Joseph Heath's Blog, page 12

The VW scandal and corporate crime

One of the things that makes it interesting to teach business ethics is the need to continually revise the curriculum. I usually spend a week discussing the latest “big scandal” in the corporate world – unfortunately, I almost never teach the same one twice, because something new always comes along. First time I taught the course it was junk bonds, and the Gordon Gekko stuff. Then along came Enron, against which all of that misbehaviour paled. Then the financial crisis. Then the Deepwater Horizon disaster. And now Volkswagen. At very least, “corporations behaving badly,” is an area where you never risk running out of material.

I’ve been following the Volkswagen fraud rather carefully in part because it affects me personally, since my wife has an Audi A3 with the TDI diesel engine. She also precisely fits the profile of a consumer who was defrauded by the “clean diesel” claim. Back when she bought her car, she had narrowed the choice down to two vehicles: the Lexus CT 200h (hybrid) and the Audi A3 diesel.… Continue reading

Final thoughts on Naomi Klein

Readers of this blog will have noticed that I’ve spent a fair bit of time since the beginning of the year discussing Naomi Klein’s book on climate change, This Changes Everything. Some have suggested, either subtly or not-so-subtly, that my apparent obsession with Klein has become somewhat unseemly. So let me offer a few words in my defence, and also provide something of a “roundup” of what I’ve written over the past year. Here are the posts:

Naomi Klein: This Changes Everything

Naomi Klein postscript 1

Naomi Klein postscript 2

Then there are my own posts on climate change:

What is a tax not a tax? Carbon taxes vs. carbon prices

The two worst talking points on carbon taxes/pricing

Hobbes’s difficult idea

and finally the syllabus for my course on climate change policy (for those who are interested in what I do consider to be worth reading).

Part of why I talked about Klein’s book at length is just that I’ve been thinking a lot about climate change lately.… Continue reading

Sex education and the paradoxes of social conservatism

People often describe the current conservative movement in Canada, as well as several other countries, as involving an “improbable” coalition, assembling groups that seem to have rather little in common. The two most often pointed to are libertarians and Christian “social conservatives,” who not only take different positions on many specific questions – such as abortion, physician-assisted suicide, marijuana, gay marriage, etc. – but have fundamentally different views about the role of the state in society. Social conservatives generally want a more intrusive state, one that takes sides on controversial moral questions and enforces particular views. In other words, they reject what we in political theory call “liberal neutrality,” or the doctrine of limited government that says the state has no business trying to control behaviour in the private domain. Libertarians, on the other hand, want a state that is even less intrusive than the one we have – ideally, one that stays out of people’s lives almost entirely, intervening only when necessary to defend their rights.… Continue reading

40 theses against the Harper Conservatives: nos. 1-10

This summer, Catherine Lu decided to write up a list of reasons to vote against the Conservative Party of Canada in the current federal election. Over a period of 40 days, she came up with one new reason per day, which she posted to her Facebook page. In recognition of her labours, over the next few days we will republish them here:

Reason #10 (with a nod to Kurt Vonnegut’s classic short story, ‘Harrison Bergeron’)

‘This is a society that is transparent, open, and where people are equal.’

–Prime Minister Stephen Harper (February 2015).

The year was 2016, and all Canadians were finally ‘equal’ and living in a ‘transparent and open’ society. Nobody was not being watched by the government’s spy agency (CSIS). Nobody demonstrated against this Harper Government surveillance, and nobody even discussed strategies to thwart these Harper Government operations, at least not since 81-year-old protestor, Doreen Routley, was charged with engaging in an “activity that undermines the sovereignty, security or territorial integrity of Canada,” and “interfering with the capability of the Government in relation to … the economic or financial stability of Canada.” Nobody could wear a niqab or a hijab or hockey mask while swearing the oath of citizenship.… Continue reading

40 theses against the Harper Conservatives: nos. 11-20

This summer, Catherine Lu decided to write up a list of reasons to vote against the Conservative Party of Canada in the current federal election. Over a period of 40 days, she came up with one new reason per day, which she posted to her Facebook page. In recognition of her labours, over the next few days we will republish them here:

