The business innovation this year is companies that handle returned products for the big retailers and manufacturers who originally sold the no-good-for-nothing junk. The original retailers pay a fee to “repackaging companies” that collect returned goods and resell them on e-bay or overseas in third world countries where slightly used or damaged crap is A-OK.

So now we have to think twice about returning that gift purchased at Sears. The company may never know it was sent back, and some poor soul on the other side of the world is going to buy the thing you already found faulty. Plus, there is now a whole lot more shipping added to the shipping already involved in the production and retailing of the product, making its ecological footprint that much bigger. Double plus, if the thing doesn’t sell even in Mozambique, guess whose dump it ends up in? Not jewel-by-the-sea Vancouver’s, where the useless trinket was initially advertised and sold.

Where are the leaders of the majority?

The Republic, your good news newspaper, is delighted to report changed public attitudes on important issues. A poll of 3,000 Canadians conducted by Innovative Research Group, and reported in the Vancouver Sun earlier this week, found two-thirds of respondents saying illicit drug addiction and abuse ought to be treated as medical problems requiring prevention and treatment, not legal problems requiring punishment and deterrence.

Then, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Conference Board of Canada jointly issued a statement saying City administrations, relied upon to be first responders in any big emergencies, do not receive the funding required to play this role from the federal and provincial governments which collect all taxes save property taxes, and keep 92% of it.

These positive signs were followed by release of a poll commissioned by Mayor Sam Sullivan and conducted by Justason Market Intelligence which found that homelessness and affordable housing together are regarded as the top priority for the City to tackle for 42% of respondents in Vancouver. Crime, beggars, squeegee kids, and Olympics preparations, combined, are the top priority for only 14% of respondents. When asked what the most important impact of the Olympics should be, 55% said homelessness and programs to help the poor were at the top of their list, while only 17% said recreation facilities were, and 11% said “showing off the city” was the top legacy.

This is all very good news and it shows, as far as polls can, where the mind of the average Vancouverite is. So if that’s who we are, where is the people’s representative in public office who mirrors these positions? Such a representative would speak out strongly in favour of legalizing currently illicit drugs and funding safe-injection sites and other treatment centres, would work hard to prepare the city for looming emergencies like climate change and much more expensive gasoline when peak oil hits, would be actively engaged in creating non-market housing, not just studying the problem to death, and might do so by diverting some of the ballooning police budget to it, and would knock it off with the “putting-the-city-on-the-map” nonsense, and cease using the words “Olympic legacy” when discussing that approaching celebration of individualism.

Even the lefties back off from hitting on all those points out loud. Yet if anyone did, they wouldn’t be loose cannons firing from the fringes at all, they’d in fact be expressing only the most average mind of only the most average Vancouverite.

Jimmy Carter opens up new space

One of the positive results of a timely book is sometimes not so much what it says, but what it opens up by way of new space for publicly accepted discussion. Take former US president Jimmy Carter’s new book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.

For sure, the book, from the title onward, says a lot. But have a look also at the discussion that flows online following CBC Washington correspondent Henry Champs’ review of Carter’s book (at cbc.ca). One Middle East topic that doesn’t get much light in the mainstream press or in polite social conversation is the rough treatment of innocent Palestinian families at the hands of very powerful Israeli policy-makers. The Globe and Mail is reporting that one likely reason Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper flatly refuses to release the report on the Middle East prepared by then-Liberal and now-Conservative MP Wajid Khan is that Khan was shocked by what he’d seen on his trip to Palestine, and his report turns out to have drawn conclusions opposite to Conservative policy.

Generally, people in public roles are reluctant to speak about Israeli treatment of Palestinians for fear of being publicly branded as anti-Semites. So when someone of the stature of Jimmy Carter comes along and releases a book that is about nothing else but Israeli treatment of Palestinians, it suddenly becomes safe, or at least safer, for public figures and ordinary citizens alike to speak rationally about the issue, freed from fear of being branded with some damaging epithet.

Following Champs’ online review, there are 59 comments gathered over only a few days. At least 90% favour Carter’s view, with many commentators declaring what a relief it is to finally see someone with stature say what many think, but only privately.

Bravo Jimmy Carter, yet one more time in what is by far the most illustrious post-presidency career in American history.

The Taliban served Canada’s stated goals

If it’s true, as almost all observers now agree, that opium farming and the raft of related consequences it brings makes it the single biggest threat to the future peace and stability, not to mention the prosperity, of Afghanistan, then no Canadian policy can afford to not take another look at the maligned Taliban rulers the US expelled in November 2001.

A UN study in 2000 concluded that the Taliban, surprising even their most vehement critics, had indeed eradicated opium farming from the 90% of the country they controlled as they promised they would, leaving it grown only in the 10% controlled by the Northern Alliance, the remnants of the anti-Soviet warlords and Mujahadin who expelled the Russians—and the inheritors of the country in 2001.

Opium farming and the health problems, the corruption, and the crime it brings was also seen by the new Taliban rulers in 1996 as the biggest problem facing the nation, just as Canadian observers like Peter Goodspeed do now, writing in the National Post in a large three-part series of articles.

The second biggest problem the Taliban noted was highway banditry. By all accounts, the Taliban government had completely wiped out that black economy as well, and for the first time in a generation, Turkish and Pakistani truckers could carry goods through Afghanistan’s critical passes without fear of being robbed or murdered. That is, again, no longer the case today, fatally hobbling the development of the country’s economy.

Though few observers dispute that the Taliban effectively removed highway banditry and opium farming, fewer still bother to point it out, leaving the casual reader to assume both activities flowed uninterrupted from before war with the Soviets to today’s war with Canadians and NATO. “Five years after the fall of the Taliban,” Goodspeed’s article begins, “Afghanistan remains hooked on opium.”

If banditry and opium are obviously the biggest problems, and burkas and schools for girls are at best laudable goals for a longer-term future, then why are Canadian forces fighting against the only group who solved both of the biggest problems, and helping to prop up the group—the Northern Alliance warlords who are now the Afghan government—who have historically ruthlessly fed off banditry and opium?

You decide how much it's worth to you: