For as long as I have been working in the non-profit and government worlds, since 1991, I have been confronted with the idea that somehow we always must do more with less. When I began work at the National Association of Friendship Centres in 1992, my first real job after leaving university, the organization was coming to the end of a five-year cycle of funding for urban Indigenous programs and core capacity that had grown steadily since 1972. Over twenty years, the federal government had increased funding in the Friendship Centres in Canada’s towns and cities, and the movement had grown to over 100 communities with between three and five core funded positions in each centre, offering a myriad of services to urban Indigenous populations from Halifax to Port Alberni and Red Lake to Inuvik.
In 1993, the Liberals were elected to power after ten years of Progressive Conservative government, and they committed to tackling the federal deficit. The did this by actually continuing a series of budget reductions that the last Tory finance Minister Ray Hnatyshyn had proposed in his election budget. Paul Martin got credit for it, but it was a PC plan.
The upshot of these across-the-board spending reductions was that we “had to do more with less,” or “become more efficient” or “get creative” or “innovate” or “tighten belts and find redundancies.” With very, very, few exceptions almost every organization I have worked with since then has had to face the same problem. The neo-liberal economic revolution of Regan and Thatcher and Mulroney delivered massive amounts of money to the richest people in the world and starved government of revenues and marginalized communities of funding and material support, even as they picked up the work of addressing the increasing social problems externalized by the private sector.
We went through periods of funding freezes, cuts, occasional bumps (“investment” it is sometimes called) but there has in general been a growing trend of increasing social problems and complexity, decreasing government support and increasing wealth inequality in Canada leading to massively underfunded non-profits. We are now seeing core government services shredded too. When the word “austerity” is used it seems to signal that direct government services such as health and education and income security are in for a tough time.
Ideology drives all of this. For most of the past 45 years that ideology has been the market-based economic liberalism that has privatized and financialized everything. In the past 20 years it has included ideologies of the culture war that has tied government funding to strange ideas that are put out there to stoke outrage, fuel algorithms, divide citizens and achieve razor thin electoral margins. In places like Alberta a bewildering set of strange ideas about public health, energy independence and education has meant that the public purse is weaponized against people who are trying to provide vaccines against fatal and preventable illnesses, or create sustainable and low-cost energy technologies, or build education systems that create welcoming and inclusive learning environments. These were things we used to fund, plan for and organize around.
In talking with a colleague today we were noticing how this moment of austerity is showing up in the work we do to support organizations and facilitate dialogue, and engagement, especially in this moment when we are confronted by nearly overwhelming confusion and complexity. It used to be that the conversations we were hosting suffered at times from a scarcity mindset, meaning that we weren’t aware of the actual richness that was around us. Participatory leadership and process opens up access to that richness.
Today we are suffering from an austerity mindset, which can be thought of as a realization that the richness we need has been taken away from us. It is harder and harder to find diverse groups of people and voices to work on issues of staggering complexity. People have had their time and material resources privatized, colonized, and taken from them.
We were noticing that coming out of the pandemic, people have welcomed the chance to be together in person again, but how we show up has changed. Every face-to-face meeting is high stakes and there is decreasing trust in opening up and letting go into a participatory process. While in the past it seemed easier to coach leaders and organizations to find solutions at the margins of their work with authentic and creative engagement with their people and communities, these days it seems like our work is to keep leaders from becoming autocratic. With so few hands willing and able to do the work of addressing huge systemic issues, most organizations and networks seem to have only a few key people who are close to the work. This creates a fear that if the leader doesn’t directly influence and shift everyone to their way of thinking, we won’t get the chance to do the work properly.
To be honest some of this worry is warranted. We know from the ways in which Cynefin advises us to act in crisis, that applying tight constraints is the best way to establish safety. But what you do with that safety once you have it is what’s at stake. These days it seems that many leaders are drifting towards consolidating that power by offering to sustain the work of maintaining safety at the expense of other ideas, diverse thinking, or even a challenge to their plans. We see this in national leadership. Trump is the obvious example, but it has been interesting to see Prime Minister Carney stumbling in the House of Commons as Pierre Poilievre looks his seat and provided the first testing challenges of Carney’s leadership. Carney has had it easy since he was elected.
There are lots of implications here for facilitating participatory work and supporting leaders in this time, and to me they come from our lessons in complexity and dialogic practice. Here’s a few, and maybe you can add to them:
The work of the world is teetering on the edge of chaos AND is deeply complex. So that means that yes, leaders and facilitators and Board chairs need to consolidate decision making and create safety. But it also means that this is EXACT time to open up leadership to people who have differing view points and perspectives and experiences. That diversity is what provides the sophisticated situational awareness needed to address the challenges we are in. Polarity management is coming back into my practice in a big way as we help groups to see the tensions they are working with and engage with them productively.
