Sunday, October 27, 2013

Let's Play... Pogo Joe

Pogo Joe
Screenplay, 1983

originally played on Commodore 64

Even among the most chaotic of individuals there is a habitual need for an order in the world, manifest in some way or another as a fetish or a process or a mode of administration. Driven not by hate or love, tied to a pogo stick for some reason unknown to even the most cruel of existentialists, the protagonist of Pogo Joe (1983) is one of the lesser-known heroes in the halls of early digital gaming. Like most people who knew the game, I encountered Joe on a Commodore 64 disk filled with at least ten other games, pirated from who knows where. My research has since taught me that Pogo Joe did in fact see a retail release, but a copy didn’t make its way to Thunder Bay when I was there, or if it did I never saw it.

Essentially a Q*Bert (1982) clone with sufficient additional gameplay elements  to justify its existence such as teleporters and areas in complete darkness, Pogo Joe is an isometric platformer which tasks players with jumping on pillars laid out in a variety of geometric patterns in order to homogenise their colour. Of course, monsters such as balls, tops, lizard-looking creatures, tadpole-things, and other abstractions are also jumping around the levels, randomly seeking to disrupt Joe's desire for an OCD-safe environment of universal colour distinction. Points are gained if players land on the balls before they ‘hatch’ into monsters, who are otherwise indestructible. Basically, distilled to its essence, Pogo Joe is either a masterpiece of feng-shui minimalism or a genocidal nightmare. In either case, it's quite an impressive copy of Q*Bert.

Q*Bert itself is an interesting thing. A psychedelic colour and light show featuring surreal abstract cartoon enemies, Q*Bert used an isometric vantage point and a control scheme centred upon a diagonally-oriented 4-way joystick. One of the first videogames to convincingly simulate a 3-D effect (note: like Zaxxon (1982) the 3-D effect is a 2-D illusion) as well as an early example of the use of digitised speech synthesis, foul-mouthed Q*Bert became one of the icons of the first generation of videogames. Reproduced on lunchboxes and t-shirts, part of CBS’s Saturday Supercade, with popular conversions of the arcade original for home consoles and computers, Q*Bert may not have been as widely-known a character as Donkey Kong or anyone in the Pacman family, but he held his own for at least one or two holiday shopping cycles. I never liked the show much, but then again I did like the piece of shit Rubik’s cube show, so what did I know?

Pogo Joe is a clear attempt to cash in on Q*Bert’s pop culture success. Oddly enough, it makes a lot more sense for a guy hopping around on a pogo stick to be restricted to isometric grid-based movement than it does for an adorably marketable alien creature with anger management issues living in a possibly multidimensional Euclidean abstraction with constant threats to his life being interrupted only by momentary instances of joy which otherwise mark as Sisyphean a tragedy of endlessly exploited custodial labour. Much like Q*Bert’s later levels, some levels in Pogo Joe remove the columns from under the colour-changing platforms, which results not in an actual gameplay change so much as a challenge to not be visually thrown off. Pogo Joe is in some ways an easier game, as players cannot fall off the columns by jumping the wrong way. However, it often tasks players with traversing levels which are far more restrictive than Q*Bert’s large pyramids. Unlike Q*Bert’s fancy hover discs which let him escape from enemies when he’s caught in a pinch, Pogo Joe has been granted an athletic double jump or bounce, or whatever the fuck you do on a pogo. Mastery of this jump is necessary to advance in the game. You’ll probably end up dying a lot in this one, at least until it gets very easy. As in many of the games of this era, enemies are rather predictable and don’t adjust their behaviour. So the trick, then, is to learn the patterns.

Perhaps it’s tough to tell from 2013, but Pogo Joe’s graphics were fairly spectacular for a small-budget release in 1983 on 8-bit computers. The ad makes a point of comparing Joe favourably to the arcades before offering one $10,000 prize to anyone who passes the tenth level. Nothing beats the bribery of children for the purposes of consumerism. So many ads in the 1980s were contests of skill or chance with cash prizes or expensive electronics that I am amazed I never participated. Actually, that’s not entirely true. In 1986, I was thoroughly hooked by the G.I. Joe Live the Adventure contest which offered people who solved a mystery extended across numerous G.I.Joe products (re: purchases) the chance to win either the infamous seven-and-a-half foot long G.I. Joe aircraft carrier or the new G.I. Joe Spaceship. In retrospect, I probably spent more than the cost of either of those excessively hyperbolic dream toys trying to win one of those excessively hyperbolic dream toys. It was the spaceship I wanted. One of my best friends already had the aircraft carrier. I wanted the spaceship.


