CFS Skills

This past weekend I was able to attend the CFS Skills workshops put on every year to enable directors on various college and university boards to become better suited to do their jobs. Overall it was a good experience in which I learned some valuable things and was able to meet with some very interesting people from all over BC. I will do an overview of the weekend with my thoughts on each of the events.

Day 1

The day started surprisingly late being that is was a Saturday. It seemed to me that the day should have started early on Saturday and then cut out the Monday so that the conference would only go over two days.

It started out with an hour long ice breaker session, which I felt was largely a waste of time with such a large group. This could have been cut out all together.

The only actual workshop of the day was about the rights and responsibilities of boards and directors. It was fairly dull, but there was some essential and basic information. Not everything useful can be fun and exciting I guess.

The day ended with a karaoke night at Felicita's. I found this to be the more fun of the two nights by far, and would advocate that this be the only night Felicita's is opened for this event in the future.

Day 2

This day felt very long. Most people were very tired from the night before and from getting up early to watch the soccer game, and it was a grind for everyone to get through it. It wasn't helped by the quality of the workshops. They were mostly quite mediocre. I'll go through them all one-by-one:

Who's Who: This one was both boring and not incredibly important in my mind. I could have definitely done without.

Public Speaking: This workshop was ok. There were a few good points. I can definitely see how someone who didn't have experience with public speaking could have taken a lot out of this workshop.

Contracts: Again, this was ok. There was some interesting info and it was probably as interesting as could be being that the topic was contracts.

Finances: This workshop could have been much better. It was essentially a platform to show all the crazy things that have been done in the past, but it didn't connect that to good practices that we should be doing. If that connection were to be made in the future, this would be a worthwhile workshop.

Lobbying: This was my favorite workshop of the day. There was some useful information about who and how to lobby.

Campaigns: Unfortunately i was so tired by this point that I don't think I can comment on this workshop one way or another. I was unable to retain any of the information, so it may or may not have been very good.

The day ended with a "dance party" at Felicita's in which I'm sure Felictia's did not do very well, I was so tired I went home early.

Day 3

This day was pretty much the opposite of the previous day. I liked most of the workshops on this day and i felt I was able to gain the more useful info on this day than the other two days combined.

Volunteers: This was a very good workshop that talked about how to recruit and retain volunteers. Definitely useful for anyone in any non-profit organization

Staff: I found this to be pretty generic stuff that I already knew, but there were lots of questions so it seemed that there were people who did get some benefit from this workshop.

Media: This may have been my favorite workshop of the weekend. We learned about developing a media and communications strategy and how to interact with members of the media. From front to back, I found this workshop to be engaging and informative.

Membership engagement: Also a very good workshop. There was some great information on how to engage students in the student society that we can act upon immediately.

Meetings: This was split into two groups, facilitation and participation. I attended the facilitation meeting and got some useful information about how to run smooth meetings. About as interesting as a workshop about Robert's Rules can be.

So that was the Skills weekend from my point of view. If there is anything anyone wants to know about the weekend, feel free to ask.

Rob McDonald

CFS Canada is a group comprised of member locals from Colleges and Universities across Canada. Their purpose is to advocate for student interests and to provide services to member locals such as the skills workshops and the ISIC cards.

The American Dream

I can't take the credit for writing this. It was written by Chris Hedges, on a site called adbusters. I just posted it to give people something to think about while I'm doing the CFS skills workshop this weekend. It is very interesting to read and relate to, being that Canada is kind of like "America Lite". Too bad it doesn't point to joyful times in our future.

The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is Michael Jackson, Britney Spears or John Edwards, enthralls the country … despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class.

The virtues that sustain a nation-state and build community, from honesty to self-sacrifice to transparency to sharing, are ridiculed each night on television as rubes stupid enough to cling to this antiquated behavior are voted off reality shows. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame, cheered on by millions of viewers, elect to “disappear” the unwanted. In the final credits of the reality show America’s Next Top Model, a picture of the woman expelled during the episode vanishes from the group portrait on the screen. Those cast aside become, at least to the television audience, nonpersons. Celebrities that can no longer generate publicity, good or bad, vanish. Life, these shows persistently teach, is a brutal world of unadulterated competition and a constant quest for notoriety and attention.

Our culture of flagrant self-exaltation, hardwired in the American character, permits the humiliation of all those who oppose us. We believe, after all, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have a right to wage war. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Those who fail, those who are deemed ugly, ignorant or poor, should be belittled and mocked. Human beings are used and discarded like Styrofoam boxes that held junk food. And the numbers of superfluous human beings are swelling the unemployment offices, the prisons and the soup kitchens.

It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Michael Jackson, from his phony marriages to the portraits of himself dressed as royalty to his insatiable hunger for new toys to his questionable relationships with young boys, had all these qualities. And this is also the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. It is the nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over truth. And it is why investment bankers blink in confusion when questioned about the morality of the billions in profits they made by selling worthless toxic assets to investors.

We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. It is this perverted ethic that gave us investment houses like Goldman Sachs … that willfully trashed the global economy and stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stock in these corporations for retirement or college. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation. The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.

The tantalizing illusions offered by our consumer culture, however, are vanishing for most citizens as we head toward collapse. The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The jobs we are shedding are not coming back, as the White House economist Lawrence Summers tacitly acknowledges when he talks of a “jobless recovery.” The belief that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the accumulation of vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others is exposed as a fraud. Freedom can no longer be conflated with the free market. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.

America is sinking under trillions in debt it can never repay and stays afloat by frantically selling about $2 billion in Treasury bonds a day to the Chinese. It saw 2.8 million people lose their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8,000 people a day – and stands idle as they are joined by another 2.4 million people this year. It refuses to prosecute the Bush administration for obvious war crimes, including the use of torture, and sees no reason to dismantle Bush’s secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Deficits are pushing individual states to bankruptcy and forcing the closure of everything from schools to parks. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have squandered trillions of dollars, appear endless. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called “near poverty.” One in eight Americans – and one in four children – depend on food stamps to eat. And yet, in the midst of it all, we continue to be a country consumed by happy talk and happy thoughts. We continue to embrace the illusion of inevitable progress, personal success and rising prosperity. Reality is not considered an impediment to desire.

When a culture lives within an illusion it perpetuates a state of permanent infantilism or childishness. As the gap widens between the illusion and reality, as we suddenly grasp that it is our home being foreclosed or our job that is not coming back, we react like children. We scream and yell for a savior, someone who promises us revenge, moral renewal and new glory. It is not a new story. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually, emotionally and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans and will usher America into a new dark age. It was the economic collapse in Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in Tsarist Russia that opened the door for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to loudmouth talk show hosts, whom we naïvely dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. And as in all totalitarian societies, those who do not pay fealty to the illusions imposed by the state become the outcasts, the persecuted.

The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began before the first Gulf War or Ronald Reagan. It began when we shifted, in the words of Harvard historian Charles Maier, from an “empire of production” to an “empire of consumption.” By the end of the Vietnam War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and domestic oil production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a level of consumption as well as an empire we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable thirst for cheap oil. We substituted the illusion of growth and prosperity for real growth and prosperity. The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free-market capitalism and globalization. They have dynamited the very foundations of our society. In the 17^th century these speculators would have been hung. Today they run the government and consume billions in taxpayer subsidies.

As the pressure mounts, as the despair and desperation reach into larger and larger segments of the populace, the mechanisms of corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil unrest and instability. The emergence of the corporate state always means the emergence of the security state. This is why the Bush White House pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. The motive behind these measures is not to fight terrorism or to bolster national security. It is to seize and maintain internal control. It is about controlling us.

And yet, even in the face of catastrophe, mass culture continues to assure us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, by Hollywood or by Christian preachers, is magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debt into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into a cheerful conformity. It turns a nation that wages illegal wars and administers offshore penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the greatest democracy on earth. And it keeps us from fighting back.

