Price rises and eating local

This report perplexes me: CanGro's shock waves.

The doors of the country's last fruit canning plant [in St. Davids, Ontario] closed yesterday with a soft thud that echoes beyond Niagara. It was a pragmatic decision on the part of CanGro, owned by American private equity firms Sun Capital and EG Capital Group.

Quite simply, the products can be made cheaper elsewhere.

Many union reps, growers, economists and even consumers reluctantly acknowledge the canned products put out by the plant, Del Monte fruit cocktails and the like, were approaching their best-before date. Consumption of canned goods is near stagnant (about 2 per cent growth a year), fruit production costs (particularly labour) are escalating, and the plant, while it made money, was not considered efficient in global terms.

This closure strikes me as premature and short-sighted. The past half a year has seen fuel prices rise to new levels. As fuel prices rise, so, for obvious reasons, do those of products transported from long distances. Over the past two decades or more, we North Americans have become accustomed to finding reasonably-priced fresh fruit and vegetables in our supermarket's produce bins all year round. During the winter months we are privileged to eat peaches and nectarines imported from Chile and South Africa, whereas in my childhood and youth, these were available only certain times of the year. The rest of the time we were compelled to eat them canned or frozen.

Given the lower fuel costs of the 1980s and '90s, it is not surprising that demand for canned goods fell. Who would not prefer fresh over canned produce? Yet it may be that this period represented a spell of exceptionally fair economic weather that could not last. As fuel costs raise the prices of everything else, the selling of canned fruits may soon become more profitable than it has been in decades. Eating locally, which is being touted by many, may well become necessary for virtually everyone with limited means. If Niagara orchards have been uprooted and if all the fruit-canning plants have been closed, this could mean that even canned fruit will be scarce, thus driving up its price for all of us.

Couldn't the owners of the St. Davids plant have held out a little longer? They might have been able to turn a tidy profit while maintaining 150 jobs.

America's future

Fareed Zakaria writes for Foreign Affairs: The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest. One paragraph stands out for me:

Learning from the rest is no longer a matter of morality or politics. Increasingly, it is about competitiveness. Consider the automobile industry. For more than a century after 1894, most of the cars manufactured in North America were made in Michigan. Since 2004, Michigan has been replaced by Ontario, Canada. The reason is simple: health care. In the United States, car manufacturers have to pay $6,500 in medical and insurance costs for every worker. If they move a plant to Canada, which has a government-run health-care system, the cost to them is around $800 per worker. This is not necessarily an advertisement for the Canadian health-care system, but it does make clear that the costs of the U.S. health-care system have risen to a point where there is a significant competitive disadvantage to hiring American workers. Jobs are going not to low-wage countries but to places where well-trained and educated workers can be found: it is smart benefits, not low wages, that employers are looking for.

A plurality of laws, II

My friend Jonathan Chaplin himself has now weighed in on Rowan Williams' address in an analysis very much worth reading and pondering: Law, Faith and Freedom: a critical appreciation of Archbishop Williams’s lecture. According to Chaplin,

granting ‘legal accommodations’ like this to religious convictions is not at all a breach of the mantra, invoked frequently in responses to the lecture, that there should be ‘one law for all’. That is an affirmation of the principle of equality before the law, and the Archbishop not only affirmed that principle but went further and hinted that it actually had religious origins. Granting legal accommodations to religious conviction is not a departure from the principle of equality before the law, but rather a specification of how it might apply to a diverse citizenry with intensely-held religious loyalties. Legal equality has never meant that every individual must be treated in identical ways by every legal rule, but rather that whatever laws exist should apply to all whom they intend to regulate and that there should be no arbitrary discrimination in the application of the law. The Archbishop himself alludes to this theme in proposing that the point of a regime of universal rights is to ‘underpin’ not to ‘supersede’ our plural identities.

Note further that the principle of equality before the law is not at all compromised by recognising the independent jurisdictions (i.e. spheres of authority) of non-governmental institutions, such as churches, universities, trades unions, etc. Each of these institutions possesses a sphere of internal ‘law-making’ (in the case of bodies like universities and trades unions this is called ‘rule-making’) which is not within the purview of the state. It is an essential feature of a free society that there should be many such self-governing institutions able to resist the tendency of states to exceed their mandate. Of course, the state may and does regulate these institutions where necessary in the public interest but the onus is (or should be) on the state to justify its interventions and not on the institutions themselves to justify their freedom to the state. This is a quite different sense of ‘legal pluralism’ to that mentioned above, and it is not only consistent with the principle of equality before the law but a necessary prop for it. Andrew Goddard is right to observe in the Archbishop’s lecture an ‘anti-statist pluralist social vision’ – one which I think Christians should strongly endorse.

