minors. Given that some at least who have transitioned as teenagers later come to regret their decision and want to detransition, and given that a double mastectomy is not reversible, it is hardly surprising that such surgery has become highly controversial.
**See, for example, these articles: Emily Bazelon, "The Battle Over Gender Therapy: More teenagers than ever are seeking transitions, but the medical community that treats them is deeply divided about why — and what to do to help them," The New York Times, March 17, 2023; Pamela Paul, “As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do,” The New York Times, Feb 22, 2024; Nicholas Confessore, How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost, The New York Times, June 19, 2025; Helen Lewis, “The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine: How the left ended up disbelieving the science,” The Atlantic, June 29, 2025; Robyn Urback, “Trans youth deserve better,” The Globe and Mail, April 26, 2024; “America should follow England’s lead on transgender care for kids,” The Economist, April 10, 2024; Alex Byrne, “I co-wrote the anonymous HHS report on pediatric gender medicine: The hostile reaction to our work shows why we needed to do it in the first place,” The Washington Post, June 26, 2025; “A landmark study of gender medicine is caught in an ethics row,” The Economist, 30 April, 2025.
***The Times also ran a selection of letters responding to the article ("The Cass Report: Biased or Balanced?", Sept. 1, 2024), and published over 800 comments on its website. To me, a letter from Gerald Ryan, of Madison, Wisconsin, was among the most persuasive. Let me quote from it here:
I am a retired physician who, as the medical director of a major university, instituted the provision of gender-affirming medications at our health facility, so I hold no bias against the appropriate use of these treatments. I found Dr. Hilary Cass’s report to be informative, well researched and balanced.I think many would be surprised to learn that the movement toward expanding gender-affirming medication for children is based largely upon a couple of small studies by researchers in the Netherlands that utilized strict inclusion criteria for their cohorts.Most current treatment guidelines on the use of these interventions stem from the collective opinion of experts in the field. This opinion alone, though helpful, is a shaky foundation for the initiation of sometimes irreversible procedures.Dr. Cass is simply stating that the science of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents is very much in its infancy and its usage requires thoughtful deliberation until we know enough to make conclusive recommendations.
**** Appallingly, anti-trans extremists such as Senator Marshall conflate surgery to address gender dysphoria with the practice of surgically suppressing female sexuality through surgery; they use the term “female genital mutilation” to refer to gender-identity-related breast and genital surgery.
Tuesday, April 8, 2025
Cutting Out the Good Bits: Sex Scenes, Sally Rooney, and The New Yorker
Not a few of those who read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo when the book was published last year had already read a substantial excerpt; “Opening Theory” was published as a piece of short fiction in the July 8 issue of The New Yorker. A note following the magazine piece informs us that "Opening Theory" is “drawn from Intermezzo,” and that the novel would be published in September. What it doesn’t tell us is that the piece has not been “drawn from” the novel as a complete, uninterrupted excerpt; it’s been expurgated.
In The New Yorker piece, Ivan, a twenty-two-year-old chess player who has won a series of ten demonstration matches for a chess club in an Irish village, is ferried about afterwards by thirty-six-year-old Margaret (the local arts group organizer), first to a pub and then to a holiday cottage that the chess club has booked for Ivan’s accommodation. Somewhat awkwardly, he invites her in, somewhat awkwardly they engage in more conversation, and then somewhat awkwardly—but much less awkwardly as things progress—they make love. The description of the lovemaking is detailed but not in the least salacious; it focuses for the most part on the psychological (switching back and forth between points of view) without ever shying away from the physicality of it. And the sex depicted is good sex, in every sense of the word good; the characters care about giving each other pleasure—and they care about each other, full stop. It’s explicit sex, but it truly is also lovemaking.
Writing about sex in ways that keep the reader’s imagination consistently engaged in the psyches of the characters is far from easy. (Were that not the case, there would never have been a “Bad Sex in Fiction” award; for anyone unfamiliar with the now-defunct award, the Independent’s December 3 2019 compilation of “The 23 best/worst winners of the Bad Sex in Fiction awards” is highly recommended.) To write well about sex you have to have a deep understanding of the characters’ psyches; you have to eschew coyness and avoid euphemism; you have to convincingly convey the degree to which the characters are aroused without pivoting into prose focused on arousing the reader; you have to guard against the unintentionally comic just as firmly as you have to guard against the pornographic. Writing about sex, in short, is an extraordinarily difficult art—and no one writing in English today is better at it than is Sally Rooney. Quite possibly, no one has ever been better at it.
The account of Ivan and Margaret first making love extends over 4 ½ pages in Intermezzo. Here is how it appears in the New Yorker piece:
So far as I can tell, neither the magazine nor the author has said anything publicly as to why the sex scene was left out of the New Yorker piece. If you ask Google’s AI engine why the sex scene might have been omitted, it cleverly offers this as an explanation:
Could it be prudishness? Squeamishness? A sense that explicit sex constitutes inappropriate content in a magazine for readers of all ages? No, is the short answer to those possibilities. The New Yorker has never been a magazine for readers of all ages, and under the auspices of Deborah Treisman (the New Yorker’s fiction editor since 2003) the magazine has published a number of stories that portray sex explicitly. Curtis Sittenfeld’s “The Prairie Wife,” for example, which appeared in the February 5, 2017 issue; includes passages such as this one:
In the years since “Cat Person” was published, my sense is that there has been a good deal less by way of explicit treatments of sex in New Yorker fiction than there was in the stories it published in 2017. Perhaps that’s just my imagination (or my faulty memory). Or perhaps there have just been fewer authors in the past few years writing well about sex and submitting their stories to The New Yorker. But one other possibility occurs to me—that the controversy over “Cat Person” might have had a long-lasting effect, leading The New Yorker (whether the fiction editor herself or, perhaps more probably, the magazine’s management) to shy away from fiction depicting sex with some explicitness—no matter how well written. It would be a sad irony if the 2017 backlash against a good story about bad sex resulted in a 2024 decision to leave out the sex in a good story about good sex.
