Chris Loblaw, Author

We’ve all enjoyed a hearty dose of doom over the last few years, haven’t we? It’s been so easy to see the possible calamities (both natural and manufactured by humanity’s poor decisions) and fall to the ground with hopelessness. Wildfires! Pandemics! Culture war strife! Actual war! Sinking fertility rates! Rising global temperatures! DOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.

Did you notice how tiring it is to be alarmed constantly? To be on the edge of panic every waking moment, scanning the internet for news on the newest thing to be terrified of? It is exhausting. Luckily, my innate contrarianism has offered me a path to salvation: techno-optimism!

Techno-optimism is the belief that humanity will find technological ways of rising to the challenges it faces. Before I go any further, I want to make it very clear that I do not invest technology with some sort of quasi-religious infallibility. Anything made by humans can be horrifying and disastrous, either by intent or by accident. But on balance, humanity stumbles forward with each tech step, not backwards. We might unleash some kind of hell that is impossible to recover from, sure, but odds are we can fix any mess we’ve made. Specifically: climate change and fertility rates.

Climate, she’s a changing. It’s getting warmer, and inconsistently varying from regular weather patterns. The bad news is that the effects we see now are the result of pollution from 10 years ago (give or take) so the next 10 years are already baked in. It does not matter if we dropped to zero emissions tomorrow, riding around on our wooden bicycles and eating only the limited food grown within walking distance of your house. But what does matter is how we adapt to the changes. Better waterway controls to reduce flooding. Aggressive building intensification in urban areas, with strict boundaries protecting woodland and farmland. And technology! Renewable energy production is skyrocketing, most notably in the places where its vital (China and the U.S.) Battery tech is improving dramatically, making full solar/wind more possible, and making a full shift to electric vehicles likely to happen at an accelerated pace. The final piece is carbon capture, and if that can get fully implemented, we’ll be a much better position.

As for dropping fertility rates (how’s that for a jarring change of topic?): Cloning and/or genetic engineering will give us the ability to choose our population growth rate. Will this open up a Pandora’s box of moral, ethical and legal issues? Oh boy will it. But the alternative solutions are worse. Do nothing and have a world full of old people with no one to care for them, or mandated babymaking which is never as fun as people assume it will be.

And what would a tech post be without mention of our newest techno-darling, AI? AI has a lot of potential, some good, some bad, and a whole lot of unknown effects. I think AI can be a very helpful tool, but I would not trust it for anything that needs to be more than 80% accurate. You still need a human to review the AI output for signs of it being completely and utterly wrong. As an example, I can see AI helping reduce the bloated costs involved in video game production. The big “AAA” games now take half a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to get made. If AI can reduce the time and cost, that’s great. The danger is that game studios will use AI on the creative elements of game design and creation, which will be a net loss for us.

So what we need from our political leadership is facilitation. A buffet of cheap solar power is useless if there aren’t enough transmission lines to get the power to where its needed, when its needed. A city that refuses to build apartment buildings taller than 12 storeys because people don’t like tall things is a city that is dedicated to emission-intensive sprawl. Speed up the process to convert unused office space to rental apartments, change zoning rules to make it easier to build dense, multiuse neighbourhoods. Make sure our arterial roadways are focused on efficiently allowing the highest volume of people to travel across the city, by car or by mass transit, and designate secondary streets as lower speed networks.

Ah, the municipal campaign season is nearing its end. And soon, the flock of sign grouses will return to their roosts and hibernate until the next campaign begins. You can identify the sign grouse by their grumbling complaints about the existence of campaign signs. To them, evidently, there is no greater blight on the urban landscape than colourful rectangles by the roadside. And some of those rectangles have pictures on them! THE HORROR!

I’ve even heard politicos themselves mutter their displeasure at signs, hoping that someday they will be banned completely. They say signs are expensive, installing them is time and labour-intensive, and sign clutter is messy. All true. But campaign signs are also important to a healthy democracy for 3 reasons: candidate legitimacy, candidate name recognition, and election awareness.