Reason #20

Supporting our troops does not mean cutting their access to benefits when they need them the most, or requiring disabled veterans to submit to a demeaning bureaucratic process in order to receive benefits. Of the forty thousand Canadians who served in Afghanistan over 12 years, more than 2,000 were wounded in battle. In 2006, the Harper Conservative government changed the way it compensates the wounded, offering a lump sum payment rather than a lifetime pension. The change costs the government less in the long run, so will save Canadian taxpayers money (!), but introduces a significant inequality in lifetime benefits between soldiers severely wounded before or after April 2006 (to the tune of $1 million).… Continue reading

40 theses against the Harper Conservatives: nos. 21-30

This summer, Catherine Lu decided to write up a list of reasons to vote against the Conservative Party of Canada in the current federal election. Over a period of 40 days, she came up with one new reason per day, which she posted to her Facebook page. In recognition of her labours, over the next few days we will republish them here:

Reason #30

When I’m planning a large party, I try to get details on things such as how many people are coming and what kinds of drinks and food they prefer, and so on. No one wants to be short on food or drink or, at my age, have too much leftover dessert. Governing a country – at municipal, regional, provincial and federal levels – also requires accurate information on what citizens need and how policies are functioning, so that government resources can be spent wisely, appropriately and efficiently.… Continue reading

40 theses against the Harper Conservatives: nos. 31-40

This summer, Catherine Lu decided to write up a list of reasons to vote against the Conservative Party of Canada in the current federal election. Over a period of 40 days, she came up with one new reason per day, which she posted to her Facebook page. In recognition of her labours, over the next few days we will republish them here:

Prologue

Earlier this summer on a short visit to Ottawa, I happened to see the ‘Northern Lights’ show,  a visually-stunning light display over the Parliament Buildings that tells the story of Canada to visitors of the great institutions of Canadian democracy. I was dismayed that after seeing this show, a visitor to Canada might leave thinking that relations between indigenous peoples and arriving settlers were based on ‘mutual interest’ and exhibited ‘partnership’, rather than dispossession and genocide; and that World War One was a meaningful sacrifice of Canadian lives that helped to build the nation, rather than a monumental and meaningless political catastrophe that generated irretrievable losses for thousands of families.… Continue reading

Sex education and the dilemmas of immigrant integration

Back when I lived in Montreal, there were about a dozen women in my neighbourhood – obviously recent immigrants – who had a strange hangup about dogs. Whenever I was out walking the dog, they would take great pains to avoid us, sometimes even crossing the street to walk on the other side. Once I came around a corner and startled one of these women, who when she saw the dog, literally screamed and ran away from us. At other times, if they were walking with their children, I would notice them covering their children’s eyes, so that they would not make eye contact with the dog.

Now I know there are some cultures where the thought of living with a dog is considered rather disgusting, but this seemed to go far beyond mere disgust, entering the realm of fear bordering on terror. So I asked a friend who studies this sort of thing what was up.… Continue reading

Stephen Harper versus the intellectuals, part 2

The case of Tom Flanagan

Someone mentioned Tom Flanagan, so I thought I’d add a small footnote to the whole Flanagan “child pornography” story (documented in his book, Persona Non Grata, quick summary here), explaining a few things that may not be so obvious to non-academics. There are a lot of people, myself included, who have very little sympathy for Tom’s politics, or the contributions he has made to Canadian public life. And yet there were very, very few of us who did not feel some sympathy for him, after the mobbing he endured from the conservative movement in 2013 – spearheaded by Danielle Smith, the leader of the Wildrose Party at the time, as well as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office.

It’s important to understand that, in piling on Flanagan the way they did, they managed to do more than just traumatize him, they also alienated pretty much every conservative intellectual in the country.… Continue reading

Stephen Harper versus the intellectuals

Looking back over Stephen Harper’s time as Prime Minister, one can see two significant “discoveries” associated with his mandate. The first is that he discovered a way of ruling the country without any support in Quebec. The second is that he discovered a way of ruling the country without any support from the intellectual classes.

The latter trick is, of course, much easier to pull off, since intellectuals do not command many votes, and they tend to cluster together in a very small number of ridings. Republicans in the United States wrote them off a long time ago. (I can still remember a pathetic issue of the New York Review of Books published just before the 2004 presidential election, in which a who’s who of American intellectuals got together to say “please do not re-elect George W. Bush.” It made not a whit of difference.)

The reasons for this hostility toward Harper in Canada are manifold.… Continue reading