In The New Yorker piece, Ivan, a twenty-two-year-old chess player who has won a series of ten demonstration matches for a chess club in an Irish village, is ferried about afterwards by thirty-six-year-old Margaret (the local arts group organizer), first to a pub and then to a holiday cottage that the chess club has booked for Ivan’s accommodation. Somewhat awkwardly, he invites her in, somewhat awkwardly they engage in more conversation, and then somewhat awkwardly—but much less awkwardly as things progress—they make love. The description of the lovemaking is detailed but not in the least salacious; it focuses for the most part on the psychological (switching back and forth between points of view) without ever shying away from the physicality of it. And the sex depicted is good sex, in every sense of the word good; the characters care about giving each other pleasure—and they care about each other, full stop. It’s explicit sex, but it truly is also lovemaking.
Writing about sex in ways that keep the reader’s imagination consistently engaged in the psyches of the characters is far from easy. (Were that not the case, there would never have been a “Bad Sex in Fiction” award; for anyone unfamiliar with the now-defunct award, the Independent’s December 3 2019 compilation of “The 23 best/worst winners of the Bad Sex in Fiction awards” is highly recommended.) To write well about sex you have to have a deep understanding of the characters’ psyches; you have to eschew coyness and avoid euphemism; you have to convincingly convey the degree to which the characters are aroused without pivoting into prose focused on arousing the reader; you have to guard against the unintentionally comic just as firmly as you have to guard against the pornographic. Writing about sex, in short, is an extraordinarily difficult art—and no one writing in English today is better at it than is Sally Rooney. Quite possibly, no one has ever been better at it.
The account of Ivan and Margaret first making love extends over 4 ½ pages in Intermezzo. Here is how it appears in the New Yorker piece:
Pressed against her, his body is thin and tensed and shivering. And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?There’s a line space, but there are no ellipses; nothing indicates that a 4 ½-page section of text has been omitted between “meaningfully from another” and “in the morning.”
In the morning, Margaret wakes alone in the holiday cottage to the sound of her alarm: Saturday, 8:30 a.m.
So far as I can tell, neither the magazine nor the author has said anything publicly as to why the sex scene was left out of the New Yorker piece. If you ask Google’s AI engine why the sex scene might have been omitted, it cleverly offers this as an explanation:
The New Yorker, known for its literary and intellectual focus, might have made a conscious decision to prioritize the novel's exploration of relationships and emotional dynamics over a detailed depiction of a sex scene.But that won’t do. In dealing with “emotional dynamics” in Intermezzo (and indeed in all her novels), Rooney always unflinchingly acknowledges the ways in which sex—sexual desire, sexual interaction, sexual frustration—plays a fundamental role in those emotional dynamics. To excerpt a Rooney novel in such a way as to separate lovemaking and emotional dynamics is to go entirely against the grain.
Could it be prudishness? Squeamishness? A sense that explicit sex constitutes inappropriate content in a magazine for readers of all ages? No, is the short answer to those possibilities. The New Yorker has never been a magazine for readers of all ages, and under the auspices of Deborah Treisman (the New Yorker’s fiction editor since 2003) the magazine has published a number of stories that portray sex explicitly. Curtis Sittenfeld’s “The Prairie Wife,” for example, which appeared in the February 5, 2017 issue; includes passages such as this one:
During the next five nights—the counsellors stayed an extra forty-eight hours to clean the grounds after the kids went home—Kirsten and Lucy were naked together a lot. The second night was both the first time someone went down on Kirsten and the first time she had an orgasm; the orgasm part happened more than once. She was less drunk than the night before, and at one point, while Lucy was lapping away at her, she thought that, all things considered, it was good that it was happening with a girl first, because then when a guy went down on her, when it mattered, Kirsten would know what she was doing.Miranda July’s “The Metal Bowl”—direct about sex, if not quite so explicit as the Sittenfeld story—appeared in the August 28, 2017 issue of the magazine. And, in its December 4 issue that same year, The New Yorker published “Cat Person,” Kristen Roupenian’s now-famous short story on the theme of bad sex. It is nothing if not explicit:
After Kirsten had basically spasmed in ecstasy into Lucy’s face, she said, “Could you tell I’d never done that?”