Pogo Joe himself is a bit of a clown demon, really. Joe and the monsters are rendered in large, colourful sprites which allow for a good amount of expressive detail in their characterizations compared to those in similar games of the era. On the other hand, the title screen scared the fuck out of me as a kid. Not in a bad way, but rather that kind of kindertrauma which excites and confuses in the best of all possible ways. The circus performer outfit I can handle. Growing up, there was this old guy on our street who lost his larynx to throat cancer. The man still smoked, of course. He lived right across the street from our house and used to come over and present us with things stored in his garage – shitty jewelry boxes encrusted with plastic diamonds, broken hockey sticks which were clearly no longer regulation even if they were in one piece, football cleats from the 1960s, and a child’s circus performer outfit. I’m not at all sure why my parents were ok with this behaviour. It didn’t happen often, maybe six or seven times in total. Each time he came over, he ended up scaring the absolute fuck out of my brother and me, dressed either in an old Canadian naval uniform or a housecoat and frayed slippers, speaking broken Italian-English through an electronic voicebox held against his throat which made him sound like a Chipmunks version of Darth Vader, a cigarette in one hand and some random shit donation to our childhood in the other. In the four years between me being old enough to pay attention to weirdos like him and the day he died and was taken down the street to the hospital in an ambulance which had to lap around the block, I never saw anyone visit his house. He used to stare at me from his porch as I ran around the neighbourhood with friends. When I told my mom that I thought he was weird, she told me that he had lost his own children when they were adults and crashed their car into a river. Like that old man, Pogo Joe on the title screen is a reminder that it’s really the eyes and the smile which trouble the soul and keep kids awake at night.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

no shoes & one sock @ New Harbours


no shoes & one sock (jamie ryan downie, reg moore, quintin zachary hewlett, drew taylor) played New Harbours on the second friday of october, 2013

Saturday, August 31, 2013

letter to Jason Kenny, re: changes to foreign worker permits for touring artists/musicians






Mr. Kenny,

Recent changes to the fee structure for visa/work permits allowing touring artists and entertainers will not allow small- or medium-scale musicians to legally tour and perform in Canada. It is clear to those of us with experience with the music industry that the government’s changes did not intend to directly affect the bars and music venues which rely on touring musicians for the effective operation of their business. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that the Conservative Party intended for its policies surrounding work permits for foreign labourers to have the consequence that Canadian bars and entertainment venues which have capacities of less than 1,000 people would be affected in the negative manner which will result from these policies. It seems to me that given the nature of the music business as inherently multinational in nature, Canadian venues with capacities less than 1,000 people will suffer catastrophically from the lack of touring musicians able to perform in Canada. There won’t suddenly exist an expanded stable of internationally-recognised Canadian musicians from which promoters and venues can choose; rather there will be fewer live music performances, and venue revenues, with their contingent tax revenues, will fall considerably. Quite simply, many venues will not be able to remain in business.

Again, it is clear that such was not the intention of the policy changes enacted by the federal Conservatives. Rather, the problems with which the live music industry is now facing are the result of a total lack of consultation on the part of the governing Conservative Party of Canada. As this situation is simply not acceptable to anyone in the music industry in Canada, what measures will the government take to immediately address this issue? The policy as currently extant does not work for the music industry, or for the arts more broadly. Let me be blunt about the situation, Mr. Kenny. There is nobody currently serving as MP within the Conservative caucus who understands or has any experience with the issue of the performing arts in Canada. In fact, understood within the context of other policy and procedural changes and the abusive, omnibus-bill methods of public governance which marks the history of the federal Conservatives since 2006, neither I nor other members of the art industry communities in Canada have any confidence in the ‘expertise’ displayed by the Conservative government in this regard.

Will government officials, in consultation with members of the Canadian live music industry, work on excepting touring entertainers for the reason that they inhabit an obviously different employment situation relative to a one-night performance than does a foreign worker coming to Canada to fill a six-month full-time position? What steps, in the timeframe of the next eighteen months, will be taken to restore the business viability of live music venues in Canada, now that recent policy changes enacted by the Conservative government have seriously undermined the business potential of the industry in Canada?