Resistance movements will have to look now at the long night of slavery, the decades of oppression in the Soviet Union and the curse of fascism for models. The goal will no longer be the possibility of reforming the system but of protecting truth, civility and culture from mass contamination. It will require the kind of schizophrenic lifestyle that characterizes all totalitarian societies. Our private and public demeanors will often have to stand in stark contrast. Acts of defiance will often be subtle and nuanced. They will be carried out not for short term gain but the assertion of our integrity. Rebellion will have an ultimate if not easily definable purpose. The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world. The goal will become the ability to endure.

adbusters.org is a site dedicated to activism and changing our existing power structures to create a more equitable society the coming century

Rob McDonald

What does Hockey Have to Do With Student Politics?

Nothing that I know of. But being a big hockey fan and Canucks fan ( I have been cheering for the Canucks since I was a 5 year old brat living 5 blocks away from the Pacific Coliseum), I can't help but being really excited that Henrik Sedin won the MVP award this year. This marks the first time a Canucks player has won a major award in the NHL. We were tantalizingly close with Pavel Bure and Markus Naslund, but aside from those spurts, it seemed that we were always left to cheer for mediocrity. Now with a Canuck winning a major award, that feeling seems to be dissipating. It feels like we do have a team worth getting behind, and that they do have a chance to win the Stanley Cup (especially since Chicago has just traded Byfuglian to the Eastern Conference).

It is even more important that Henrik won the Hart (and the Art Ross) this year since Pavel Bure was snubbed from induction to the Hockey Hall of Fame in favour of Dino Ciccarelli, meaning that there is still no player that played a significant portion of their career in Vancouver in the Hall. Henrik Sedin winning MVP this year will change that. As long as he keeps up his normal pace, meaning at least a point a game for the rest of his career, he is almost guaranteed to be in the Hall. There is no player in history that I know of that has won the MVP award and not been inducted into the Hall of Fame once they became eligible. And if Henrik gets into the Hall, it would be very hard to keep Daniel out. Perhaps, when the time comes, they should be inducted as one player, Henrik and Daniel. It would only be fitting.

Rob McDonald

Yahoo Sports is where I tend to get most of my hockey information not because I think it's better than anywhere else, but because I really like their hockey pool structure. I usually am in two or three different yahoo pools a year.

Big Changes Ahead for the UVSS?

A motion was brought forward to the UVSS Board meeting on June 21 to form an ad hoc commitee with the purpose of looking at potential changes to the structure of the UVSS. This is potentially the biggest issue that will come before the board this year, with the possible exception of the CFS referendum issue. The last time the structure of the board was changed was in 1996. The motion was eventually tabled until next meeting to give time gather more information, but it is not too early to talk about the issues here.

In my discussions with various board members, there are three key issues that people want to focus on: Changing the way we elect our board members; Changing the representation on the board to possibly a model that better represents each faculty; and Making more executive directors with more specific responsibilities and less hours. I have heard arguments both for and against each of these propositions and will lay them out here. Before I do, however, I want it to be known that many of these arguments both for and against are not necessarily my own, but of those of people that I have talked to. The purpose of laying them out in this fashion is to, hopefully, create a discussion around these arguments so that some of us can use this discussion to come to a position on these issues.

Changing the Way We Elect Board Members

The argument for this is that we use the antiquated first-past-the-post system which is tailor-made for a two party/slate system and creates tensions between the two sides. This past election was very indicative of these symptoms where it was essentially two slates running against each other and only people from those two slates ended up being elected. And while members of this board have been very civil and so far willing to work with each other, last years board was incredibly divisive down slate lines. The argument is that if the voting system is changed to something like STV or AV, it will reduce those tensions and create a more friendly working environment on the board and allow for a better diversity of voices.