The more she imagined his arousal, the more turned-on she got, and soon they were rocking against each other, getting into a rhythm, and she reached into his underwear and took his penis in her hand and felt the pearled droplet of moisture on its tip. He made that sound again, that high-pitched feminine whine, and she wished there were a way she could ask him not to do that, but she couldn’t think of any. Then his hand was inside her underwear, and when he felt that she was wet he visibly relaxed. He fingered her a little, very softly, and she bit her lip and put on a show for him, but then he poked her too hard and she flinched, and he jerked his hand away. “Sorry!” he said. And then he asked, urgently, “Wait. Have you ever done this before?”According to Roupenian, The New Yorker was not the first magazine she had sent “Cat Person” to: “the story … had already been rejected, politely, by every other publication I’d sent it to” (“What It Felt Like When ‘Cat Person’ Went Viral,” The New Yorker, January 10, 2019). The story did indeed go viral, with many readers judging it to be a well written as well as a persuasive piece of fiction, and many women attesting that they could relate to the plight of the central character (a young woman who feels she has to go through with a sexual encounter, even after she stops enjoying herself). But there was also a powerful backlash. A Twitter thread (@MenCatPerson) was entirely devoted to men venting, calling “Cat Person” “garbage” and “shit.”
In the years since “Cat Person” was published, my sense is that there has been a good deal less by way of explicit treatments of sex in New Yorker fiction than there was in the stories it published in 2017. Perhaps that’s just my imagination (or my faulty memory). Or perhaps there have just been fewer authors in the past few years writing well about sex and submitting their stories to The New Yorker. But one other possibility occurs to me—that the controversy over “Cat Person” might have had a long-lasting effect, leading The New Yorker (whether the fiction editor herself or, perhaps more probably, the magazine’s management) to shy away from fiction depicting sex with some explicitness—no matter how well written. It would be a sad irony if the 2017 backlash against a good story about bad sex resulted in a 2024 decision to leave out the sex in a good story about good sex.
Sunday, March 30, 2025
Did we ever have a "deal" that "you get a job, you get a house, by your 20s"?
One of Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre’s ads in the current election campaign shows him on Shawnessy Drive in Calgary’s suburbs, saying this: “We had a deal in this country when I grew up on this street. You get a job, you get a house, by your 20s.”
But that’s simply not true—there never was any such deal. It’s not just that there was never any such written agreement; there was never any such understanding. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in an upper middle-class family, with mostly upper middle-class friends; I can think of only one friend who was able to afford a house while still in his twenties. My children grew up in the 1980s and 1990s and the first few years of this century; neither they nor most of their friends could afford to buy a house while still in their twenties.
Might my friends and I have been unusual? Might my children and their friends have been unusual? At first glance, some statistics might seem to support the notion that, whether or not there was a “deal,” the norm in the 1970s and 1980s was for people to become homeowners before they were 30; the median age of first-time home buyers in those decades was 29. The same set of statistics shows that the median age of first-time home owners was still only 31 years in 2015 (when my eldest child turned 30).
Such statistics, though, look only at people who were able to afford to buy a home; they don't give a picture of all Canadians. As Poilievre should be aware, many Canadians in low-income brackets are never, in any era, able to afford to buy their own home; the “median age of first-time home buying” number leaves them entirely out of the picture. The data show that the post-WWII percentage of Canadians renting rather than owning has fluctuated from about 45% in 1950, to about 31% between 2010 and 2015, to about 34% in 2024. If you include the whole population, there has never been a time when the average Canadian could afford to buy their own house by the time they turned 30. Through the generations, many, many Canadians have lived their entire lives without being able to afford to buy their own house.
There are other reasons, too, why some people in any generation are unlikely to be able to afford to buy a home before they turn 30. Many of my friends, for example, stayed in university well into their twenties, obtaining two or even three degrees before entering the work force.
Poilievre’s own education and employment history is quite unusual. He dropped out of the University of Calgary in 2002,* and then, when he started his full-time job in 2004 at the age of 25, it was a job that paid $141,000—or almost six times the average 2004 salary in Canada, $24,400. As a Member of Parliament at 25, there can be no doubt that Poilievre himself was far better able to afford to buy a house in his twenties than was the average Canadian.
None of this is to suggest that we do not have important inter-generational justice issues. We surely do. Nor is it to suggest that housing affordability—for renters as well for prospective buyers—is not a huge issue. Of course it is. Housing prices and rents have increased far faster than have incomes in recent decades. To address that problem, we need to greatly increase housing supply, while allowing house prices and rents to fall (as, thank goodness, they have begun to do over the past year or two in many cities). And people of my generation need to view with equanimity the prospect of the value of our homes coming back to earth. We did nothing to earn the inflated valuations of our homes, and we should welcome it if the cost of housing comes down to a level that our children and their children can more easily afford.
Poilievre, like other politicians, wants to increase supply, but plays politics when he refuses to admit that prices will need to fall significantly to make housing more affordable. In that way, he’s no better and no worse than other politicians. But the dishonesty with which he advances the notion that there used to be a “deal” guaranteeing young Canadians home ownership before they turned thirty is a dishonesty unique to Poilievre. It will surely exacerbate intergenerational ill-will, while deflecting attention away from the degree to which our economic problems are matters not just of intergenerational justice, but also of productivity, of demographics, and of justice between haves and have-nots, of whatever age.
Postcript, April 2
The last twenty-four hours have added a new wrinkle to Poilievre's weirdness; it's come to light that he seems to regard owning a home as a necessary prerequisite to having children. He has declared that he will stand up for the "36-year-old couple whose biological clock is running out faster than they can afford to buy a home and have kids." In similar fashion, he has declared that he will come to the defence of the "39-year-old woman, desperate to have kids but unable to buy a home in which to raise them, her biological clock running out."