Regards,

UPDATE:


Thursday, May 30, 2013

The political use of copyright law by the Bank of Canada


I am curious about the politicised deployment of the Bank of Canada’s copyright interests. In response to a satirical image circulated by cartoonist Dan Murphy on or around May 29, 2013, the Bank of Canada issued a cease-and-desist order to Artizans, the distribution agency for the cartoon. Since Mr. Murphy intended the cartoon as political satire and is self-employed as a political satirist, it stands to reason that the Bank of Canada is grounding its complaints in the commercial activities of the ostensibly offending cartoonist. Surely such is within the legal jurisdiction of present copyright law in Canada. However, the question then becomes why the image of Canadian money is itself copyrightable material.

Copyright law is intended to protect the rights of content producers to the profitable sale of the material their create. Obviously, in the age of mechanical reproduction the ability to economically produce facsimiles of literature, fine  and commercial art, music, “IP”, and product design necessitates that the rights of creators be protected to ensure the continuing economic viability of such innovations.

To this end, I cannot help but wonder about the desire of the Bank of Canada to restrict the use of images referencing Canadian money. Certainly, measures to control the production and circulation of counterfit bills are necessary to protect the integrity of the monetary system. However, the deployment of copyright law against a political cartoon (or any other creative recontextualisation of such images as dollar bills) does not serve to protect either the integrity of the country’s monetary system, nor the commercial interests of the Bank of Canada, the producer of the images in question as protected under copyright. The Bank of Canada will not have its creation undervalued and will not face competition in the marketplace as a result of the breach of copyright law as reflected by Dan Murphy’s editorial cartoon. In fact, I would argue that the operations of the Bank of Canada, commercial or otherwise, are entirely unaffected by the creative recontextualisation of images of Canadian money. Moreover, the creative recontextualisation of the images of Canadian money is entirely within the public’s interest and right to live as informed and active citizens as protected by the freedom of expression clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, namely Section 2b of the Constitution Act.

Furthermore, in this particular instance the nature of the creative asset being protected needs to be examined. Unlike commercial products which require copyright provisions to maintain their economic and social value, money as instantiated in dollar bills and their likeness as representations (please note that the ontology of representation is beyond the scope of this letter; refer to your local university media studies/literature/philosophy department for details) is not the end product of commerce but rather the infrastructure by (and in) which commerce is enacted. This fact is the first indicator that the Bank of Canada is improperly applying copyright law to protect the creative recontextualisation of the images of Canadian money. Unlike the reproduction of an artist’s graphic design work, a musician’s song, or a company’s retail packaging, the reproduction of Canadian money does not devalue money in terms of either its economic or symbolic operations. Unlike a creative person or business which loses a sale to counterfeit goods, or has the price of sale affected by the availability of counterfeit reproductions, the marketplace in which the Bank of Canada operates is not affected by the reproduction of images of dollar bills. In no way is the Bank of Canada compromised in its function or intention. In its institutional capacity, the Bank of Canada is not a producer of goods, but rather a regulator of the infrastructure of commerce. As such, the end results of its operations, namely the dollar bills themselves, can be afforded no protections under current Canadian copyright law except to the extent that the counterfeit production of money is restricted. The Bank of Canada should indeed deploy copyright law to ensure that the majority of (if not all) bills in circulation have been manufactured by and remain under the supervision of the mint. Any other use of copyright law by the Bank of Canada oversteps the intentions of copyright provisions as well as the mandate foundational to the Bank.

Satire has a long history of constitutional protection as free speech. For satire to function, it must redeploy and recontextualise the contemporary images of politics, culture, art, science, technology, and economic practice. To focus on the present situation, political cartoons have a long history of using nationally-accurate depictions of dollar bills as important symbols and referents for the syntax and meaning in which the cartoon can be understood to operate. They also serve as visual shorthand frequently deployed in political cartoons for a variety of concepts such as greed and corruption. To be specific in this instance, Dan Murphy’s cartoon, which recontextualises a Canadian $50 polymer bill to make statements (again, which themselves have a long history of being protected by freedom of expression laws) about contemporary politics, namely the activities of one particular public figure and the (rather scandalous and illegal) activities responsible for the instance of their public notoriety presently. Despite the commercial nature of Mr. Murphy’s enterprise, his actions were protected under Section 29.1 of the Copyright Act as the syntax and content of the message relayed by the cartoon is one of political commentary and not one whereby the function or intentions of the Bank of Canada as manifest in the image of a dollar bill is in any way undermined or absconded by the cartoonist. Again, in no way does the cartoon challenge the “market” wherein the processes and institutions of money as regulated by the Bank of Canada operate. As copyright provisions are grounded in the idea that unauthorised reproduction devalues the market for the good or service in question, in no way can it be applied to the Bank of Canada’s “ownership” of dollar bills as images, as such cannot be understood to be a goods or services produced and sold in a competitive marketplace.

