¿Libertad personal o negocio millonario?/Get high, sell high

This fall I wrote a piece for El Cultural, the high-minded magazine supplement of Mexico's La Razón newspaper, about Canada's decision to legalize cannabis. The article was published in Spanish, translated by my friend Wenceslao Bruciaga. It was a complete privilege to work with Wences and be published in El Cultural.

Canadian readers might find this a bit 101, but here is the original English text of the piece.

Get high, sell high: Canada’s cannabis reforms are more about money than personal freedom

By Paul Gallant

One warm fall night two years ago, a lineup of people stretched down a block of Church Street in downtown Toronto, all of them waiting to get into the Cannabis Culture boutique. The store was run by Marc Emery, known as Canada’s “Prince of Pot,” a marijuana entrepreneur who has gone to jail a few times for the cause. The store might as well have been selling bottles of eternal youth, people were so excited. Each time the boutique’s front door opened, marijuana smoke rolled out into the street, but you’d hardly notice because there was already a cloud of pot hanging over the sidewalk—so many people in line were already smoking up. Mostly young, mostly middle-class, the patrons looked like attendees at a Drake concert. Inside, in glass jars on a glass counter, there was a choice of 12 strains of marijuana, with names like Sharks Breath and Girl Scout Cookies and prices ranging from C$5 to C$14 per gram.

At the store’s peak, more than 1,300 people visited the location each day. And it was just one of maybe hundreds of marijuana boutiques that sprung up across Toronto and across the country after Canada’s federal government announced its plan to legalize marijuana. After the government started preparing the policy in 2015, Canada quickly became the Wild West of weed, with entrepreneurs, the police and various governments pulling this way and that, trying to anticipate what the marijuana marketplace will look like after October 17, 2018. In the meantime, on sidewalks, in parks, at parties and at concerts, the smell of dope has become more common than the smell of tobacco. Canadians tokers embraced the transition period as an opportunity to experiment and push the limits. Walking to the grocery store, walking to my gym, in outdoor beer gardens and on restaurant patios, for the last couple of years, I smell weed everywhere I go.

During the 2015 election campaign, Trudeau had promised not just to decriminalize marijuana, like the Netherlands with its coffee-shop culture, but to fully legalize it and create a system for Canadians to grow it, sell it, buy it and smoke it. The system might also provide ways to export it, if the rest of the world wanted to buy Canadian. The old system, Trudeau argued a few weeks before the election, “makes it easier for young people to access marijuana than it is for them to access beer or even cigarettes and continues to fund the kind of crime… that is a real challenge for our communities.”

Soon after the election, entrepreneurs and smokers started acting like all the laws against marijuana had been wiped off the table. Boutiques and lounges like Cannabis Culture sprung up all over, sometimes several on the same block. It seemed like there were no rules at all.

But over the last couple of years, the government has made it clear that Canada’s version of legalization will not be a free-for-all. By the spring of 2017, seven Cannabis Culture locations, including the one on Toronto’s Church Street, had been raided and closed by the police, as had many other pop-up boutiques and dispensaries across the country. Emery and his wife Jodie were charged with drug trafficking, conspiracy and possession. (A year into the court process, Emery had been fined a C$5,000 for trafficking—a mere slap on the wrists.)

When the laws come into effect on October 17, cannabis will be much more tightly controlled now than it has been over the last few Wild West years. “On the face of it, the restrictions that the government is putting on the marketing and the distribution seems pretty strict,” says Jan Westcott, president and CEO of Spirits Canada, an organization that represents the distilled spirits industry. Pot growers might eat into the “good times” market share of his members.

The all-night pot shops and lounges that are still operating will likely be put out of business. The police will again become interested in teenagers smoking dope in playgrounds. Unlicensed marijuana dealers will be arrested and charged.

That’s because the legalization is not so much about fun, but about money. The days of big-business cannabis companies has begun. You’ve heard of Bacardi and Smirnoff, Marlboro and Pall Mall? Get ready to hear about Aurora and Canopy Growth. Sure, Canada’s new pot laws will make life more relaxed and convenient for smokers. No more need to do drug deals in dark alleys. But mostly it’s about going corporate, and most importantly, more taxes. Turn on, tune in, buy low, sell high.

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Canada loves to regulate pleasure. Historically, there’s a culture of trying to protect people from their impulses and the consequences of too much fun. We had national Prohibition on alcohol from 1918 to 1920 (my home province, Prince Edward Island, outlawed booze until 1948). Until the 1960s in Ontario, Canada’s most populous and richest province, liquor-store customers carried booklets where their purchases were recorded, so employees could say “no” if a customer was buying too much booze. “Fundamentally, they don’t trust the users of these products and they want to be sure it’s not too easy to get and it shouldn’t be too easy for children to get,” says Craig Heron, professor emeritus at York University’s Department of History and author of the 2003 book Booze in Canada: A History. Since Prohibition, provincial and territorial governments have controlled almost all alcohol distribution. In some provinces you can buy hard liquor only from government stores, and the sale of beer and wine is also very tightly regulated. There are complex rules about when you can buy alcohol, where you can drink it and how much you must pay for it. Bar closing hours are taken very seriously.