Most of the attention paid to these remarks has focused on the “biological clock” side of things. At least as remarkable, I would say, is Poilievre’s obliviousness to the lives of those who may always remain unable to buy a home for financial reasons—or who may actually prefer to remain renters, for a whole host of reasons. Poilievre’s phrase “unable to afford a home in which to raise kids” speaks volumes. Are we to take it that Poilievre believes those who live their entire lives in low-income brackets need to refrain from ever having children? Are we to take it he believes the 46% of Montrealers who live in rental accommodation (many of them for their erntire lives) should refrain from ever having children?** Or perhaps he thinks it’s somehow impossible if you live in such circumstances in such a place to have children.
As many of us can attest, it actually is possible to have children and to give them a good upbringing while living in rental accommodation. But that’s probably something Poilievre doesn’t want to know. He seems to have no desire to imagine the lives of those who did not do as he did, or may not want to do as he did—grow up in a suburban street on which everyone lives in a detached house; and then buy a house, marry, and have your first child, all before you turn thirty.
But that’s simply not true—there never was any such deal. It’s not just that there was never any such written agreement; there was never any such understanding. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in an upper middle-class family, with mostly upper middle-class friends; I can think of only one friend who was able to afford a house while still in his twenties. My children grew up in the 1980s and 1990s and the first few years of this century; neither they nor most of their friends could afford to buy a house while still in their twenties.
Might my friends and I have been unusual? Might my children and their friends have been unusual? At first glance, some statistics might seem to support the notion that, whether or not there was a “deal,” the norm in the 1970s and 1980s was for people to become homeowners before they were 30; the median age of first-time home buyers in those decades was 29. The same set of statistics shows that the median age of first-time home owners was still only 31 years in 2015 (when my eldest child turned 30).
Such statistics, though, look only at people who were able to afford to buy a home; they don't give a picture of all Canadians. As Poilievre should be aware, many Canadians in low-income brackets are never, in any era, able to afford to buy their own home; the “median age of first-time home buying” number leaves them entirely out of the picture. The data show that the post-WWII percentage of Canadians renting rather than owning has fluctuated from about 45% in 1950, to about 31% between 2010 and 2015, to about 34% in 2024. If you include the whole population, there has never been a time when the average Canadian could afford to buy their own house by the time they turned 30. Through the generations, many, many Canadians have lived their entire lives without being able to afford to buy their own house.
There are other reasons, too, why some people in any generation are unlikely to be able to afford to buy a home before they turn 30. Many of my friends, for example, stayed in university well into their twenties, obtaining two or even three degrees before entering the work force.
Poilievre’s own education and employment history is quite unusual. He dropped out of the University of Calgary in 2002,* and then, when he started his full-time job in 2004 at the age of 25, it was a job that paid $141,000—or almost six times the average 2004 salary in Canada, $24,400. As a Member of Parliament at 25, there can be no doubt that Poilievre himself was far better able to afford to buy a house in his twenties than was the average Canadian.
None of this is to suggest that we do not have important inter-generational justice issues. We surely do. Nor is it to suggest that housing affordability—for renters as well for prospective buyers—is not a huge issue. Of course it is. Housing prices and rents have increased far faster than have incomes in recent decades. To address that problem, we need to greatly increase housing supply, while allowing house prices and rents to fall (as, thank goodness, they have begun to do over the past year or two in many cities). And people of my generation need to view with equanimity the prospect of the value of our homes coming back to earth. We did nothing to earn the inflated valuations of our homes, and we should welcome it if the cost of housing comes down to a level that our children and their children can more easily afford.
Poilievre, like other politicians, wants to increase supply, but plays politics when he refuses to admit that prices will need to fall significantly to make housing more affordable. In that way, he’s no better and no worse than other politicians. But the dishonesty with which he advances the notion that there used to be a “deal” guaranteeing young Canadians home ownership before they turned thirty is a dishonesty unique to Poilievre. It will surely exacerbate intergenerational ill-will, while deflecting attention away from the degree to which our economic problems are matters not just of intergenerational justice, but also of productivity, of demographics, and of justice between haves and have-nots, of whatever age.
Postcript, April 2
The last twenty-four hours have added a new wrinkle to Poilievre's weirdness; it's come to light that he seems to regard owning a home as a necessary prerequisite to having children. He has declared that he will stand up for the "36-year-old couple whose biological clock is running out faster than they can afford to buy a home and have kids." In similar fashion, he has declared that he will come to the defence of the "39-year-old woman, desperate to have kids but unable to buy a home in which to raise them, her biological clock running out."
Most of the attention paid to these remarks has focused on the “biological clock” side of things. At least as remarkable, I would say, is Poilievre’s obliviousness to the lives of those who may always remain unable to buy a home for financial reasons—or who may actually prefer to remain renters, for a whole host of reasons. Poilievre’s phrase “unable to afford a home in which to raise kids” speaks volumes. Are we to take it that Poilievre believes those who live their entire lives in low-income brackets need to refrain from ever having children? Are we to take it he believes the 46% of Montrealers who live in rental accommodation (many of them for their erntire lives) should refrain from ever having children?** Or perhaps he thinks it’s somehow impossible if you live in such circumstances in such a place to have children.
As many of us can attest, it actually is possible to have children and to give them a good upbringing while living in rental accommodation. But that’s probably something Poilievre doesn’t want to know. He seems to have no desire to imagine the lives of those who did not do as he did, or may not want to do as he did—grow up in a suburban street on which everyone lives in a detached house; and then buy a house, marry, and have your first child, all before you turn thirty.