Avoid premature convergence. One of my favourite Dave Snowden slogans implores us to not choose the first good idea and go with it. Even if thing seems to be moving fast, committing too early to a course of action can send you on a path from which return is very tricky. Use scenario planning to keep a view on possibilities, and adjust plans as you go. COVID killed the five-year plan, but you can still set longer-view directions of travel and think about the different landscapes you will confront to get there.
Leave more community than you found. In times of crisis it is impossible to build the social connectivity and relational fields that help sustain us. We need to be doing that in the moments when we can take a breath and think. And meetings are what those moments look like in organizational life. If you are using meetings to preach to the masses, you are missing this chance. Every conversation in the organization right now has the chance to build community while also doing good work, including conversations about how to be together. And if you are a leader with a good idea that you want others to take up, you need to build trust and relational capacity if that idea is to be supported and improved upon. Participatory work does this. It also does this much better if we are physically n the same room.
Big messy conversations are a feature, not a bug. Since the pandemic, I have been doing A LOT of Open Space meetings. Open Space just creates the kind of agenda that is impossible if only one person is in charge. When participants begin posting sessions in Open Space everyone gets to see the real texture of need and capacity in the organization, and we are given the chance to dive in and work on them. Same with Pro Action Cafe, which helps individuals in large gatherings get the help they need with the many different projects and programs they are running. We don’t need alignment on everything right now. We do need much more activity happening in plain view, co-created and co-supported. Like Harrison Owne used to say “Trust the people.”
We need to look after ourselves. This time is taking a real toll on many people. Caring for oneself is not greedy. It is essential. If we are all to stay resourceful in the messy chaos of the present moment we need to be taking our time to be grounded, become familiar with our own patterns of reactivity and do the world a favour and work on them. Yesterday, in talking with a colleague who works right at the coalface of social change and community organizing, I asked her how she was keeping it together. Her morning practice of prayer and meditation has never been more essential, and in fact she had to remind herself to get back to it. I can relate.
I’m sure this list could go on, and I invite you to add to it. Leave a comment about what you are noticing and how you are working with others to cope with the realities of this moment. We are living in a thin time when the macro currents of war and conflict and austerity and hatred are seeping into each of our special places. We need to work within these contexts and find islands of meaning and respite so good work can continue and people can be looked after.
Alberta populism has deep origins in a group of people who have long harboured a libertarian utopia for Alberta. Danielle Smith is the most recent manifestation of this wave of thought. The Jacobin traces her origin story.
My first connection to the internet was made using a second-hand IBM 386 through a dialup modem to the National Capital FreeNet in early 1994. I was an avid reader of several Usenet groups related to cooking, hiking and some of the social and political issues of the day. I was reminded of that great initiation to internet culture when reading this blog post which envisions a kind of barely adjacent, but now out of reach, timeline for how the internet might have developed if Salvador Allende had remained in power in Chile in 1973. Seriously.
While we are contemplating scenarios, how about one that places the crash of the US economy and political system in 2026. It’s a hastily constructed work of fiction, but it underscores how many things COULD go wrong to kick off an era of transformation. I found myself contemplating the position of lots of other people in this story, folks trying to scrape together rent, people who had just quit their jobs for a new opportunity or retirement, a new citizen…
This is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and Rebecca Solnit is a good person to guide us through the stories and the spiritual meaning of what happened in New Orleans that week and afterwards.
It’s Labour Day. Be kind to those who have to work so you can have a holiday that was hard won by workers. And maybe listen to some great reinterpretations of Juan Carlos Caceres tango music from Le Collective Tango Negro Ensemble.
An astonishing photograph from the Very Large Telescope this week of a planet being born. From the link:
At the center of this frame lies a young Sun-like star, hidden behind a coronagraph that blocks its bright glare. Surrounding the star is a bright, dusty protoplanetary disk— the raw material of planets. Gaps and concentric ringsmark where a newborn world is gathering gas and dust under its gravity, clearing the way as it orbits the star. Although astronomers have imaged disk-embedded planets before, this is the first-ever observation of an exoplanet actively carving a gap within a disk — the earliest direct glimpse of planetary sculpting in action.
Downhill mountain biking is huge here on the south coast of British Columbia. As a young rider for years my son built trails and maintained a few here on Bowen Island. His mentor and inspiration was our neighbour Dangerous Dan Cowan, an absolute legend of North Shore style trail building who built unreal structures here. The history of mountain bike trail development is a folk tradition here. Mountain Life lifts the cover on some that hidden history.
In this ongoing story about Alberta schools banning books, the Alberta premier today had this response to the list prepared by the Edmonton School Board:
“Edmonton Public is clearly doing a little vicious compliance over what the direction is,” Smith said during an unrelated news conference. If they need us to hold their hand through the process to identify what kind of materials are appropriate … we will more than happily work with them to work through their list, one by one, so we can be super clear about what it is we’re trying to do,” Smith said.
The term is “malicious compliance” and it is an excellent tactic. It will be good to see exactly how the premier wants her party’s bigotry expressed in public schools. Here’s the ministerial order, which makes pretty steamy reading on its own.
