Hello readers and welcome back to the second issue of the fall 2013 Iron Warrior. Once again, I’d like to thank all my staff for all the hard work they put into copy editing and writing to make this issue happen. I would also like to extend a warm welcome to our two newest members, Cameron Soltys and Christy Fung, both in first year! Particular articles I want to highlight this issue include Caitlin McLaren’s interview on page five with Dr. Christine Moresoli, which is a continuation of the Teaching Excellence Initiative started last term, and Kevin Liang’s tips for safe biking on page 12. I know I learned a lot from both articles, and I hope you will too.
I’d like to put in a reminder that we printed our special EngSoc election issue last week. I hope many of you picked it up and voted, and if you haven’t voted yet, you still have time. Elections close on Wednesday October 9, which is…Today! So get on your Waterloo account, find the election email, click the link and vote!
The first thing I’d like to do is to apologize to Alison Lee, a 4A Nanotechnology student. Last issue, Allison was quoted without permission in an opinion piece regarding Elon Musk’s statement about women at Waterloo, and the University’s response. The quote was taken out of context and was not approved by Allison, and hurt both her image, and the image of her new student club, WiSTEM. For this I apologize, and the offending quote has been removed from the online edition of the paper. In addition, Filzah Nasir, the author of the opinion piece, has written a retraction of the quote.
You may have also noticed that the first issue’s Iron Inquisition question and answers did not make sense. I apologize for that as well; the question should have read “What is your pre-interview ritual?” The Mars question was from the Spring 2013 Issue One.
You may be used to the steady rhythm of having The Iron Warrior to read every two weeks. However, the next issue will not be published until October 30, which is three weeks from now. Some of you may be wondering why I would do this. Do I hate you? Do I do it to watch all our readers suffer? Well, actually, no. We’re skipping three weeks to avoid a) Thanksgiving, and b) hell week. Being in Nanotechnology Engineering, my hell week will be the week of October 21-25, and that means that I will be working on the third issue of this newspaper… right after hell week. However. HOWEVER. This still beats working on it right before hell week.
With all that out of the way, I’d like to use this space this issue to talk about what was probably the biggest news of the past week: The US government shut down. When I first heard this, I was utterly confused. How exactly does a government ‘shut down’? Does all of it’s institutions just stop working all of a sudden? Does the state fall into complete anarchy? What happens to the Constitution? What about the three branches of government? After reading more, I realize that it wasn’t quite as big a deal as I initially thought. It turns out that all it means for now is that the some government services cease to function because the government cannot pay them. Now I was confused for a different reason; how is a government unable to pay for its own services? Even though the China has been making gains, the United States remains the largest national economy in the world right now. How is a country so wealthy unable to pay its workers? After further inquiry into the matter, I learned that the problem lay, as always, with the Republicans and the Democrats. Put simply, the Republicans took issue with Obamacare and refused to pass government funding. As a result, the government technically does not have the ‘funds’ to pay for services, and has to shut them down.
I also learned that this wasn’t the first time this has happened. In fact, it has happened 18 times since 1976. It also isn’t quite as world-changing as I initially thought (and partially hoped for). However, it is the first time this has happened in seventeen years. It also highlights some of the flaws of the two-party system, mainly that it can lead to extreme partisanship. Inherently, there is nothing wrong with a two party system. It has worked fine (for the most part) for our southern neighbor for the last 240 years or so, and in many cases allows for effective government because there is always a party that has a majority in a house. In Canada, it is much more difficult to have a majority, because there are four mainstream parties, and while there are two dominant ones, the other two still draw a significant number of votes and seats.
However, recently the political system in the United States has become increasingly polarized. I don’t know exactly when it started, though I would say sometime in the eighties, but it became very obvious in the late 2000s, namely at the end of the Bush era in 2009. This was when Obama assumed power, but when he did, he was faced with a House of Representatives that did not support him, and a Senate that did.
At this point I’d like to note that while Canada, in a sense, does suffers from having four parties, we do not suffer from having two houses. Even though we do have a senate, it was defanged a long time ago and is now largely ceremonial in essence. Thus, it could be argued that Canada is effectively unicameral. I should also note that if America was also unicameral, as well as having two parties, there would never be any issues with a deadlock in parliament.
Anyway, with one house controlled by Democrats, and the other by Republicans, it has been extremely hard for either party to do anything during the Obama Administration. Thus, the government shutdown is not an isolated effect, but rather a symptom of a much more pervasive problem in American politics: extreme partisanship. The GOP and the Democrats are so polarized that they cannot get anything done; there is no room for compromise anywhere between the two, and until both sides warm up a little and reopen true communication, America will face this problem indefinitely.
Canada actually experienced a similar crisis relatively recently, though not to the same extent. In 2006, during Paul Martin’s rule, our four party system had aligned with the Conservatives and Bloc Quebecois on one side, and the Liberals and NDP on the other side, and their numbers came up exactly even. It was only the Speaker of the House’s vote that broke the tie in favour of the ruling party, which allowed the governmental budget to pass and the Liberals to hold onto power.
Note that while I spent the last several paragraphs trashing both Canada’s four party system and America’s two house system, both are actually crucial. If a democratic form of government actually only had two parties and one house, while it would be a lot more decisive, it would also be very dangerous, as the ruling party would have virtually no opposition to their agenda. The minorities and those opposed to the government would not have an effective way to have their voices heard, and such a system can quickly turn autocratic. So such divisive systems are necessary to check the ruling party’s power, but they come with their own problems.
Some of you may be wondering why we as Canadians care about what happens down south. The truth is that the whole world should care, because while it’s no longer as dominant as they once were, the USA still remains in many way the world’s greatest power, and thus when something crippling happens to it, it affects everyone. This is especially true for Canada, as we are heavily linked with America, particularly economically. When America sneezes, we feel a gust of wind up here.
Politics and international relations is a very deep topic, and there’s no way I could cover even a fraction of it in a 1400 word editorial. In addition, we’re engineers, so we don’t need to know such a topic particularly well. However, we as engineers should have a thirst for knowledge in all forms, not just scientific, and knowing even a little bit about humanities topics can go a long way in the future. Even for a topic as distant as politics, we can all take away something personal from the largely impersonal government shutdown: communication and compromise are crucial skills to have in today’s world.
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