The argument against changing the way we elect our board members is that students really don't know much about the people they are electing, especially for the director at large positions. We already get to vote for 11 people, and asking to rank the votes or do anything more complex than just picking 11 people would be asking too much of the students. How would we rank people from one to eleven if we only know perhaps three of the names and the rest we just are voting by slate? Already it's intimidating looking at the list and having to choose 11 people, asking students for more than this would be unrealistic.

Changing the Board to Become More Faculty Representative.

The argument for this is that some faculties are vastly under-represented on the board while other faculties are vastly over-represented. Our current board is a great example of this. There are no students from the engineering faculty on the board, and only one each from the sciences and commerce faculties. Meanwhile, the board is made up of mostly people from the social sciences faculty, with the majority of those being political science students. I will outline the potential solutions to this problem, then I will follow up with an argument against why any changes at all are needed.

Solution #1:

Make it so the board has to have the same proportionate makeup as students make up the faculties at UVic. To clarify, if UVic is made up of 25% science students, 25% engineering students, 25% social science students, and 25% humanities students (sorry to any faculties I left out), then the board should be made up of the same proportions. This would give each faculty their proportionate voice on the board.

Solution #2:

Make it so the board has at least one representative from each faculty. This way each faculty would have UVSS representation, while allowing for people that come from more competitive faculties to have less diminished chance of getting elected than under the first solution.

Solution #3:

Assign a faculty to each board member. That board member would then consult with their assigned faculty to let them know what is going on at the board level and listen to concerns of the faculty to bring them back to the board.

The arguments against solutions #1 and #2 are almost the same. The first argument is that by making it so all faculties have to be represented, the elections would be much less competitive in some faculties, while in other faculties there could be many people who really want to be on the board but can't get elected due to being in a very competitive faculty. This could lead to the people that got onto the board easily not taking their job as seriously and not doing as good of a job as currently. This issue is especially compounded in solution #1.

Another argument is where do you stop? Some faculties are under-represented, so you make sure they're represented. But people who live in University residence are also under-represented, with maybe one on the current board. International students are also under-represented, again with maybe one on the current board. What about students who play World of Warcraft? Do they have adequate representation? The point is there is some group that will always be without automatic representation. Under the current system, there is nothing stopping someone that is really interested in getting their viewpoint represented from running in elections and getting on the board. It is better to have people who really want to be on the board get elected than to mandate people to be on it that don't necessarily have an interest in being there.

The third argument against solutions #1 and #2 is an extension of the previous argument. There is a reason that there are a lot of political science students on the board. The board of directors and the elections are very political, and it is natural that political science students would be the most interested in that. By limiting the participation of that faculty in running for director positions, we would be limiting the opportunity of those who are arguably the most interested in doing those jobs from being able to run for them.

As for solution #3, I just thought it up as I was writing this, so i haven't really thought about the arguments against it yet, though I'm sure others will be able to do that for me. The strength I see in it is it doesn't create limits on who can get elected to the board, but it does make sure that each faculty does have a voice on the board.

Maybe an argument against it would be that if you are going to have someone act as a representative for a faculty, why not have that person be a member of that faculty?

A counter-argument to this would be that just because someone is a member of a faculty, doesn't mean they actually consult with that faculty to find out the views of other people within their faculty. By creating an appointed representative for a faculty that is mandated to consult with their appointed faculty, you are ensuring that the representative is actually hearing about the concerns of the faculty they are assigned to represent.

Creating More Executive Positions With More Specific Mandates and Less Hours

The argument for this is currently, the jobs for each of the executives is too broad, and there is too much work for each one of them to be able to do a really good job. By creating more positions it would allow the executives to be more focused in what they have to do and relieve some of the stress associated with be overburdened by too many things. I'm afraid I can't explain it better than this, and I hope someone else can do a better job than I can here.

The argument against this is it will cost more. Hours would be reduced, but I wouldn't anticipate them being reduced enough to financially counter-balance the addition of new positions. The solution wouldn't make sense if this were the case, as there would be the same amount of work to do in the same amount of hours as currently, just more people doing it. Another issue would be, where do you put the new executives? There is only so much office space and new offices would have to found for each new executive.