And that’s just booze. Our tobacco laws are among the strictest in the world. Taxes make cigarettes very expensive (an average of C$14 for a pack of 20), and, in the stores that sell them, cigarettes packages must be hidden behind unlabelled doors. Health warnings must cover 75 per cent of the packaging. A new law expected soon will prohibit any branding on cigarette packages—all brands will be forced to use the same font on a plain brown background. So much for selling smoking as a glamorous lifestyle.

So nobody would have pointed to Canada as the first country, after tiny Uruguay, to legalize pot. Though almost half of Canadians (49.4 per cent of men, 35.8 per cent of women) will smoke marijuana at least once in their lifetime, according to the government agency Statistics Canada, only 14 per cent of Canadians aged 15 years and older reported use of cannabis products in the previous three months. Fewer Canadians smoke up than Icelanders, Americans, Italians and Kiwis.

Marijuana was made illegal in Canada in 1923—almost 100 years ago. Maximum penalties for possession of up to 30 grams are a fine of $1,000 or six months in jail, or both. Being convicted of trafficking pot can bring a sentence of life in jail. But since the 1990s, government and police haven’t been particularly interested in enforcing marijuana laws. The Baby Boomers generation, which still holds the strings of power, associate weed with happy memories of their wild, freewheeling youth—something to take as seriously as a few beers. The police have better things to do than arresting people for a joint. In Vancouver, the country’s most relaxed jurisdiction, growers like Marc Emery were mostly left alone to refine their products, creating hybrids for energy or relaxation. Canadian growers became known for more and more THC content in their weed, providing an intense high.

After a court ruling in 2000, the government was forced to permit the use of marijuana for medical purposes. At first, the government envisioned a system where medical marijuana was grown and distributed by the government, for people who had a prescription and a diagnosed health problem, like cancer. But cannabis clubs and lounges opened that were very relaxed about requiring a prescription. Their legality was questionable, but they were mostly discreet, and the police didn’t pay them much attention. But then Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party won the 2015 federal election, after promising to legalize marijuana across the board. Suddenly the cannabis suddenly industry exploded. Nobody cared about discretion anymore.

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Although pot legalization is good for the “nice and easy” Canadian brand, Trudeau is not interested in making Canada a party destination, like the Netherlands. He’s mostly interested in making money. While there will be additional healthcare costs due to increased marijuana use, legalization is expected to be very profitable for all levels of government. Government revenue from the control and sale of alcoholic beverages was C$11.9 billion in 2016/2017. Government revenue from tobacco sales was an estimated C$8.4 billion in 2016/2017. Cannabis is expected to be taxed at C$1 per gram, or 10 per cent of a product’s price, which may earn the federal government C$100 million in the first year. But there will also be revenue from sales tax, government distribution profits, licensing and property taxes, leading some to speculate that various levels of government could make C$2 billion annually from pot.

Will crime go up or down? Right now, most crime in Canada related to marijuana are connected to its sale and use. About 58 per cent of police-reported Controlled Drugs and Substances Act offences in 2016 were cannabis-related (the rest were for offences relating to the importation, exportation, trafficking, production and possession of other drugs). Of course, these marijuana-related “crimes,” 54,940 of them in 2015, will disappear off the books when marijuana becomes legal. Even then, cannabis-related offences have decreased over the last five years, maybe because the police aren’t even trying to enforce them any more. The rate of drug-impaired driving is low (8.5 incidents per 100,000 trips), especially compared to the rate of alcohol-impaired driving (186 per 100,000).

Although legal pot is a new frontier, it will probably look a look like a combination of existing alcohol and tobacco regulation. Canada’s 10 provinces and three territories will be in charge of distribution, just like with booze. The provinces and territories will also make rules about who gets to sell (in some cases, just the government; in others, government and private stores) and under what conditions. Municipalities will be able to create their own rules, and may be able to prohibit the sale of marijuana altogether—some Canadians may have to buy their legal dope online from government websites. Better than striking a deal in an alleyway from a dealer who’s a friend of a friend, I suppose, but not as convenient as popping by one of Amsterdam’s coffeeshops.

Actually, when you look closely at the provincial laws, there will be very few places outside the home where Canadians will be able smoke marijuana; there’s been a debate about whether it should be allowed in places like seniors’ homes. Smoking tobacco isn’t allowed inside most public buildings, including bars and nightclubs, and, so far, it looks like pot will be treated the same way. Though some provinces will allow “public” smoking, there are rules to keep it away from where children might be.

Just weeks before the official legalization date, there is a tremendous uncertainty about how things will unfold. Alberta, the province with the most liberal liquor laws, will allow as many as 250 retail locations, some private, some government, to open in 2018. Ontario first planned to open government-run stores. Then the provincial government changed and declared that pot will be sold only through a government website until April 1, 2019, when a plan for private retailers will come into effect. Most provinces will allow consumers to grow as many as four plants at home for personal use; Quebec, usually seen as a liberal province, won’t allow it.