*Several years later, Poilievre completed an undergraduate degree through Athabasca University.
**Or the 67% of New Yorkers who live in rental accommodation. Or the 87% of Berliners.
Letter to the Globe and Mail: Separating Mothers and Babies
Re “Why are we still keeping elephants in zoos?” (March 22): Marsha Lederman writes movingly and well about “the suffering of animals, particularly from human causes”—and in particular about “a mother and her calf being separated.” “Why are we doing this?” she asks. Why indeed? And why, on so-called “farms,” are we still separating calves from their mothers so that we can drink the milk meant for the calves? Zoos are horrific places for non-human animals; factory farms (including dairy and egg operations) are far, far worse. A whole-foods, plant-based diet is better for our own health and better for the planet as well as infinitely better for other animals.
Letter to the Globe and Mail: Lessons from the Pandemic
On the 5th anniversary of the onset of the pandemic lockdowns, many pieces looking back appeared in the media. I wrote the following letter in response to two that had appeared in The Globe and Mail:
Re “Hindsight is 2020” (March 10) and “2020 hindsight on COVID-19” (March 11): These and other recent pieces have compared Canada’s pandemic performance with that of some other countries without ever mentioning the small group of countries that imposed far fewer restrictions. Sweden in particular was widely vilified for its lack of restrictions. It ended up with a 2020–2023 “excess death rate” higher than that of Denmark but lower than that of either Norway or Finland (comparable countries that enacted much stricter measures).
As we now know, lockdowns had long-lasting ill effects on children’s learning and on the mental health of many people. Plus, of course, they caused serious harm to the economy. It’s no wonder that (as a March 5 BBC article reported) “even some researchers who have found evidence that lockdowns saved lives have cautioned against turning to this measure in haste in the future.” Vaccines definitely worked; the verdict on lockdowns is more mixed.
Labels:
Canada,
excess death rate,
lockdowns,
pandemic,
Sweden
Letter to the Globe and Mail: CEO Compensation
[I've written several letters to the editor the past month. None has been published; I'll post three of them here.]Re “RBC paid CEO $26 million last year” (March 7): In the fourth century BCE Plato suggested than in human societies governments should “permit a man to acquire double or triple, or as much as 4 times the amount [that is deemed to be at poverty levels].” Twenty-first century surveys suggest that most people today are in rough agreement; both liberals and conservatives feel CEOs should be paid 4-5 times what ordinary workers are paid.
Current starting pay for a bank teller at RBC is under $20 per hour (a little under $40,000 a year). I’ve just pulled out my calculator; RBC’s CEO was paid about 700 times more than that bank teller.
I’m with Plato.
[Here's a link to my long piece on this topic from some years ago, "Why Plato Was Right: Those at the Top Should Be Paid No More than Three or Four Times What We Pay Those at the Bottom": https://donlepan.blogspot.com/2017/06/bringing-end-to-luck-money-why-those-at.html]
Saturday, February 8, 2025
Generosity Should Not Have to be Justified Purely by Appeals to Self Interest
Of all the horrors that the Trump administration has set into motion during its first two weeks, the effort to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAID) ranks high. What has been the impact? In Khartoum, where much of the population has been facing starvation, the Trump administration’s funding cuts have resulted in the closure of more than half the soup kitchens that have been keeping people alive. That’s just one example; there are hundreds of others around the world.
I’ll offer two thoughts. One is that it might be good to put at least as much effort into considering what we can do to help those who need help around the world as we seem to be putting into considering how to alter our buying habits so as to buy American less frequently. Buying in to “Buy Canadian” campaigns is playing by Trump’s playbook; while I can understand the motivation, the fundamental principle involved seems to me to be just as unattractive as are Trump’s own “Buy American” campaigns.
On the other hand, we are certainly not playing by Trump’s playbook if we reach out (and reach into our wallets) to try to help those in need around the world. Charities such as UNHCR and Medecins sans Frontiers/Doctors Without Borders (as well as faith-based charities such as World Vision and Islamic Relief) are doing everything they can to fill the gaps left by the cuts to USAID; we can help by contributing to one or more of them as generously as we can. (Before writing the next paragraph, I’ll go to the MSF website and make a contribution.)
A second thought has to do with the fact that Trump and his ilk are doing everything they can to undermine not just programs, but also decent, human values. Cuts to foreign aid create untold damage for the world’s most needy; more subtly, the very way in which discussions of foreign aid are increasingly framed works to undermine ethical values.
There is nothing subtle, of course, about the way the Trump administration itself rejects altruism and embraces selfishness for America. A recent statement from the US State Department leaves no room for doubt:
That foreign aid is to a large extent in the donor country's own self-interest is no doubt true. But surely the most important justification for foreign aid is simply that humans who are fortunate enough to be living comfortable lives should be generous to those who are in need. To give and to give generously should not need to be justified as an “investment” or through appeals to self-interest. And there should be no shame in giving those in need short-term as well as long-term assistance. What those who rely on the soup kitchens in Khartoum need right now is indeed a hand-out—and those of us who can afford to help give them just that should be proud to do so. Trump does everything he can to taint generosity; let’s not play along.