Here, I turn to what I interpret as the politicised deployed of copyright law by the Bank of Canada. The image of Canadian money has been reproduced on flyers disseminated for advertising purposes by supermarkets and dollar stores, and is routinely used on flyers produced and distributed by local businesses. Usually, the reproduced image signals to the reader of a sale or reduction in price, or of how the use of this product or service will save the reader money. Perhaps such is done outside of media reportage, but I have not heard of other instances where the Bank of Canada produces and delivers a cease-and-desist order to the ostensible copyright violator. In the case of Dan Murphy’s political cartoon, it appears to outside observers that the Bank of Canada is taking an interest in this particular “violation” of their copyright to silence a criticism against a scandal which extends throughout the ranks of the current government. As the Bank of Canada is a government institution, it is not much of a stretch for these same outside observers to question the political (and politicised) intentions of this particular intervention by the Bank of Canada.

Monday, May 13, 2013

letter to Guelph City Council, re: anti-music noise bylaw

Hello,

Having read about Guelph’s new noise bylaw in the Guelph Mercury, I cannot remain silent on this issue of community silence. As a past member of the music industry who currently studies art and culture professionally, I must say that I was quite thoroughly appalled when I read about the bylaw clause forbidding “the operation of a radio, television, stereo or other electronic device including any amplification device, or any musical or other sound-producing instrument” in residential and mixed-use areas. Surely it is not the wish of Guelph city council to censor all musical activities within city limits, for such a desire would not only prove itself illogical and untenable, but would be a serious impediment to the quality of life in Guelph, as throughout recorded history music has served as one of the principal means for the joyous expression of the spirit of humanity. Furthermore, banning human noise production in residential areas will disallow children from a musical education. If people cannot teach themselves how to play an instrument in the home, where do you expect musical crafts to be honed and perfected? While it is true that studio rental spaces may be available to aspiring musicians, renting space to learn musical performance and composition is exceptionally expensive and will result in the consequence that only affluent children will learn music. The educational benefits of participation in musical appreciation and performance [see article from Scientific American, linked below] will be restricted to wealthy families in Guelph. To learn how to play any instrument at the “concert” level requires thousands of hours of daily practice; obviously if such practice cannot occur in the home, then such practice will not occur. Given the implacable nature of the human spirit relative to its own expression through art, however, it’s much more likely that the noise bylaw will simply be ignored by most residents. Policing costs along with property taxes will increase as more and more people are harassed in their own homes by police seeking to shut down five friends with a stereo or teenagers making hiphop in a garage. Many residents will purposefully break compliance with the bylaw, and if I lived in Guelph I would certainly and happily be one of them.

More importantly, however, what is the actually purpose of the new bylaw? To what end are the lives of Guelph residents improved by the imposition of silence? Silence has not been enshrined as one of the driving forces of civilization (in fact noise is the marker for civilization), and has not been codified as a fundamental human right in any modern legal jurisdiction. But of course, Guelph residents won’t suddenly be without noises: traffic, people talking, construction, industry, daily commercial activities – all of these noises will continue unabated. What privileges the noise these activities produce over the concerted (and if they are talented, poetic) expression of a person with a trumpet or a guitar? As an aside, I noticed that the real noisemakers which pollute residential neighbourhoods are all exempt from the noise bylaw: lawnmowers, leaf blowers, power saws, power washers, compressed air machines, generators, etc. Surely the noises these machines produce, often very early in the morning, are far more obnoxious than is a car stereo or a child singing into a microphone. I cannot help but consider that the current Guelph city council members think it more important that the rights of residents to watch their evening reality shows and pretend through silence that the rest of the world doesn’t exist is superior to the rights of individuals to pursue and explore the fascinating potential of their own existence as reflected in musical expression. While in The Republic, Plato did in fact ban music from his political utopia, such censorship should not reasonably be expected as a component of an enlightened 21st century democratic jurisprudence.