“Where we are going to be on October 17 is going to be vastly different from where we’ll be five years from now,” says Westcott. “One of the aspects of this whole thing is that there’s almost no medical research. Almost zero, partly because it’s been illegal.”

The reforms are a dream for medical, sociological and crime researchers, who will finally be able to conduct experiments, and observe how legal access to marijuana plays out in various jurisdictions. Will violent crimes go up or down? Will productivity at work go up or down? Will there be more health problems or fewer? Will the black market shrink and disappear? Will more people smoke more pot in the provinces where pot is more freely available? What we do know already about marijuana is that it’s less harmful than alcohol, at least in the short term.

“When it’s legalized, it’s likely that cannabis will in many cases substitute for alcohol,” says Tim Stockwell, a professor of psychology at the University of Victoria and director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research. “[For example,] although cannabis is not a good thing to use while driving, people tend to go slower, while people who are drinking tend to go faster. There is some evidence that impaired driving and road crashes could be reduced. That may also apply to violence…. There are 60 ways that alcohol can harm you; there are only two or three ways cannabis can.”

It will take years to collect statistics on how legalized pot will transform Canadian society. But the most dramatic change has already been taking shape on the business side. Because the provinces will be the main distributors—and they’ll want to buy in bulk—the playing field will be skewed toward big players that can cut deals to sell to uniform-quality pot to populations of millions. This new industry, perhaps one that will eventually rival alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceuticals, intends to go global. Although nine U.S. states now permit the sale and use of marijuana for recreational purposes, and 36 permit it for medical purposes, the drug remains illegal in the U.S. nationally. Federal enforcement officials in the U.S. have let the pro-pot states do their own thing—within reason. That’s kept their industries small, more local and less corporate. In Canada, companies like Canopy Growth (WEED.TO), Aurora Cannabis (ACB), Aphria Inc. (APH) and Cannex Group Holdings Inc. (CNNX) are listed on the Canadian Stock Exchange. Investors have already made millions on this industry, which, in the U.S., still has difficulty accessing traditional financing.

This summer, Corona beer maker Constellation Brands invested C$4 billion into Canopy Growth, which already had an estimated value of C$10 billion. Just last year, Constellation Brands had made a C$200-million investment last summer to help Canopy produce a non-alcoholic cannabis-based beverage (which will not be legal in the early days of legalization). Canopy predicts as many as 30 countries are likely to allow medical marijuana in the near future. Its chief executive, Bruce Linton, says the company is targeting C$1 billion in overseas acquisitions over the next 12 months. With the right strategy, Canada could become to pot what Hollywood is to movies or Silicon Valley is to tech.

Although great fortunes await, the pot business still carries risks. Some employees at legal-in-Canada cannabis companies have been turned away at the U.S. border and banned for life from entering the U.S., deemed inadmissible because they are considered to be living off the profits of the drug trade. Going global might be trickier than some investors think. Unlike in California, one of the nine U.S. states where recreational marijuana is legal, medical marijuana outlets may not get preferential treatment in getting licences to sell. The provincial and territorial governments that will be doing the licensing are unlikely to issue licences to businesses that broke the law during the Wild West period. Mark Emery, for example, by being a pioneer, may have shut himself out of the legal pot business. There have been calls for a “marijuana amnesty” to clear the criminal records of people convicted of past marijuana offences. Considering that the government apologized last year to LGBT Canadians for past laws against homosexuality, you have to wonder if the government might apologize to potheads for past government persecution.

After three Wild West years, it may be hard for the government to restore Canadian-style law and order. Businesses that have made big profits in the last few years may be reluctant to close, even if they don’t get licences. Potheads who have grown accustomed to smoking up wherever they want may not want to limit their use to their own home. Police officers who have spent years turning a blind eye to marijuana use will have to again become diligent, arresting black-market dealers, people who are smoking in the wrong places and people growing more plants than they’re allowed. Sounds like a real nuisance.

Habits are hard to break. This month I dropped by the fifth annual Karma Cup, a cannabis trade show held in a parking lot on Church Street in Toronto, across the street from where Cannabis Culture did its booming business. Crowds packed in to sample the wares of dozens of booths selling “elite cannabis products” that were judged for quality. There were lots of Guns N' Roses T-shirts, leather jackets and dreadlocks. Many of the products—edibles, for example—probably won’t be legal after October 17, but at this point who cares? I didn’t see police anywhere, even as the clouds of marijuana smoke wafted down the block.

Yet now there is a multi-billion-dollar industry with lobbyists and the power to create thousands of jobs and fortunes for investors. Industry demands for a level playing field will put the police and the government under much more pressure than worried parents, priests and school teachers ever did. The stakes are much higher than a few joints in the school playground. Canada has created a new industry and the world is watching.

Customer service in an information vacuum

Last year when I wrote a little piece for Reader’s Digest Canada about how to get better customer service, one of the key themes was keeping your cool.