I’ll offer two thoughts. One is that it might be good to put at least as much effort into considering what we can do to help those who need help around the world as we seem to be putting into considering how to alter our buying habits so as to buy American less frequently. Buying in to “Buy Canadian” campaigns is playing by Trump’s playbook; while I can understand the motivation, the fundamental principle involved seems to me to be just as unattractive as are Trump’s own “Buy American” campaigns.
On the other hand, we are certainly not playing by Trump’s playbook if we reach out (and reach into our wallets) to try to help those in need around the world. Charities such as UNHCR and Medecins sans Frontiers/Doctors Without Borders (as well as faith-based charities such as World Vision and Islamic Relief) are doing everything they can to fill the gaps left by the cuts to USAID; we can help by contributing to one or more of them as generously as we can. (Before writing the next paragraph, I’ll go to the MSF website and make a contribution.)
A second thought has to do with the fact that Trump and his ilk are doing everything they can to undermine not just programs, but also decent, human values. Cuts to foreign aid create untold damage for the world’s most needy; more subtly, the very way in which discussions of foreign aid are increasingly framed works to undermine ethical values.
There is nothing subtle, of course, about the way the Trump administration itself rejects altruism and embraces selfishness for America. A recent statement from the US State Department leaves no room for doubt:
Every dollar we spend, every project we fund, and every policy we pursue must be justified with the the answer to three simple questions: Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?Increasingly, though, even those who oppose the Trump administration's cuts to foreign aid do not argue that, as humans, we should be generous to those who most need help; what they emphasise instead is that we should maintain foreign aid because it helps us. As reported today by Mark Rendell in the Globe, Christopher Hernandez-Roy, deputy director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, criticized the decision to close USAID on the grounds that such a move undermines a crucial component of America’s “soft power” in the world. In Canada, a spokesperson for Ahmed Hussen, Minister of International Development, expressed deep concern at the decision to shut down USAID, and emphasized self-interest as a reason for Canadians to continue to provide foreign aid: "Foreign aid is not a handout; it’s an investment in the safety, security, and well-being of Canadians and communities around the world.”
That foreign aid is to a large extent in the donor country's own self-interest is no doubt true. But surely the most important justification for foreign aid is simply that humans who are fortunate enough to be living comfortable lives should be generous to those who are in need. To give and to give generously should not need to be justified as an “investment” or through appeals to self-interest. And there should be no shame in giving those in need short-term as well as long-term assistance. What those who rely on the soup kitchens in Khartoum need right now is indeed a hand-out—and those of us who can afford to help give them just that should be proud to do so. Trump does everything he can to taint generosity; let’s not play along.
Wednesday, January 1, 2025
The Horrific Attack on Bourbon Street
Relatively little is known about the horrific attack last night in New Orleans, but it seems that the attacker was a US Army veteran inspired by the ideology of the Islamic State.
It’s not hard to guess why someone adhering to a viciously puritanical ideology might focus on those particular blocks of that particular street. I can’t think of any other place in all of America that has more of a reputation for giving full expression to American decadence than do the first six or eight blocks along Bourbon Street as you enter the French Quarter from Canal Street.
As I remembered this stretch from the two times I've lived in New Orleans (in 2007 and then again in 2011), the bars along this stretch were of the seediest sort, blaring canned music out onto the street and advertising “Big Ass Beers” in huge letters. And (with the notable exception of two classic restaurants--Galatoire's and Arnaud's) there was very little along the stretch except seedy bars, tacky tourist souvenir shops, and strip clubs. Further into the French Quarter, Bourbon Street becomes very pleasant—and New Orleans as a whole (very much including its bars) is wonderful in an almost infinite variety of ways. But as I remembered them, those few blocks of Bourbon Street were deeply unpleasant; it was not by coincidence that there were often been fundamentalist Christian demonstrators along that same stretch, carrying large signs accusing the Bourbon Street bars and strip clubs of being dens of iniquity.
I've often visited new Orleans over the past 15 years, but I've avoided that stretch of Bourbon Street. I just now used Google street view to get a more recent sense of those blocks. Much seems to have changed. There are still some seedy bars, to be sure, but they seem to be far less dominant--and considerably less seedy--than was the case 15 years ago. There is still a "Kama Sutra Cabaret" but there seem to be far fewer strip clubs than there used to be. All in all, very little evidence of iniquity. But perceptions linger, of course, and perceptions, however outdated, often seem to have more of an impact on cruelly deranged minds than does reality.
The Christian fundamentalists used to harangue the tourist throngs through megaphones. But I don’t think anyone before the past 24 hours imagined that rage against sinful behavior in Bourbon Street’s real or perceived dens of iniquity—rage of any religious stripe—would find expression in mass murder.
Update, 4 January: It's striking that, overwhelmingly, media coverage of the attack has portrayed the tourist strip on Bourbon Street in a purely positive light. The Assoctaed Press report that's printed in today's Globe and Mail (and no doubt in many other newspapers) is in this respect typical; it describes Bourbon Street as "famous world-wide for its festive vibes." True, but a fuller and more honest accounting would also mention its long-standing reputation for seedy bars and sleazy strip joints.
It’s not hard to guess why someone adhering to a viciously puritanical ideology might focus on those particular blocks of that particular street. I can’t think of any other place in all of America that has more of a reputation for giving full expression to American decadence than do the first six or eight blocks along Bourbon Street as you enter the French Quarter from Canal Street.