Mid-February snippets

• It's finally happened: Kosovo Declares Its Independence From Serbia. A lot of people will not be pleased over this, especially ethnic Serbs living in the province, but also a number of European Union members with their own separatist movements.


• Here is very good news indeed: Cyprus vote goes to runoff, Papadopoulos out. Tassos Papadopoulos has obstructed a settlement in the island since attaining the presidency five years ago. I would still prefer Nicos Rolandis in office, but either Kassoulides or Christofias will be an improvement over Papadopoulos.


• This makes little sense to me: 5 Anglican primates to boycott Lambeth. Ten years ago it became evident that there is a small-o orthodox majority in the Anglican communion. Why boycott the next Lambeth Conference where orthodox provinces would otherwise carry the day once again?


• This I can understand more easily, given the current confessional disarray in the Anglican Church of Canada: Five Anglican parishes set to separate from Church. Archbishop Fred Hiltz is, of course, appealing selectively to the Windsor Report, thereby demonstrating, once more, that bishops are quite willing to defy any authority except their own.


• The WRF's Comment runs an interview with a south central Upper Canadian political scientist of minor renown. It might be worth taking a peek at.


• Tomorrow is the new provincial holiday, Family Day, instituted by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty upon being returned to office last autumn. My wife pointed out to me that it just happens to fall on what in the US is called Presidents' Day. Our holidays tend uncannily to coincide with American ones. Or are we simply copy cats?

A plurality of laws

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been under a lot of pressure lately, mostly over his handling of the imminent breakup of the Anglican communion. Most recently, however, he has come under fire for suggesting that the coming of Sharia to the United Kingdom is inevitable. However, the Rev. Dr. Andrew Goddard believes that Rowan Williams' remarks have not only been taken out of context, but reduced to a few controversial sound bytes that do not come close to doing justice to his views: Prudence and Jurisprudence: Reflections on the Archbishop's interview and lecture. Though I have not followed this story closely, I find persuasive Goddard's analysis, in which he even cites my friend and colleague, Jonathan Chaplin, as a "leading evangelical political theorist."

Here in Ontario we had a similar controversy in 2005 when Premier Dalton McGuinty ruled out the use of "faith-based arbitrations," proclaiming that "There will be one law for all Ontarians." Yet this is not an adequate account of the plurality of laws governing our lives in their diverse realms. If a child disobeys her parents, the latter do not call the police in to punish the child under the public law of the state. Rather they themselves mete out an appropriate punishment within the context of the particular norms governing that family itself. Similarly, a faculty member is subject to rules internal to the university, while a church institution is governed by canon law or church order. McGuinty must surely recognize this?

To his credit, Williams appears to understand the reality of multiple and overlapping allegiances in a complex, differentiated society better than many of his compatriots, who are echoing McGuinty's somewhat panicked response of two years ago. I understand, of course, that anything having to do with Islam and Sharia in western societies is a touchy subject these days. Yet the full import of Williams' argument is being lost. Here is Williams:

I think at the moment there's a great deal of confusion about this; a lot of what's been written whether it was about the Catholic church adoptions agencies last year, sometimes what's written about Jewish or Muslim communities; a lot of what's written suggests that the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody; now that principle that there's one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy, but I think it's a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don't have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and the law needs to take some account of that, so an approach to law which simply said, 'There is one law for everybody and that is all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or your allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts'. I think that's a bit of a danger. . . .

It would be a pity if the immense advances in the recognition of human rights led, because of a misconception about legal universality, to a situation where a person was defined primarily as the possessor of a set of abstract liberties and the law's function was accordingly seen as nothing but the securing of those liberties irrespective of the custom and conscience of those groups which concretely compose a plural modern society.

Of course, there is a difference between what I call the pluriformity of authority and the sort of pluralism rooted in divergent spiritual commitments. Yet these two intersect in so far as one can expect particular religious norms to impact the internal ordering of, say, marriage and family life. To reduce all legality to the public law of the state tends in a totalitarian direction. Fortunately our political leaders, including McGuinty, formulate policies that are better than their expressed commitments might suggest.

While you're reading Goddard's article, you might also read this post by the winsome — and sorely missed — Mr. Brian Dijkema, who alerted me to it.