In retrospect, I feel a little weird about that advice since, personally, I’ve found that losing my cool—at least just a bit—can work wonders. Especially when most customer service agents are so intent on following a script, they treat anything the customer tells them as a nuisance not to be believed. Getting emotional is risky, but it can be a way to get an employee to abandon a templated approach and listen in order to figure out the real problem—and solve it.

Last week I heard weird sounds from behind my house. I got left the work I was doing on my computer and went outside to investigate. In the dark I could see a family of raccoons, screeching and screaming at the top of a utility pole, as if they had been chased up there by something. They were inching nervously out onto the communications wire that runs along the back of my yard, which butts up against the yards of several of my neighbours. I had never seen raccoons walk on wires like that before. It was quite a drama.

I went back to my computer to discover my Internet was out and that my phone wasn’t working. The next morning the phone was back, though too static-y to have a comfortable conversation.

To me the cause was pretty obvious. My Internet drops out periodically in the fall and spring when the squirrels are in a frenzy, and my phone line gets mildly static-y when it’s raining. The weight of the raccoons seems to be the last straw for a communications line that was moody at the best of times. When a Bell technician visited last year when I changed my Internet plan, he told me the line was in bad shape and should be replaced, though the technician I scheduled to do that never showed up.

But trying talking about raccoons and chronic static problems to customer service people at my phone company, Primus. With each of the nine calls (or maybe more—I stopped counting) I had to make to solve the problem and with each of the two technicians who showed up, it was almost impossible to convince them that my theory—a raccoon-damaged line—could possibly be correct.

Had I restarted my modem? Yes, more than a dozen times. Was the cable to the modem less than three feet long? Yes, for more than a decade. Yes, there were filters on the phone line and, as far as I knew, they hadn’t dematerialized the night of the raccoon drama.

I understand that a lot of telecom customers don’t understand tech stuff. I understand that if I hadn’t seen the raccoons on the line that I wouldn’t have had any idea what might have caused the Internet outage and the phone static—it was an unusual piece of evidence to have. I understand that telecom companies want to troubleshoot simple things before investing time and money into fixing hardware. But to be disbelieved, dismissed and condescended to for the better part of a week was exasperating.

After a couple of days, the phone static became episodic; only 70 per cent or so my calls were inaudible. So I had one customer service agent tell me that my line was just fine because they could hear me just fine, so if I was still having an Internet problem—had I reset the modem? She got angry with me when I interrupted her wildly inaccurate description of my problem. The fact that I had successfully been using my phone and Internet for years, had seen the line being damaged and had talked to several other agents, some of who agreed with me, was irrelevant to her. She had her script and she was sticking to it. By this time, I had realized that the customer service ticket for my problem was wildly inaccurate, failing even to note that I had no Internet service. Yet for everyone I talked to, this ticket was the truth and I, as the customer, was an obstacle to the truth. It was customer service as theatre, not problem-solving. But what a depressing show it was.

Finally a Bell technician arrived. My telecom, Primus, rents Bell’s lines so Bell is kind of the landlord in this situation, Primus is the tenant and I, apparently, play the role of subletter (no wonder nobody listened to me). The technician agreed the outside lines were static-y and in bad shape. Yes, they should be fixed. But he needed to go up a pole in my neighbour’s yard to get to the lines and my neighbour’s yard was locked. I needed to schedule another technician to visit when I would be sure there’d be access. (It turns out the Bell technician hadn’t bothered to knock on the door of my neighbour who was home and would have readily given him access.)

When the second technician arrived the next day, it was like none of my previous conversations or the previous technician’s visited had ever happened. I had to tell him four times that the Internet went out moments after raccoons stepped onto the wire. He didn’t seem to believe me. Had I restarted my modem? At the time of his visit, the phone wasn’t especially static-y. He fiddled with some switches on the hub down the street, took note of the absence of static and told me the problem was fixed. If I was still having Internet problems, which I was, I’d have to call tech support again—the line was fine.

That’s when I lost it. Didn’t the guy from yesterday file a report? Didn’t you read it? If the problem is intermittent, as I’ve said innumerable times, then of course, the line may be fine right now—that doesn’t mean it’s fixed. Why doesn’t my not having Internet and having a static-y phone for days outweigh the 10 minutes you’ve been here? Why can’t you just believe me and fix the problem I’m describing to you? Why can’t you just fix the problem? Why can’t you just fix the problem?

As I was pleading with him, the Bell guy fell silent, walked away from me, got in his van and drove away as I stood there, aghast. Primus called me on my cell to tell me the problem had been fixed. “How would you know?” My Internet was still out and the static had already come back on the phone line. But the technician had already called to close the ticket and the ticket had been closed.

Then I realized what bothered me even more than not being listened to as a customer—that the various customer service agents, tech support people, dispatchers, managers and technicians don’t talk to or listen to each other except to report “Job done, clear the ticket.” Each interaction had taken place in a vacuum, as if no information had previously been collected or changed hand. Today’s technician doesn’t build on the work of yesterday’s; he starts from scratch.