As I remembered this stretch from the two times I've lived in New Orleans (in 2007 and then again in 2011), the bars along this stretch were of the seediest sort, blaring canned music out onto the street and advertising “Big Ass Beers” in huge letters. And (with the notable exception of two classic restaurants--Galatoire's and Arnaud's) there was very little along the stretch except seedy bars, tacky tourist souvenir shops, and strip clubs. Further into the French Quarter, Bourbon Street becomes very pleasant—and New Orleans as a whole (very much including its bars) is wonderful in an almost infinite variety of ways. But as I remembered them, those few blocks of Bourbon Street were deeply unpleasant; it was not by coincidence that there were often been fundamentalist Christian demonstrators along that same stretch, carrying large signs accusing the Bourbon Street bars and strip clubs of being dens of iniquity.
I've often visited new Orleans over the past 15 years, but I've avoided that stretch of Bourbon Street. I just now used Google street view to get a more recent sense of those blocks. Much seems to have changed. There are still some seedy bars, to be sure, but they seem to be far less dominant--and considerably less seedy--than was the case 15 years ago. There is still a "Kama Sutra Cabaret" but there seem to be far fewer strip clubs than there used to be. All in all, very little evidence of iniquity. But perceptions linger, of course, and perceptions, however outdated, often seem to have more of an impact on cruelly deranged minds than does reality.
The Christian fundamentalists used to harangue the tourist throngs through megaphones. But I don’t think anyone before the past 24 hours imagined that rage against sinful behavior in Bourbon Street’s real or perceived dens of iniquity—rage of any religious stripe—would find expression in mass murder.
Update, 4 January: It's striking that, overwhelmingly, media coverage of the attack has portrayed the tourist strip on Bourbon Street in a purely positive light. The Assoctaed Press report that's printed in today's Globe and Mail (and no doubt in many other newspapers) is in this respect typical; it describes Bourbon Street as "famous world-wide for its festive vibes." True, but a fuller and more honest accounting would also mention its long-standing reputation for seedy bars and sleazy strip joints.
Letter to the Globe: The Vancouver Art Gallery and the Tate
For years the VAG planned to move out of its current quarters into a much larger new building designed by Herzog & de Meuron, a prestigious Swiss firm known for showy and expensive gallery and museum architecture. Sure enough, projected expenses ballooned out of control and the project never got off the ground; it was officially declared dead in 2024, and the VAG has gone back to the drawing board.Re “Big Ideas” (Letters, Dec. 12): In the 1990s London’s Tate Gallery was housed in a beautiful old building that had become too small for its collection.
The Globe published this letter on the topic in its 16 December issue; sensibly, they made three short paragraphs of the one long one I had written.
Instead of moving out of the beautiful old building, they opened a second gallery—converting the old Battersea Power Station into Tate Modern for a mere £134 million. There have been huge battles over the subsequent plan to build a vast extension to Tate Modern, but everyone agrees the original decision to adopt a two-gallery model was a good one.
The Vancouver Art Gallery’s current home—a 1906 courthouse building—is one of the most beautiful gallery spaces in the world. Rather than abandoning it, why not keep it as a home for the gallery’s traditional art collection, and then plan for a second, much larger but economically-built structure to house the gallery’s modern art collection?
Letter to the Globe: The American Election and the Average American Worker
Quite a number of commentators on the American election have suggested that the average American has been doing better economically under the Democratic administration of Joe Biden than they did under the Trump administration. The numbers tell a different story. The letter below was published in the 11 November issue of the Globe and Mail.Re “Postmortem” (Letters, Nov. 13): According to economist Alan McFayden, “the evidence tells us that most Americans have higher incomes now under Joe Biden than they did under Donald Trump.” But FactCheck.org reports that Bureau of Labor Statistics data show real average hourly earnings for all private sector employees decreasing by 2.24% between January 2021 and May 2024, and real median weekly earnings for all full-time workers decreasing by 2.14% over the same period. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that real per-capita disposable personal income decreased by 9.04% over that period.
There’s no doubt that the US economy overall has been growing, and that the growth in corporate profits has significantly outpaced inflation. And there is good reason to expect that Bidenomics will eventually increase real average earnings for workers. Sadly, there is little to suggest that’s happened yet.
Letter to Alberta Views Magazine: Rodeos
One of the best things about Alberta Views magazine is the monthly “Dialogue” feature they run, in which two people on opposing sides of an issue air their views, and then have a chance to rebut the other’s initial statement. For July/August the issue was “Should We Ban Rodeo?”, with Camille Labchuk from Animal Justice arguing yes, and Aritha van Herk arguing no. I would have liked the question to be “Should We Support Rodeo or Not?”—banning anything rubs so many people the wrong way—but it was nevertheless a good debate. The feature can be found online here: https://albertaviews.ca/should-we-ban-rodeo/ . There were many responses from readers published in the September and October issues, most siding against rodeos. The letter below was published in the October issue.Re “Should We Ban Rodeo?” (July/August) Aritha van Herk does as good a job of defending rodeos as anyone could; her argument that banning them would further polarize our society is worth taking seriously.
But what of her assertion that rodeo is a positive good? Her claim is that rodeos help people “learn about animals, agriculture, and food,” and help “everyone better understand the interaction between people and livestock”? But van Herk appears herself to badly misunderstand the basics of that interaction. She tells us that “no one, least of all working ranch hands, wants to inflict pain or damage on the animals that shape their livelihood.” But the fact is that cattle, who have a natural lifespan of roughly twenty years, are killed before they reach the age of two (having spent much of their short lives in feedlots). Doesn’t killing and eating a creature entail pain or damage?
