Visions of decolonizing society certainly sound progressive, but when the rubber meets the road the concrete proposals behind decolonial ideology are often internally inconsistent, sacrificing real progress for the enjoyment of sounding radical.  

Anyone paying attention to modern trends in the academy in the last several decades will have noticed the quick growth of a now large body of interdisciplinary theory known as decolonialism. 

While this strain of thought has led to some embarrassing trends in education, such as “decolonizing math” — which are quickly picked up by the culture war and used as fodder by the right to call their political opposites unreasonable — it does still provide an important mode of thinking that has been neglected since the end of European colonialism in the 20th century. Namely, how the legacy of former centuries-long colonial projects of European countries still lives on in certain thoughts, practices and even policies of today’s former colonial powers and the world at large. 

The discipline of decolonial studies certainly has lots of interesting things to say about how certain prejudiced attitudes and behaviours persist today that are remnants of a colonial mindset and former-colonial culture.  

However, for all its critical might in educational contexts, decoloniality quickly reveals itself to be a poor base to build a broad forward-looking political project. This largely stems from the fact that it’s not hard to produce convincing theories about how a colonial mindset and practice persists in certain aspects of today’s hegemonic cultural centres, but agreeing on what former-colonial or settler-colonial formed societies are today is where the issues begin — and this is especially so when trying to figure out how to craft policy for more just societies. 

Oftentimes, decolonization advocates in the political sphere believe that colonization — in the European sense of total control of governance and exploitation of a culturally and ethnically distinct people by an imperial power or “mother country” — still exists today, just in mutated form. Nations like Canada, the United States and France, despite being UN members subject to the historically significant UN General Assembly Resolution 1514, which made colonial foreign rule illegal under international law, are still colonial nations, they say.  

To be clear, remnant and marginal forms of colonialism still exist in the world today. For example, the US still has two semi-independent colonies in Puerto Rico and Guam. Furthermore, the violence that Israel is currently unleashing on the occupied territory of Gaza — a colonial occupation since the June 1967 war in the region — is probably the most vicious contemporary example of the actions of a colonial nation. Even Russia’s annexation of Crimea and current military control of eastern parts of Ukraine as a result of the ongoing war can be appropriately deemed as a neocolonial project with all of Putin’s irredentist rhetoric about the territory of Ukraine originally being Russian. 

The issue is that a view that the essential nature of European colonialism still exists today leads to a bunch of inconsistencies that make political planning for a better world basically impossible.  

Where radical advocates of decolonization feel they have the strongest argument for the persistence of colonial rule writ large is with countries that began as settler-colonial projects, mainly nations in North America. After all, the Canadian state born of France and Britain’s colonial projects settled itself on land that was already inhabited by Indigenous communities. The Canadian state then committed cultural genocide to those Indigenous inhabitants right up until the second half of the 20th century. The lack of historical justice through reparations, adequate funding of reserves and denial of cultural genocide are major issues persisting in Canada today.  

However, despite the undeniable injustice in the Canadian case — which in relative terms was somewhat tame compared to the brutal genocides the Spanish subjected Indigenous peoples in the south of the continent to, but brutal nonetheless — the fact that Canada was formed as a settler-colonial project doesn’t necessarily mean it still is one or that Canadians born today are colonizers.  

Again, the point of this criticism isn’t to rob a decolonial perspective of contemporary Canadian politics of any of its explanatory power in certain areas. But when there’s rhetoric that Canadians born today are colonizers, all this does is sow absolutely phantasmic standards for concrete policy proposals to alleviate injustice against minorities, which includes Indigenous peoples.  

If Canadians born today are colonizers, and pretty much most of the global population agrees that colonization is reprehensible, the only way to produce fully just policies, many a radical decolonialist argues, is to dismantle the Canadian state entirely and give the whole country back to the Indigenous population to decide what to do with.  

From this perspective, a $20 federal minimum wage in Canada is no longer a straightforward, unalloyed good; it’s simply a materially beneficial policy to an otherwise colonial population that’s already inherently advantaged, poor or rich, due to being settlers and using the resources of a land they don’t belong on.  

Not to mention, if the Canadian state is being dismantled for a full-scale land-back initiative, there’s the issue of where to put the 36-some-odd million people who now must leave. Do they go to France and Britain? Or maybe just anywhere in Europe will suffice?  

The call for land-back also begs the question: What are the metrics for determining colonizers who should lose their property and emigrate and those who are exempt?  