But if companies aren’t going to listen to their customers, their employees should at least be listening to each other. This failure to absorb and share information is not only infuriating for customers, it costs companies money as they chase easy solutions to non-problems even though, after more phone calls and more false steps and more aborted technician visits, they will eventually have to fix the real problem—or lose the customer.

My story has something of a happy ending. After my emotional pleading with the second Bell technician to please, please, please fix the cable, he had driven away. I went back in the housing feeling totally defeated. Who needs phone and Internet anyway?

Fifteen minutes later, I saw the technician up on top of the pole, right where the raccoons had been four days earlier. He strung new cable into my backyard.

The technician had taken pity on a desperate man, had listened to the desperate man and, against all conventional wisdom, taken action.

Less than 15 minutes later, the static was gone and my Internet worked perfectly. The customer who had been dismissed at every step of the way had been right all along.

The problem with art and news is not that they should be centrally planned

Taken together, Alain de Botton’s two latest books, Art as Therapy (with John Armstrong) and The News position the writer and philosopher as a consumer advocate, lobbying the monolithic institutions of art and—if “art” wasn’t broad enough for you—the news media on behalf of underserved customers who are not nearly as articulate as de Botton, a thinker whose writes with a fluidity that, for better or worse, makes common sense seem fresh and the ridiculous seem appealingly obvious.

Both projects are worthwhile enterprises. The visual arts, on which Art as Therapy dwells, have a marginal role in contemporary western society, despite the rich archive of beauty and longing, and the talent of current practitioners. A few minutes with a piece of visual art can evoke many new feelings and ideas, so you could argue that there’s bigger bang for the buck in it than our current obsession with TV shows, which require dozens of hours to absorb. The huge auction bids that go towards top artist brands (Is Gerhard Richter the Prada of the art world? Is Jeff Koons the Dolce and Gabbana?) are a testament not to the relevance of visual art, but its lack of centrality; collectability shifts the value from the meaning and emotional effect of a work to the market surges it creates, that is, to buzz.

And the news? As the highly formalized formats of TV news and newspaper stories are shoved aside by the cacophony of free online content (articles and charticles, rants and puff pieces, tome-like critiques that would never have been read if not for Facebook, video responses to video responses to non-official music videos chronicling news events), established profit-oriented media are desperately flailing for something that would make it stand out from a crowd composed of every literate and semi-literate person with access to a data plan. With news in such a deeply existential crisis, any advice is worth listening to.

For de Botton, the purposes of both visual art and the news are remarkably similar. In fact you could imagine the two books combined into a single volume: How media (plus nice buildings and furniture) can make a better, happier world through happier and more introspective people.

“Alongside its usual focus on catastrophe and evil, the news should perform the critical function of sometimes distilling and concentrating a little of the hope a nation requires to chart a course through its difficulties,” de Botton writes in The News. “While helping society by uncovering its misdeeds and being honest about its pains, the news should not neglect the equally important task of constructing an imaginary community that seems sufficiently good, forgiving and sane that one might want to contribute to it.” In Art as Therapy, de Botton and Armstrong propose that “art (a category that includes works of design, architecture and craft) is a therapeutic medium that can help guide, exhort and console its viewers, enabling them to become better versions of themselves.” Media can make us better. And can make us feel better.

I can’t disagree. A way forward is badly needed. De Botton’s intentions are worthy. Yet these two books seem simultaneously condescending and naïve. You admire de Botton for getting his ideas out there—the Art Gallery of Ontario is currently offering a show built according to his principles—and still shake your head about this unhelpful rabbit hole he has led us down.

In the case of art, the singularity of expectations set out in Art of Therapy ignores what most people find most delightful about the visual arts—surprise, open-endedness, transmutability. It’s a domain where effect in the heart and brain of the observer can separate itself entirely from artistic intent and critical interpretation; unlike in literature, you can ignore the voice telling you what it’s all about. But de Botton and Armstrong argue that discourse about art should focus on its effects on the human spirit and psyche, providing a balm—or perhaps a cure—for our anxieties about love, nature, family, work and politics.

The authors are right in attacking the dry art-history text that accompanies most art displayed in galleries—birth dates, historical events, formal artistic influences. No one can deny the art world is full of bad writing. But at least these curatorial insights are, for the most part, based on facts, even if they’re not particularly helpful in letting a piece of art work its way into our psyches. What de Botton and Armstrong suggest in lieu of dry, impersonal analysis of art is to insert an interpretive voice directly between the work and the viewer. They want to tell you exactly why they think a piece of art is good for you.

For example, the current description of Christ Appearing to His Mother in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York reads, in part: “This picture is the right panel of [Queen] Isabella’s triptych and can tentatively be attributed to her court artist Juan de Flandes on the basis of documentary and technical evidence. The center and left panels remain at Isabella’s burial site, the Capilla Real, Granada, where she bequeathed the triptych upon her death in 1504.”