Van Herk lambastes those who ignore the “environmental toll exacted by soybeans” and those who know so little about animal agriculture that they “think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.” “Let’s face facts,” she urges. But the fact is that most soybeans are grown not to be consumed by humans directly but rather to feed animals raised in order to provide food for humans. If we humans all adopted a whole foods, plant-based diet, we would need far less land to be devoted to growing soybeans than we do now. It’s animal agriculture that requires vast amounts of land to be devoted to raising crops such as soybeans; the far more efficient ecological approach is for humans to obtain the nutrients we need directly from plants. And yes, Prof. van Herk, humans often don’t realize where the milk they drink (chocolate or otherwise) comes from. When we humans drink cows’ milk, we do it by taking the babies away from their mothers so that we can drink the milk that otherwise would have gone to the babies. And then, when they are quite young, we slaughter the male babies, so we can eat them as veal. As van Herk says, “let’s fact facts.”
Letter to The Economist: Diet and Health
The Economist is a great publication in so may ways, and open- and fair-minded on almost every topic. A long-standing exception has been animal agriculture; quite consistently over the past twenty years or more, The Economist has ignored or downplayed the ever-growing body of evidence as to the many sorts of harm caused by animal agriculture and by the human practice of eating animal products. And one will search in vain in back issues of the magazine for any coverage of the extraordinary health benefits of a whole foods, pant-based diet. The letter below was not published.Your recent article on the food business (“Appetite for Change,” August 24–30) tells us that “it may not only be an excess of sugar, fat, and salt that causes health problems,” and reports that the “heavy processing” of food may also be to blame. True enough, but even more damage is caused by something you don’t touch on; you make no mention whatsoever of the effects on our health of eating animals rather than plants.
The organization Physicians for Responsible Medicine lists more than a dozen areas (arthritis, asthma, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.) in which research has shown health outcomes to be far better to the extent that we eat a whole-foods, plant-based diet. And to the extent that we do go that route, our tax bill for health care costs is reduced, global warming is reduced, pollution of our lakes and rivers is reduced, and harm to non-human animals is reduced. It would be good to see some of this reported on in your pages.
Letter to the Globe: Farm Animals and the Law
I haven't posted much on this blog in the past few months, but I have been writing lots of letters to the editor. Many of them didn't have a lot to say (the several I wrote to ask newspapers to pay more attention to the war in Sudan, for examle). But some may be of interest; I'll post a few now. The Globe and Mail published a slightly revised version of this letter in its 6 August issue.Re “More life” (Letters, Aug. 2): A letter writer finds that the National Farm Animal Care Council and Canadian Council on Animal Care “do somewhat protect” farm animals. The truth is that neither they nor federal or provincial governments provide meaningful guards against such cruelty.
Just as American states have done, Canadian provinces have made animal agriculture essentially exempt from animal cruelty laws; anything considered “generally accepted practice” is allowed. And what is generally accepted by the animal agriculture industry – and by these councils – often entails horrific cruelty.
Instead of focusing on reducing cruelty, our governments continue to pass “ag-gag” laws designed to prevent the public from realizing the extent of the cruelty. Meaningful protection of farm animals on the part of all levels of government is long overdue.
Tuesday, December 31, 2024
Song for a New Year
It struck me today that, great as "Auld Lang Syne" is,* we could use a few more New Year's songs. So I wrote this one. The music for it is nothing special, and I don't know how to record and post music (except into a very old tape recorder), so I'll just post the lyrics here. (If anyone feels like making up their own music to these words, please feel free.) Happy New Year!
Where do the old years wander?
What can we do with time?
The sky is alive with wonder,
The world has its ways to shine.
What must we leave alone?
The sky is alive with weather,
And wherever we are is home.
What if the hour is late?
The sky is alive with wonder,
Time can find ways to wait.
*As Maureen pointed out to me, "Auld Lang Syne" is not the only one; Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," for example, is half a New Year's song; it probably deserves to be sung a lot more as the New Year approaches. Ditto for Mary Traver's great song "The Rest of the Year," though it's no more than maybe 1/4 a New Year's song.
Where do the old years wander?
What can we do with time?
The sky is alive with wonder,
The world has its ways to shine.
We see the round world getting older and olderWhat must we bring together?
But we’ll have a young year again.
We’ll have a younger year tomorrow,
We’ll have a younger year tonight—
We'll take the train away from sorrow
To where the moon is shining bright.
What must we leave alone?
The sky is alive with weather,
And wherever we are is home.
We see the round world getting older and olderWhat if the light comes early?
But we’ll have a young year again.
We’ll have a younger year tomorrow,
We’ll have a younger year tonight—
Take the train away from sorrow
To where the moon is shining bright.
What if the hour is late?
The sky is alive with wonder,
Time can find ways to wait.
We see the round world getting older and older
But we’ll have a young year again.
We’ll have a younger year tomorrow,
We’ll have a younger year tonight—
Take the train away from sorrow
To where the moon is shining bright.
*As Maureen pointed out to me, "Auld Lang Syne" is not the only one; Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," for example, is half a New Year's song; it probably deserves to be sung a lot more as the New Year approaches. Ditto for Mary Traver's great song "The Rest of the Year," though it's no more than maybe 1/4 a New Year's song.
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