Music is ornamentation for time in the same way that painting and architecture serve as ornaments for space. Indeed, music is a celebration of life against the inevitable closure of death, the silent end-of-time in which we must all ultimately find our peace. People who regularly practice musical composition and performance enrich their intellectual abilities and their capacity for learning. Due to the newly-passed noise bylaw, Guelph will be a city with less capacity to placate and enlighten the distempered soul as it passes through life. I am certain that the residents of Guelph will not abide such inhuman and illogical attacks on artistic expression within residential areas. It heartens me to see the increasing prominence of the art community in Guelph, as it is they who will surely lead the protest against the insanely unhuman, unnecessary, and illogical noise bylaw which City Council has just passed. Hopefully, council members will see the folly of this bylaw and reverse or remove the new amendments, lest their careers be defined in terms of the inhuman silence they illogically imposed on a community.

Regards,

--
qzh

PS: an article in the popular journal Scientific American about the pedagogical benefits of musical participation: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2012/08/21/even-a-few-years-of-music-training-benefits-the-brain/  . A full bibliography outlining such benefits as listed in numerous peer-reviewed academic studies can be made available to Council upon request.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

The provincial Tory education White Papers

[note: this conversation is a response to provincial Conservative policy as published on their website:  http://ontariopc.uberflip.com/i/108917 ]


Hi Mr. Leone and Mr. Hudak,

I’m curious about the position on student loans represented by your party’s most recent “white paper”, as well as the comments which you made during today’s press release. While I do not presently wish to address the idiocy of tying provincial education dollars directly to employment statistics, even though this proposal is as unfeasible logistically and it is intellectually abhorrent (how does one judge what a student’s “field” is relative to their later employment; I don’t know of too many professional philosophers or literary critics outside of academia, for example, but I have noticed that many of the corporate executives in the Fortune 500 list have graduate and undergraduate degrees in such fields), the purpose of this present letter is to discuss with you the most obvious problem with your party’s proposal.

Indexing student loans to academic achievement has a superficial logic to it, granted. However, such a system of funding does not allow a student who does poorly in one area to transfer into another more suited to their aptitude. I can give as example in this regard British politician whom I once met who described failing out of the science program in his university. He transferred to history and political science at another university, and proceeded to finish a doctorate several years later before entering into federal politics in Britain. Under the Tory proposal to index student finances to academic performance, this individual would not have graduated from university and would not currently be a sitting MP in the British Parliament.

What about a student who has issues with mental or physical health affecting their grades? What about people with developmental difficulties? Or, to take a personal example, what if a student endures trauma or grief due to the death of a loved one? What if they endure physical and/or emotional abuse at home during the course of their studies? What if they’re just irresponsible for a moment during their youth (kids start post-secondary school at 17 now) and learn the lessons of responsibility as they mature and learn from their more ambitious peers? In short, there is a very long list of reasons why a student’s performance at school may be negatively affected at any given moment. It is my view, shared by many experts in the field of post-secondary education, that a functional educational system is flexible enough to cope with the individualities presented by all students, not simply those who do not struggle with paying for or performing in school during their studies. How dare your party be so callous as to assume that a student’s academic performance be exemplary and if it is not they are lazy and should be cut off from funding. What you are saying, Mr. Leone, is that students from affluent families are able to make mistakes, and students from poor families do not get to enjoy such privileges. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that your proposal will result in “better” students, and neither of you, Mr. Hudak and Mr. Leone, have the expertise or credibility to suggest otherwise. More importantly, since student loans are a for-profit system of student financing greatly beneficial to the profitability of several Canadian banks, the idea that student loans are a great expense on the taxpayers of this province is a hyperbolic inaccuracy. The majority of student loans are paid back to the banks, and the government benefits from increased tax revenue from a more advanced and productive workforce. All empirical data points to education being a good investment for the state.

“Market discipline”, as you call it, is neither practical nor desirable, and should not be expected of our students. Education and knowledge are more important for the advancement of the human condition than is the pursuit of money for the sake of itself. Perhaps now is the time to discuss market discipline in relation to the marketplace, and here we can talk about why the world economy went into the toilet in 2008...   

As a student from a relatively poor end of the middle class who has struggled very hard to enjoy the privilege of working on a doctorate in a “good” program at a “good” school, I cannot emphasize this point (and pun) enough: Tory educational policy is an act of class warfare.

Regards,


>>> 
Thank you for your e-mail. 