Art as Therapy would substitute this historical tracking with something more like this: “This is an image of a loving mother-son relationship. But it does not avoid conflict or grief: these are precisely what the picture says are central to love. It is a very restrained image. They do not embrace. He will soon leave. How often has this scene been re-enacted. The picture makes the claim that such moments of return (and of survival), though fleeting and rare, are crucially important in life. It wants men to understand—and call—their mothers.”

That’s a fine approach for a newspaper column or a blog that is not official or definitive, text that does not claim to buttress the power of art in our lives. Critics can say what they want about art, no matter how wrongheaded or eccentric. But, as a comprehensive way of looking at art, de Botton and Armstrong’s approach makes not one but two wild assumptions. First, they assume what the artist’s intention was—did de Flandes explicitly try to paint that conflict and grief are central to love? Who knows?! I doubt he would have expressed it that way if he had expressed it at all. But worse, de Botton and Armstrong assume what’s going on—or what should go on—in the viewer’s own head. They have banished the viewer’s own imagination from the equation.

I have been a fan of de Botton for a couple of decades now. His early novels, especially, are brilliant at mapping the brain’s neuroses, the unique connections an individual’s experiences create. “Lucy lacked confidence in her intellectual capacities,” he writes in Kiss & Tell. “Afraid a conversation might grow beyond her comprehension, she had a habit of deflating matters to levels obviously below her. To discuss the politics of the Prime Minister would lead her to wonder how he combed his hair, consideration of a recent novel would elicit remarks on how the jacket cover matched the author’s eyes.” De Botton’s depictions of the idiosyncrasies of an individual’s emotional wiring is the opposite of universal. Lucy needs a counsellor for her problems, not a generic self-help guide. Yet in both Art as Therapy and The News, he plops his very specific expectations on us all.

There are times in Art as Therapy when I thought the authors were having me on, positing art as a propagandistic pharmaceutical: get the dosage right, take it with the right sort of criticism and you get a better life. I kept waiting for the joke to be unveiled: But of course art is not a drug! Of course our emotions are trickier than that! The punchline never came. They are dead serious.

The authors go so far as to commission an artwork according to an Art as Therapy-style brief: “Many couples have painful conflicts that break out over dinner. The spark often looks quite small, such as the way someone asked, ‘How was your day?’ which what feels like a sarcastic or sceptical intent….We would like an artwork to carry indications of an underlying but frustrated longing to be happy together. Perhaps the table is beautifully laid…. Can their suffering gain in dignity and be less catastrophic and lonely because of a work of art?”

Sounds like something Stalin might write if he cared more about matters of the heart than the grain harvest. But this is not satire, it’s sincere. As proof, there’s a photo by Jessica Todd Harper delivering on the brief’s dictates. Good for her, though you wonder if, while producing the piece, Harper wondered: Why don’t de Botton and Armstrong just go do this themselves? Besides, she didn’t quite get the RFP right: her table is not beautifully laid. Marshall McLuhan, who argued an artist’s power is discerning the environment we can not easily see—and seeing the future before others do—wouldn’t be impressed by this all-request-Friday approach to creativity.

The very appeal of visual art is that the space between the work and the observer is wide open. There are parameters, sure. But de Botton, more than anyone, should know how quirky human responses can be. Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire is both a gateway to the indescribably sublime and a provider of ideas for a new paint colour for the living room walls. Henri Matisse’s Dance (II) may conjure hope for some, but, in a certain mindset, it can conjure futility and desperation. The effects differ not only from observer to observer, but from day to day in a given observer. History changes the meaning of a piece of art more than any piece of critical text accompanying it. “Art,” declare de Botton and Armstrong, “has a powerfully therapeutic effect. It can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand and reawaken us.” So true. But having someone guess how it should do so hurts rather than helps the process. Some of the text accompanying the show at the Art Gallery of Ontario seemed literally random, as if the authors had concocted a compelling meditation—a bit of chicken soup for the soul—and then rapidly chosen a work that might fit. You could easily imagine the therapeutic advice applied to another painting—or another hundred paintings—if the one on display hadn’t been brought to their attention. The specificity of any given piece vanishes in a wash of generic self-help.

The assessments laid out in The News seem less ridiculous, in part because de Botton doesn’t adopt a newly patented one-of-a-kind, super-duper self-help strategy in order to fix the mainstream media’s many problems.

He picks apart the failures of foreign news, cultural news and financial news with great astuteness. Foreign news and financial news, especially, are often stripped of all humanity—body counts and share prices reported without any sense of who’s dying and what’s been manufactured. “The financial news organizations have journalists embedded in some of the world’s most remote economic outposts. There are correspondents monitoring the wheat harvest in Saskatchewan, Canada, the progress of oil exploration off the coast of Brazil, the extraction of niobium and zirconolite in Malawi, the development of the next generation of commuter trains in the Ruhr Valley, Germany, the weaving of carbon-fibre aerospace panels in Chubu, Central Japan—and yet in spite of their extraordinary and privileged vantage points, these journalists are required to maintain a pinpoint focus on only such information as will help investors to answer one lone question: ‘To which companies should we commit our money?’”

