A Coalescence of Ideas

One of the great advantages of having nothing to do and a brain that stores trivia in random and inconsistent ways is that I get to make connections between conversations that I have had, sometimes years apart, and things that I am reading now. As I have mentioned before, I am in constant awe of how things flow and connect within my limited internal universe.

For example: a number of years ago I was having a discussion with a very good friend. The general topic was unions and I was ranting on about how unfair it was that unionized employees got such great pay and benefits while the rest of the employed got, in comparison, so little. I further suggested that it was the unionized employees who voted for Mike Harris in Ontario in 1995 in an attempt to maintain their comfortable status quo. I don't think I was suggesting that we do away with unions but rather that they were taking more than their fair share. My friend did not agree with me reminding me that rather than reducing unionized workers down to the pay level of non-unionized workers, the task was to raise everyone else up to their level.

Just last Sunday I was having a hot chocolate after the Cedar Farmer's Market and somehow the three of us started to talk about education and how poorly and sometimes how discriminating our system was preparing some of our young people for the world that they would have to live in. I mentioned that the school system had always tried to "weed out" those it thought did not belong. I, and as it turned out, another participant in the conversation had both experienced the aggressive streaming of our school systems when we were younger. I, for example, was encouraged to leave school in grade nine as I was deemed "too stupid" to go to university.

In this month's Walrus (I am behind in my reading), there is an article about those students who are deemed to be "gifted" and therefore get to attend different classes and sometime even schools that cater to students who have the capacity to excel. The article suggests that students from middle and upper class white families are over represented in those enriched classes; that those students have an unfair advantage in getting into those classes.

My initial reaction to the article especially after my conversation on Sunday, was what else is new? Of course the system is discrimatory. School have always been a defender of and an advocate for the class system. There is no reason think that things will change anytime soon. The Walrus article in part seems to argue that we need to ensure that all students, regardless of their background, ethnicity or who their parents have the right to access such individualized and exceptional programming. The article does go on to point out that if more students leave the general classroom to participate in the gifted classes, then system will be even more dysfunctional (my words not the authors).

In that strange fashion that my brain functions.... the conversation from years ago, the one on Sunday and the Walrus article all coalesced into an almost seamless discussion within my mind. I am in favour of ensuring that children who have an exceptional talent in any area, are given the opportunity to develop that skill. I accept that it is incredibly difficult to teach a range of students in one classroom where some of the students are highly motivated and others are either bored or disinterested in the subject matter. It should surprise no one that in a classroom of 30 plus students there will be a wide range of interests and capacity to learn at any one time. If there is a strength to our democratic educational system it is our capacity to be encourage individuals to be different.

It struck me however, similar to my discussion with my friend, the proponent of unions, who argued that we need to raise everyone up to the highest level of pay and benefits, we should not be taking students out of the classroom to give them extra learning opportunities, but rather we need to find ways to raising everyone's educational experiences within that classroom. That the task is not to ensure that that we reduce all the classrooms to the lowest common denominator of educational expectations but rather that we raise it up to the highest level for everyone. To create a system that says all students are equal but some need (read deserve) more than others is just to perpetuate a class system.

We should be able, with all of our resources and skills, to develop a system that supports all students without leaving some behind.

Does the World Change Tomorrow? (part two)

If I were a diehard advocate of the inherent right to smoke or ingest any part of the cannabis plant, today I suspect, would feel somewhat anticlimactic. Yes, someone over the age of 18 is now allowed, in Canada, to be in possession of or smoke cannabis in public. Except of course if you live in BC. One is legally allowed to smoke in my fair province - but with the exception of one store in one small city - there is no where to buy the stuff unless you do it online. In other words if I had wanted to smoke up today - the only way that I could have done so would be to go to a private, illegal dealer. Other provinces appear to be better organized and access is easier, but it is somewhat ironic that the province that is best known for the quality and quantity of its marijuana has almost none available legally.