Nothing in the white paper precludes this British MP from doing what he did.  It's actually encouraged.  Put it this way, the major issue that you have raised in this white paper is a paragraph which follows another paragraph that talks about minimizing debt.  I think we need to talk about the 1 in 5 students who do not finish university.  They may have really struggled in first year, probably failed a couple courses, and came back for year 2 or 3, only then to drop out.  This student may then go to college to finish a 2 or 3 year university diploma, meaning he or she spent an extra 1 or 2 or 3 years getting an education than needed.  That's 1 or 2 or 3 more years of student debt. That's 1 or 2 or 3 years of government investment in this student's education.  So, what we're suggesting is that we encourage the student to do what the MP has done and find a different program sooner.  That pretty well falls in line with our thinking.  Look at our colleges strategy as providing this kind of direction.

We propose that institutions have greater control in managing financial aid.  In every one of the cases you outline, such exemptions are already provided by institutions, so you're really grasping at straws.  We never gave a minimum grade/mark, and we never said we want to be punitive (i.e. taking loans away from people).   You assume, incorrectly, what our intent is on this issue by posing every hypothetical that comes to mind.  We are a compassionate party.  Inside the framework we have set, we could encourage the use of incentives to encourage student improvement.  For example, for those we may want to incent students to achieve higher by forgiving a portion of their loans for student success. These options are on the table, and we don't specify because we want to encourage a discussion.

You are actually making assumptions about my assumptions, and they are incorrect. My focus is to improve student success not to focus on who can make "mistakes".  This is entirely your hyperbole.  I actually believe I do have "expertise" and "credibility."  I have a PhD in Comparative Public Policy.  I hope that when you get your PhD, you begin to appreciate the enormity of your achievement.  You may not agree with what I have said in this white paper, and you're free to do that.  However, to suggest that I have no expertise or credibility is an ad hominem fallacy in argument.

Finally, you conclude with your position on how this is class warfare.  I'm offended by this, because my parents were immigrants who came to this country with just the shirts on their backs.  My father worked hard to provide for my family in a blue collar job.  He and my mom are proud to have a son who ended up with a PhD. I know your parents will take as much pride in your success as mine did for what I was able to accomplish.  I wish you the best of luck.

All the best,

Rob

>>>
Mr. Leone,

It is clear that we have different interpretations of Tory policy as published on the Conservative website. My bias against the line of thinking which this white paper presents centres upon the idea of higher education being solely for the benefit of particular fields of education most easily indexed to employability records, while other fields are deemed “wasteful” by government bureaucrats who do not understand the correlation between education and employment. To restate a point from my last email to you, in what manner is Philosophy or Ethics directly quantifiable in terms of monetary gain or employability? Surely, you do not wish to challenge the value of philosophy to the human condition or the experience of humanity, for you would undoubtedly be wrong. When examining student employment post graduation, the Tory white paper cites the 2012 Auditor General’s report which indicates that student employment outcomes are not always tied to their field of study in university or college. My worry is that you interpret such data as being a negative outcome of the educational system. Many contemporary studies on pedagogy and labour indicate that a breadth of experience and education is required for the lateral strategic and logistical thought processes which define successful business strategies in the 21st century. In fact, as I mentioned in my previous email to you, if you examine the education backgrounds of many corporate leaders, it is evident that many of them were trained in university or college programs which are ostensively of little use to their executive careers. And yet there they are: corporate managers with English or geography degrees. I myself was employed in the music industry for several years after having received an MA in English. Surely, my employment would have fallen outside of my field of study, despite my continual utilisation of “English degree” skills at a “Music degree or MBA” job. Please note in contradiction to your email response that Paths 1, 5, and 10 in the Tory white paper explicitly details the need to tailor fields of study to fields of employment.