So this is all I've got. I have laid out all of the issues that I know of, and given the arguments on both sides of the issue to the best of my ability. However, I am not one of the people that brought any of these issues forward, so my hope that people who done much more thinking on them than I have can elaborate on the issues here and even let us know if there are any other issues that may be on the agenda, and hopefully we can get a good discussion going on this!

Rob McDonald

Fair Vote Canada: This site is purposed with trying to change the voting system in Canada to better reflect the population. It educates people on the different voting systems and the benefits of more proportional representation. The specific page I have linked to outlines the different voting systems that may be proposed to change the way we elect our board.

BP Oil Spill, and California's Debt Crisis... Connected?

By now, everyone knows about the catastrophic oil spill in the US Gulf Coast. Labeled the worst environmental disaster in US history, the amount of oil that has already entered the environment is unknown, nor is it known how long it will take to stop the flow of oil into the ocean. Another unknown is how far-reaching the effects are going to be. I have read two great articles about the oil spill that go past the actual oil spill itself and look at more in depth issues the spill reveals. They can be found here and here. For the purposes of this post, I will be focusing on the first of the two articles.

Today, I also read an article in the Globe and Mail talking about California's debt crisis. This is a story I've been following for the past couple years and it looks like it's finally coming to a head. In short, California is going bankrupt, and it might take a bailout on the same scale as the big bank bailouts we have seen in the past couple years to keep the state's essential services operating. This is bad news for the US and the rest of the world, which is still reeling from the previous financial crisis in the US, and is wary that the financial crisis in Greece will create global havoc.

So, other than the far reaching impacts of both, what do these two issues have in common? More than what you might think. To follow my train of thought, we must look at pieces of each of the articles I have linked to to go deeper into each of these issues.

The first linked article states that "while the BP Spill is the biggest single oil spill we here in America have experienced, in terms of overall impact, it's just a drop in our pollution bucket... Even in terms of oil spilled in North America, this disaster is small compared to business as usual: more than 90% of all the oil spilled in North America comes from oil leaked from cars (or poured down drains) finding its way to the sea". Why has the general public not heard about this? Why are people so outraged over the BP spill, yet not the everyday pollution which is far worse?

There are two answers to this question. The first is that the BP spill is very visible, very sudden, and effect a specific geographical region and specific people. It is very easy to get angry when you can see the damage being done and who and what it damages in a very short time-frame. The other reason is very similar. There is only one very visible bad guy. It is BP that was in charge of the rig that collapsed which caused the oil spill. It was their lax safety practices that led to the disaster. It is easy to angrily point our fingers at BP and says "You did this!" However, you do we point our fingers at for the everyday pollution? Who is most affected? What exactly is the damage to the environment and where is it? These questions aren't as easily answered. We are all part of the society that is responsible for this pollution. Does this mean we should be pointing our fingers back at ourselves? That we should all abandon our jobs and our cars and live in little homesteads in the woods? Not so fast, the worldchanging article adresses this point:

"In failing to see that the BP Spill is a symptom, we also make it easy to blame the wrong people for the failures of the systems we now use. I've read dozens of pieces parroting the opinion that the BP Spill is all of our faults; that because we all use oil, we've all been responsible for making this happen. That's just stupid. Leaving aside entirely the fact that this particular spill itself appears to be the result of unethical and possibly criminal leadership within BP, the simple fact is that we continue to use so much oil largely because Big Oil, the car companies, the road-building lobby and sprawl developers have engaged in one of the largest sustained political efforts in history to keep us using as much oil as possible by blocking climate legislation and gas taxes, fighting smart growth laws and new public transportation investments, stalling higher mileage standards in new cars, channeling trillions of dollars into new roads and auto infrastructure, gutting water- and air-quality laws, even (arguably) getting a former oil man (George W.) elected, which resulted in a war for oil and general atmosphere of climate denialism. We burn oil in such astonishing quantities because those who profit from selling and using oil have all but run the American political system for the last ten years, and exerted decades of dominant influence before that.