As mentioned in the previous blog, the reasoning as to why we needed to legalize marijuana may have not have been based in scientific reasoning or on an over whelming body of medical evidence. However, regardless of the logic why the use of cannabis has been made legal, it is clear that there will be winners and losers. The winners are those corporations who had enough sufficient capital to build large growing, and processing plants and the capacity to work their way through the complex procedures to get government approval. Those large corporations will make millions of dollars, successfully gobbling up small companies that cannot compete. Those corporate entities will fairly quickly dominate the market the way a few food store or drug store chains control their markets.

The losers are all of those small, illegal growers who may have lost most of their best customers. Not only will those growers be affected but all of the hydroponic stores, the sellers of topsoil and of course various hydro facilities will lose a portion of their income. Perhaps even more importantly, we may lose a portion of our vegetable producing greenhouses. Clearly producing four crops a year of cannabis is far more profitable than producing celery.

The next few years will be interesting (and rewarding) for some lawyers as the courts sort out what impairment means for those who ingest cannabis. There will be countless studies, some reporting diametrically opposite findings in terms of the harm or benefits. Maybe if we are lucky, more researchers will , using reliable research methods, examine whether or not the drug is medically beneficial consistently.

But for most Canadians not much else will change. We are not all bound for hell in a hand cart nor are we about to enter a new enlightened age.

Does the World Change Tomorrow? (part one)

Given the amount of space and time allocated to the fact that marijuana will be now legal to use starting tomorrow, one would think that something fundamental has changed in terms of who smokes pot and when. It is almost as if people believe that there will be an explosion of new users. While the paranoia that users in central Canada have lived with (as opposed to those on the west coast) will no longer exist, I suspect that those who smoked pot in the last week will continue to do so and those who did not, won't. Once people get over the urge to smoke in public because they can, the only thing that will change is how one buys it and who get rich selling it. While I think that the decriminalization of personal use cannabis is long overdue, I can't help but feel that it has all been a bit of a con; that the public have been manipulated once again.

I find it surprising the number of groups/agencies/communities who have said that they are not ready, that they need more time to prepare. Really? Canadians have known since the Liberals were elected three years ago that this was going to happen. Everyone has had more than enough time to figure out how they want to deal with it. I am unclear as to why people are all of a sudden confused or concerned.


For example, surely the Canadian armed forces have had sufficient time to decide what is acceptable or unacceptable behaviour. While some of the effects of alcohol are different than marijuana, one has to hope that people who are either given guns or are using very expensive machinery are not allowed to smoke up during their coffee breaks. If they are not allowed to have a beer then why would they expect to be allowed to inhale a joint? No matter how much we would all like our work places to be more relaxed, in some cases I want them alert and able to respond without hesitation. I really don't want the pilot of my Air Canada plane to be even a little bit stoned.


I suspect that part of the confusion, the sense of permissiveness or the sense that employers have limited control in terms of who smokes or when is the responsibility/fault of doctors. Because there is very little clear research as to the effectiveness of cannabis on a wide range of conditions, doctors have written prescriptions based on anecdotal evidence that it did some good for at least one person, or at the very least, it no harm. Because of the broad cultural acceptance of cannabis as a medically useful substance , it has become impossible for any employer to ban a substance that the doctor says someone must take.


It is not clear how or why this public perception has developed. While all of those small stores that have been popping up claiming that they are providing a medical service - Statistics Canada (https://www.statista.com/statistics/603356/canadian-medical-marijuana-clients-registered-by-quarter/) reports that in April-July 2017 (the last quarter statistics are available) there were less than a quarter of a million registered users. Clearly not everyone who uses the numerous store front operations has a legitimate prescription - in spite of what those stores say.


There will not be an explosion of new pot smokers. In the short term it may look that way because people will take some delight in smoking up in public. There will be in the upcoming months - arrests and then the appeals over driving while stoned, there will be charter challenges as people argue that they have the right to get stoned wherever. This time in two years - we will all think we were silly to spend so much time talking about it.