A wake up call for Tottenham this morning. After a season start with two clean sheets, we met a determined Bournemouth side who brought their high pressing game to North London. After they scored an early goal they kept on going and put Spurs into a slow, defensive, and reactionary torpor. It wasn’t until 77’ that Spurs found some life. Still, some slow decisions and poor passing compromised our ability to take advantage of Bournemouth’s fatigue. We only managed one shot on target, five overall. The Cherries saw out the match with grit and determination and raw belief ,holding on for the win. They played out of this world.
Now that Pierre Poilievre is back in the public eye, it’s worth pointing out why his particular brand of populist politics will never make him a good prime minister.
There was recently a case in Canada in which a man has been charged with aggravated assault and assault with a weapon for defending himself from a home intruder. Predictably, this stirred Poilievre into a broad-based attack on the justice system as a whole and he is now vowing to introduce a private member’s bill that would broaden the conditions for using self-defense, including killing someone if someone enters your home without permission.
This is a populist tactic. You take an extreme case that is an outlier to the general application of the law, and you call the system broken and promise to “fix” it with a bill that would outlaw that very specific case without any consideration to the other consequences of the law, or to whether the law actually works at all.
In Canada self-defence is permitted by law, but under specific conditions. If the police think you have broken those conditions, you will be charged. It is then up to a judge to hear the case. But it is already legal to kill someone in self-defence. People have been acquitted in the past for even killing police officers who were either undercover, or who were acting illegally. So what Poilievre is advocating for is actually legal now, although I doubt that he is intending that this bill should result in more police deaths. That is certainly not the country I want to live in.
But that is the problem with pandering. You miss (or in this case just ignore) the nuances of cases and you can end up creating the conditions that make the world less safe and less secure, including for the people who support you and for whom you are claiming to champion, all to appear “stronger.”
When you are in opposition, you can do and say whatever you want, because you don’t have the power to make actual changes. A populist will always jump on the outrage train because stoking fear and providing simplistic solutions to problems, even before a court has ruled on the legality of a situation, gets you “points.” in some cases, it might even end up getting you elected, and then you have to govern. And you cannot govern that way. Populists make terrible governments, as we are seeing all around North America at the moment.
A more reasonable opposition leader might say “this case has the potential to erode the rights of Canadians to defend themselves. Let’s see how the trial goes and if we don’t like the result we will propose amendments to the Criminal Code that allow for more latitude in self-defence, but that provide reasonable safeguards for people like delivery drivers, police, paramedics, firefighters, canvassers, and social workers, who by the nature of their jobs, find themselves more likely to be in these situations where they are on the receiving end of self-defence.” That might be a position I would disagree with, because I’m not sure the law needs more latitude, but it is one I would be able to discuss. But how are citizens supposed to reason with a reactionary position based on a single unique case which may well be complicated by a number of mitigating factors? We cannot make laws like that, and Poilievre’s gamesmanship is not designed for deliberation. It is what I call “a drive by shouting” which is when a politician makes bold and brash statements with no regard for consequences simply to trigger emotional responses based in anger, fear, and perceived grievance. It forces a categorical response. And that erodes democratic process.
Poilievre is not a reasonable opposition leader, and his return to politics through his recent by-election has just reminded me why so many people refused to elect his party to govern the country back in the spring. Since returning to Parliament, many in his own party have advised him to change his tone. Many others, including me, are skeptical that he will be capable of that. Many are watching. We need a good opposition leader in Canada right now, even if that leader is the leader of the Conservative Party. Poilievre isn’t it.
Congrats to the Air Canada Components of CUPE who secured a contract between Air Canada and their flight attendants. This was a wild moment in Canadian labour relations. A ten year agreement expired, the union demanded pay for unpaid work and achieved a 99% strike vote. Air Canada preemptively locked out the workers last weekend and began cancelling flights. The federal government ordered the groups to binding arbitration and then ordered the flight attendants back to work. They refused and began an illegal strike. The public largely stayed onside becasue NO ONE LIKES DOING WORK FOR FREE. Then yesterday, the announcement came that the dispute was settled.
This whirlwind week was an important moment for labour in Canada. At the same time as the new agreement was announced, CBC reported last night on the increasing prices of things, especially food, and how the affordability crisis is going. We have heard all kinds of news about price inflation over the past few years, but hardly anyone has talked about wage stagnation. In the past, price would rise, and so would wages. But in the last 20 years, and the last ten years specifically, this difference has become truly unhinged. Nobody in politics with any power, least of all the federal Liberals and Conservatives, have discussed wage increases, but everyone seems to have solutions for inflation, which has largely returned to its “normal” levels.
We need to talk about wages. All the time. You are not getting paid enough. People need to be paid more. And if you are worried about prices increasing perhaps we shouldn’t be because very little of what we are paying in higher prices is going to the people that make things and provide us with the services we need. For things like food, living wages for workers are not the issue. It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together, but we’re still living the neoliberal dream, so at the very least, the lateral thinking needed to do it is wanting.