In that light, our personal behaviors are essentially meaningless, especially if they aren't part of a larger effort to identify ways of changing our cities, transportation, agriculture and energy systems to function much more sustainably. If we want to change our impacts, we need to change our systems, on a scope we almost never talk about, stretching through essentially every aspect of our society."

Based on the arguments given in the article, the problem is that big business has too much influence on government decision making. This is a big problem, but is that the extent of the problem? If we just don't allow big business to tell government what to do, will everything be alright? Can we even do this? To answer these questions it is useful to look at the California debt crisis.

The reason California is in the precarious situation it's in is because people's fight against many forms of taxation since the 1970's. It costs more and more to provide services for a growing population, but the tax revenue hasn't grown at the same rate. "Americans have been “brainwashed” into believing they pay a lot of taxes ... In fact, they are among the least-taxed people in the Western World, particularly if they’re wealthy" states the Globe and Mail article. California residents want the services, but they are not willing to pay for them.

This situation reveals two issues. The first is that the wealthy aren't carrying their weight in paying taxes. This points to the theory that the wealthy and big businesses have too much influence on government being true. But what the previous statement really points to is a bigger underlying problem. People do not want to sacrifice their own income and comforts to allows government to provide all the services that they want to see government provide. The general public is not seeing the bigger picture. Most people focus on their own economic situation, and trying to get ahead in any way they can. The motto of today's China sums it up the best: "It is glorious to get rich."

The real problem at the base of each of these issues can be derived from China's new favorite pastime. We are a society that is focused almost exclusively on economic progress, and we need to change our values... fast. Until we change our fundamental values, any move to separate business from government won't gain any traction, because our societal values as they are right now, are exactly the same values of big business.

If we valued a sustainable healthy environment to live in, BP wouldn't have been allowed to skimp on safety precautions. We probably wouldn't have developed a society based on polluting technologies in the first place. And the only way we are going to move our society away from these polluting technologies is if our society as a whole changes what we value most away from the economy.

The same can be said for the California debt crisis. If people changed there values from a me first financial perspective, to a perspective that values health, education and community support services instead, the state would have much less resistance to the taxes needed to pay for these things.

Both of these crises are the fault of society at large. By places our values in a me first economic system, we are setting ourselves up for many such catastrophes. We need to look into our collective mirror and ask ourselves what we really value. This includes each individual and business, but especially the media and government. Because if we don't change our societal values quickly, we might lose all those things that really are more important than our pocket books, like our natural environments, our schools and our health care systems.

Rob McDonald

Worldchanging.com is a nonprofit media organization that covers the world’s most innovative solutions to the planet’s problems, and inspires readers around the world with stories of new tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future.

Introducing...

So I'm starting a blog. It feels weird thinking that whatever I have to say here is important or interesting enough that people would want to check back on it and read it regularly. I guess that is the challenge I have to live up to.

The reason I felt the need to start this blog is because of discussions with friends in the UVSS Board of Directors, and the sentiment that our perspectives are not being well represented to the student body, but I have decided that I wanted to go beyond that. The focus of my blog will include UVSS issues and student issues in general, but it will also address larger environmental and political issues, as well as other random things that I find interesting.

I will also post a link to a cool and/or interesting site each time I post. Today's site is uvss.ca. This site is your place to find all the info you need about the UVic Student Society and what it does for you. Hopefully this year we can drive more traffic to the site so that students can become more involved with the society.

With these considerations in mind I bring you the thoughts of Rob McDonald. My goal is provide a thoughtful viewpoint to issues that are of concern to me and that I feel are of concern to many others. I will try to update as often as possible, hopefully every day or two. In order to make this work, however, I need help from everyone that reads this. Please offer comments, suggestions, encouragement or criticism. Let me know that this is engaging you in one way or another, and I will do my best to keep you engaged, and hopefully we can all better understand each other in the process. Most of all, please spread the word about this to anyone you think will be interested.

Rob McDonald.