But in an effort to produce a critique that is technologically neutral—de Botton focuses strictly on content, not delivery systems—he seems to ignore the established media’s current upheaval (I say “established” rather than “mainstream” because The New York Times and alternative weeklies are equally affected). It’s as if he’s talking about a time (perhaps an imaginary time but one that stands as a sturdy stereotype) when a citizen primarily got his or her news from a single newspaper, some hourly reports on the radio and an evening TV newscast. Even then, it’s as if magazines, weeklies and other news sources don’t exist in de Botton’s world. Sure, the daily financial news focuses on the bottom line, but Bloomberg Businessweek, say, is full of kooky characters and compelling narratives on which we can draw inspiration. The Economist may also be obsessed with data, but its writers often give us a quick snapshot of the people and places in which these trends and supply chains exist. It is certainly piecemeal. An idealist might suggest that instead of hourly updates about, say, the kidnapping of school girls in Nigeria, a 4,000-word piece about the country, the terrorist group doing the kidnapping and the lives of women there would be much more engaging and enlightening. But the fact that such hourly updates exist do not preclude that long feature. There are many journalists who dedicate themselves to such work.

In the chapter on photography, de Botton demonstrates his failure to see the mechanics of how news is produced. As a cultural critic, he does a great job of pointing out that great images communicate reams of information about their subjects, while poor images merely break up the text on a page. But it’s not like news organizations don’t want great images. It’s about talent, resources, timing and access. News organizations could wait until they get a compelling image of President Barack Obama before they publish one—but that could be weeks or months. Meanwhile, the Twitterati and blogosphere continue to talk about him, citizens still wonder what he’s up to.

There are indeed publications that wait for the right photo, the right story, the right writer, that try to rise above the 24-hour news cycle. Again, magazines seem to be something that deliver just what de Botton is asking for, but seems never to have encountered one he could cite in this book (he does quote a particularly bad piece of writing from The Economist, which seemed a little unfair. How about this as a way to improve the media: write better!). He seems to call for news to have some sort of codified system—perhaps not unlike the education system—but he ignores that the marketplace has created a system. Visual cues, language, venue and reputation guide gossip-seekers toward Us magazine and TMZ, thoughtful types toward the New York Review of Books and local shoppers toward their weekly flyers. Online publications like Slate and Salon have been particularly adept at blurring the line between highbrow and low brow, thoughtful and sensational, topical and enduring. In the west, we don’t rely on a single or handful of news organizations to surprise us and tell us what we want to know. We navigate between trite and deep as we see fit. Could the offerings be better? Oh yes. But that’s often an economic problem, not one of a commitment to quality or lack of thoughtfulness on the part of editors and producers.

The thing about de Botton as a consumer advocate is that he seems to lack faith in consumers themselves to bring their own insight to what they read and see, to know their own needs when they seek out and consume media and art. Certainly there are some consumers that take in only the loudest voices. But they have been with us always. And they are sometimes the consumers who also want a refined experience. Centrally planned art and news worlds can’t anticipate who wants what when. There’s no one door in.

This piece originally appeared on Suite.io.

A loyalty program only for the affluent and tech savvy

About 56.4 per cent of Canadians have a smart phone, which is a lot of Canadians. But that means 44.6 per cent don't have them. And that 44.6 per cent might as well forget about engaging in the Loblaws PC Plus reward program.

Launched in March, one of Canada's highest profile retailers has created the lowest profile loyalty program.

Admittedly, there are signed offers in stores. I found three points offers after about 45 minutes of searching around the Loblaws at Dundas and Bloor in Toronto. For example, I could earn 400 points buying $5 worth of bottled curry. That's about 40 cents worth of shopping when I hit a points threshold--20,000 points get you $20 in groceries.

But the real action is on your phone. Each week I get supposedly customized offers in an online account. There, the point accumulation can be impressive. 1,000 points for each $5 spent on fresh produce--that's about 20 per cent off. Buy $100 worth of produce and get $20 back. Or 1,000 points for a $2.29 bottle of flavoured water--that's 40 per cent off. The digital offers are far superior--and far more abundant, from what I can tell--than the bricks and mortar offers.

But unless you a master memorizer, you must carry a smart phone with you to exploit the rewards. Otherwise, you'd have no idea what your offers are as you wander the aisles.

Which raises the question: who is PC Plus for? Not for everybody. Lower income Canadians can't afford cell phones. Seniors often don't have them. And even then, who walks around a grocery store flicking through items on their phone to see if they match up with what they might buy? Probably not parents with their kids or people in a rush.

It is certainly following a trend. PC Plus is a step toward gamefication--it makes shopping like a treasure hunt, where you must match the items you're sent with what's available. But it's needless complicated. The threshold to entry is way too high.

Technical glitches make things worse. When I bought my $6.02 worth of produce, I saw that I hadn't received my points. I was told that "digital produce offers" (ask someone from 1992 to parse that term) sometimes don't register properly. So I had to call customer service which, moments after I went through the checkout, was able to call up my receipt to see that I had bought more than $5 in produce. They promptly issued me my points and I thought, wow, he exactly what I'm having for dinner!