University professors are expected to perform more duties than simply teach classes in their field, and the typical 40-40-20 split mentioned in the Tory white paper reflects this fact. However, the paper also suggests that universities should employ full-time, teaching only professors. While such a suggestion makes sense in a superficial manner, it ignores the fundamental reality of university education: the continual expansion and refinement of human intellectual activity. The knowledge being taught by a full-time teaching professor would likely be obsolete after a few years, and they would then need to retrain themselves, likely at the expense of the province. Please note this important fact: the process of research is precisely the manner by which university professors update and refine the information they are teaching. In effect, it is research which keeps the education system “up-to-date”. Furthermore, it is a school’s research profile which determines its standing in the global academic community, with the consequence of a higher research profile attracting a greater number and “quality” of students. Like you, I too am concerned that universities are increasingly relying on low-paid, part-time, contract teaching from newly-minted doctoral students. Not only is the education of students compromised by poorly-paid and overstressed part-time faculty, but arguably this situation is poor for the economy as a whole, as good wage, full-time jobs are replaced by temporary and expendable contract labourers. You know what would improve this situation however? Releasing more provincial and federal funds to universities to hire more full-time professors. In terms of their employment practices, universities are acting like fast food chains in terms of hiring low-paid, disposable employees because of the same “market diligence” championed by conservative thinkers for decades. The end result of such thinking is that student education is increasingly compromised by the myopic constraints of free market capitalism, with the outcome of students treated more like consumers with desires than as students with needs. Look at the American University of Phoenix as the logical conclusion of this process: an online university which tailors its programs to the “needs” of students (which, unsurprisingly, are defined as contingent with profitability for the school’s stakeholders) and which produce students with worthless, made-up degrees that are not recognised as being useful by most employers; the unskilled and untrained students of the University of Phoenix are for all intents and purposes the unqualified remnants of education dictated by free market principles. Such is the consequence of a university which employs teachers who do not research anything and whose outcomes are “employability”. Please note in contradiction to your email response that Paths 6, 9, and 10 in the Tory white papers explicitly discuss the need for online, free market, non-research focus for university education.

Here’s a proposal. The corporate and business communities in Canada benefit greatly from having access to a large pool of highly-educated and healthy workers, and yet the corporate and business communities have seen their taxes decline significantly since the mid-1990s. Corporations hire employees who have skills with computers and technology, language, and mathematics, and these skills are deployed by the corporation for profitable gain. However, the business and corporate communities are increasingly paying a lower share of the costs of educating their employees. Presently, corporations, which are granted the rights of “personhood” under Canadian and international jurisprudence, do not pay taxes at anywhere near the same percentage of their income as do individual Canadians. Such corporate taxation policies have been championed by Conservatives as well as the Liberals as encouraging job growth. However, according to recent findings by the Bank of Canada, corporations and large businesses in Canada have not invested the money saved from lower taxation and no jobs have been produced as a result, and this accumulation of “dead money” (in the words of the Financial Post’s Gordon Isfeld) is in fact harming the Canadian economy. Since it is not likely that major corporations will cease operations if their taxation levels are restored to the rates extant in the mid 1990s, when they were also profitable entities, I propose that significant investments be made in higher education be financed by increasing the corporate tax rate back to previous levels. Again, all of this increased revenue from corporate taxation would be earmarked for investment in education, which is of direct benefit to corporate and business employers. The trend of public subsidies for private profits has to end; using the same “free market”, fiscally-conservative logic behind most other Tory policies, it’s time to end the socialisation of expense and the privatisation of profit and “charge” employers for the education received by their employees.

I know full well that your party follows its own ideological vectors regardless of the empirical data which may contradict such positions. As such, it is not likely that Conservative policy will lead the charge, as it were, to a better system of higher education in Ontario. There is one thing on which we can agree, however: like you, I believe that perhaps 15-20 percent of the students enrolled in university programs would be better served by study at a college. Having taught at Mohawk and Sheridan, as well as Columbia International College, I can state that the commonly-held mantra of “go to university, unless you are dumb then try college” is both incorrect and elitist nonsense. Indeed, many students are avoiding the trades because of unfounded class prejudices against such employment. However, I must point out that the reason that universities have lowered their standards and are significantly increasing undergraduate enrollment numbers has to do with cuts to provincial and federal funding which force schools to rely increasingly on tuition dollars from students to pay for their operation. To restate my position above, academic standards would be improved by funding schools directly by increasing the rate for corporate taxation.

PS: Path 11, in which you call for student unions to be made accountable, is a red herring, as student union expenses are less than 1% of a student’s tuition. Even if that 1% truly reflects waste which could be recovered through policies of oversight and accountability, which it does not, the amount of money saved by students (note: not the government; no tax dollars are spent on student union activities) would be negligible.

Regards,


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Dear Quintin,

Thanks for the time you took to respond to my e-mail and the discussion paper.  The purpose of doing these discussion papers is to encourage debate.  While we don't' agree on many issues, it's nice to know there are a couple things in which we can agree.  Thank you for participating!
All the best,

Rob