Candidate Legitimacy

Campaign signs tell the public several important facts about your campaign. They demonstrate that you have the resources (people and money) to purchase and install signs across the area that you’re running in. They demonstrate that you have an ability to follow the rules ( or reveal that you can’t). A well-designed sign shows the voters that you are a serious candidate who will act professionally and understands political norms. And overall, they show that you have a functioning campaign.

Name Recognition

I know you want to believe that the average voter spends time researching the candidates, examining their positions, and making an informed decision, but I have to burst your bubble. Political weirdos like me do that. Most people don’t. The average person spends about 5 minutes thinking about any given election, and that five minutes takes place during their walk to the voting booth. The only political name they have been exposed to in the period between elections is the incumbent, and a lot of voters will choose the name that sounds the most familiar. Campaign signs are the only opportunity the other candidates have to shout their name at the electorate and build name recognition with those voters. So if you like making it even easier for an incumbent to get re-elected, ban campaign signs.

Election Awareness

Those voters I mentioned above, who only spend 5 minutes of political thought per election? They may not even notice that an election is happening. Politics has so little meaning to their day to day life that they can ignore the entire election without being inconvenienced. But each campaign sign they see as they drive to work is an unavoidable reminder that an election is indeed taking place, and they should probably get off their ass and vote. My suspicion is that is really the reason why people get irrationally angry at colourful rectangles: they hate being nagged about their civic responsibility.

OF COURSE ROAD SAFETY IS IMPORTANT

To head off one of the common anti-sign complaints, let me clarify: There is a legitimate need for a sign by-law that prevents campaign signs from being placed in a location that interferes with road safety. I’m not arguing against that part of the sign by-laws. Good god, why would anyone? But I am arguing against the elements of the by-law that are driven exclusively by esthetics and feelings. Your feelings are your business, not the governments.

Oh, and the 48 hour deadline to takedown all your campaign signs is arbitrary and malicious. It’s a petty deadline meant to discourage campaigns from putting up signs in the first place.

As I get older, I learn that the old cliché rules of social etiquette are actually pretty valid. The first one I came to accept is “don’t discuss religion or politics in polite company”. (I’ll go into why that’s a good rule in a later post.)

And with the passing of Queen Elizabeth II last week, I realized there’s another important one: “Don’t speak ill of the dead”. For the purpose of this argument, I’m going to limit this rule to the time period between the death of the individual and their funeral. There’s a practical reason for this rule, and a more important spiritual reason.

Practically, it’s not a wise idea to antagonize people dealing with their grief. Grief puts the human mind in a perilously fragile emotional state. Dealing with grief is the most difficult situation humans find themselves in, and the overwhelming emotions can easily be diverted to easier to manage but more dangerous emotions like rage. It’s the whole “7 stages of grief” business. So picking a fight with the bereaved is unproductive. It makes them your enemy while doing nothing to advance your cause.

But more importantly, you need to have compassion. It’s a basic currency of human decency that you spend on others, in hopes that they will do the same when grief comes for you. Because grief comes for us all, king and servant, pop star and shopkeeper alike.

Now you may be filled with the growing need to rebut my argument with a ‘whatabout’ statement. I’m going to get you to pause for a moment and ask yourself this: why are you so determined to withhold some basic human decency? Any issue, any historical grievance you want to draw attention to will still be there after the funeral. No amount of anger right now will erase any of the past. But in refusing to hold a respectful silence for a few short days, you’re choosing to inflict hurt on people who are already wounded from the loss of a loved one. You do remember that, right? That in addition to being a ceremonial head of state, Elizabeth was a mother, and grandmother, and great grandmother. Let them have their sorrow.

I know it seems unfair that you have to show respect for someone who you think is responsible or representative of great evils inflicted on others. Sorry, but’s that the only way this works. Everybody gets space to grieve. Even the worst person in the world (to you) is loved by someone somewhere. It’s easy to show compassion and grace to people you’re sympathetic to. Compassion for your enemies is much, much harder.