Obviously, chasing loyalty points is something you need money to do. But introducing a loyalty program that serves only the most diligent and connected Canadians seems ridiculously exclusive for a mainstream retailer. It's almost as if Loblaws is saying: If you can't afford a smart phone, you can't afford to shop here.

FaceTime? Maybe if you put the phone down for a minute

I find the new iPhone ad sad and lonely. You want to take the phone out of the hands of the supposedly real people in the ad and tell them, "Live in the moment for a moment and maybe talk to the person who's next to you."

Or I could be less charitable. Like my thoughts about the people who run into you when they're striding down the street with their eyes glued to the screen of their phone. I always imagine a careening truck just around the corner.

When our shopping moves online, what takes the place of our favourite brick-and-mortar stores?

 Following on my griping about the Shoppersization of Canadian downtowns, this Economist article reminded me of the broader trends that have helped boost Shoppers’ ubiquity. We don’t really go downtown to buy things anymore.  

It’s not just that we’re buying more stuff online. It’s that many of those things that are best suited for online shopping—music, collectibles, books and periodicals—have also provided the best “third spaces” where enthusiasts can loiter and bump into other like-minded people—the reasons why people have loved shopping downtown. Bookstores, music stores, collectible boutiques and magazine stands are places where browsing without purpose can be a form of identity expression. Their disappearance (into the digital economy) is changing the character of our commercial streets, especially as more mission-driven shopping (hardware, household goods—stuff that can't be “dematerialized”) moves online and to big box outlets beyond our downtowns.

But wait—our downtown streets seem to be as lively as ever before. I think that’s because the rise of restaurant culture and burgeoning neighbourhood bar scenes have filled in the gap.

Storefronts where retailers used to sell "things" are now occupied by businesses offering experiences. The customers who produce “the scene” are as much the product as the food or beverages. Deprived of being able to loiter in the Heavy Metal section of a local music shop, we find a restaurant or bar that, through other means, puts us in close proximity with our demographic. We eat or drink together, rather than shop together.

Perhaps we’re looking at a world where there is little downtown retail other than convenience and food shopping. Thus the rise of Shoppers as a place to buy things you won’t travel any distance for (toilet paper, shampoo) or can’t wait to be delivered (drugs, a soft drink on a hot day).

What will keep our downtowns fun is discovering the next hot food trend, not hanging around in Sam the Record Man all day. It's a tastier pastime  but, compared to the browsing the CD bins, a pricier one.

Why the Loblaw takeover of Shoppers won't make downtown life any better--and will probably make it duller

The hegemony of Shoppers Drug Mart in downtown life took a sharp left turn this week with the announcement that Loblaw intends to buy the pharmacy chain for $12.4 million. 

While optimists are hoping for savings though cost-cutting and perhaps loyalty reward synergies between the PC Plus and Optimum programs, the merger will likely speed up the Shoppersization of urban life—big generic chain stores gobbling up prime commercial space, squeezing out the variety and whimsy that makes city life great.

Throughout Toronto’s condo boom, it’s been clear that Shoppers Drug Mart is one of the top choices for anchor tenants in new buildings. (Winners or Marshalls might also do in a pinch.) Of course, why not? A pharmacy is a safer, quieter and less risky choice for storefront space than, say, a nightclub, independent café or niche boutique. But safe choices in retail tenants makes for bland and banal streetscapes. A 25-minute streetcar ride down Queen West from Roncesvalles to University—Canada’s most vibrant shopping street—showcases no fewer than four Shoppers Drug Marts.

Grocery stores aren’t particularly exciting either, but they’re usually in oddball parking-lotted places or, in the case of the two new flagship Loblaw—Maple Leaf Gardens and Queen West at Portland—imaginatively tucked away into larger developments. Target—again, not a retailer known for its beautiful properties but let’s do our best to muster some choices here—has so far only opened stores on the fringes of the city. The chain remains virtually invisible to downtowners. You can complain that Walmart hurts small independent shops, but you can’t complain the stores are eyesores. So far, the retail giant’s only central location is in a mall, though plans to open a new location near Kensington Market are enough to send a chill up the spine of any flaneur.

Shoppers Drug Marts are much more in your face. Small enough to eat up the best most high-traffic locations, big enough to squeeze out three or four small boutiques once they set their sights on a property. Shoppers drug Marts can make even the most unique neighbourhood feel like nowhere at all.

Surprisingly, Pharma Plus and Guardian drugs have done little to take advantage of all the new retail space that’s come available in central Toronto; the expansion of the Pharma Plus at Church and Wellesley seems almost uniquely futile. Which means that the city is not merely awash in new brightly lit pharmacies, but awash in a single pharmacy brand.

A Loblaw/Shoppers merger can only increase the homogenization of our urban landscape. Unless other major retail chains push into downtown—or unless landlords start making it easier for independent stores to get leases—our corridors will be awash in red and white façades, retail spaces that offer a little of everything except personality.