Is, say, a Yemenis migrant settled in Canada who has fled from the vicious Saudi Regime — which Canada has close economic ties to despite being a genocidal-maniac monarchy — a colonizer because they secured their path to citizenship and perhaps even was able to afford a mortgage and start a family? If yes, it’s certainly ironically cruel to tell this hypothetical Yemenis person, a product themselves of an outsider nation attacking their own right to self-governance, that they have to pack up and return their family to a war-torn country that Canada, through funding Saudi arms, certainly has indirect responsibility for creating the unlivable conditions of.  

Moreover, if this hypothetical person is exempt from a decolonial land-back movement given their oppressed-migrant status, then what about the working poor in Canada, or Black Canadians who are descendants of slavery? To go with the latter group scenario, does that mean that Black Canadians who through ancestry testing are determined to not be the descendants of slaves also have to leave on the grounds that they are colonizers as well?  

At a certain point, it appears the only reliable metric would be if you’re White or not. Chances are, if you’re a White Canadian, you’re either a descendant of the British or French peoples who settled in Canada or are a descendant of other European nations — many of them having their own colonial empires at one point in history, or at least not being colonized themselves — that came to settle in Canada.  

But this metric also quickly becomes problematic. If the Yemenis person from earlier is exempt from removal due to settling in Canada to avoid the violence of an oppressive external nation’s imperialist-adjascent policies, then what about a White Irish person living in Canada today whose parents immigrated to Canada in the mid-19th century due to the Irish potato famine, which, to add another layer of complexity, was the product of British colonial policy in Ireland. 

Changing the focus from Canada makes the issue even more complex as the nation’s slow severing of ties to Britain was more of a product of non-violent negotiations aided by a centuries-in-the-making general cultural attrition towards early Modern-era colonial rulership. Consider, for example, the United States, which broke from colonial rule from Britain in an extremely violent revolutionary war. Though still settlers of a colonial project, the American revolutionaries viscerally rejected colonial rule (to an extent).  

What effect, if any, do these specific caveats create on the “colonizer-or-not” balance sheet? Ignoring them and just doing an “if you’re visibly White, you leave” test would surely be a crude form of racism missing the paradox that the Irish case brings into the math.  

These questions are impossible to answer. The notion that there could ever be a science to determine who is more colonizer or less colonizer based on some criteria for oppression points is hopelessly misguided and helplessly unserious in terms of alleviating injustice in society.  

An opponent of this position might ask: What about the decrying of Israel as a settler colonial state? If you aren’t for decolonizing society after all, how can you stand up for Palestinian independence? 

It’s actually fairly simple to be consistent with this position and be against the colonial aspirations of Israel or even a Russia.  

The answer is not new; it comes from broad Enlightenment-era values of universal rights to self-determination and individual autonomy. In other words, the belief that all human beings, regardless of race, gender, sex, nationality, ethnicity and the like, are all entitled to certain basic rights over their life and can be exempt from non-just forms of coercive action by other actors.  

Now while these basic Enlightenment values, originating in Europe around the time of the continent’s height of global imperial status, certainly have a hypocrisy to them given that context, it doesn’t mean those values on their own are therefore undesirable or somehow the language of the colonizer. It was, after all, the values inherent in the French Revolution — liberty, fraternity, equality — that inspired the Haitians to revolt against their French rulers in the world’s first-ever successful slave revolution, as Marxist C.L.R. James writes in his magisterial The Black Jacobins. 

The decolonial rhetoric of dismantling former-colonial and settler-colonial states ultimately relies on a fantasy of some kind of peaceful homeostatic pre-modern world before European colonialism came and corrupted humanity. It fails to broach the nuance of how even a horrible institution like modern colonialism can exist within the same constellation of ideas that brought about the French Revolution and many of the rights we enjoy today in liberal-democratic societies. Instead, this perspective sees any contiguity between the ideals produced out of the modern era and the practice of colonialism coming from the same or a similar source as reason to reject all European thought from that time, root and branch.  

This mode of thinking is a huge mistake as it’s the same rationale behind thinking that a $20 minimum wage in Canada or providing free healthcare in the US are not universally good policies because they’re being instituted by colonial nations to help colonizers, ipso facto, making them colonial policies instead of simply just good ones.  

Overall, universal principles of justice and the right to self-determination are vastly more politically viable and genuinely radical over impossible-to-define metrics of identity and impossible-to-settle questions around the reorganization of populations in order to “undo” colonialism. 

By: Christian Roethling and Andrew Hawlitzky 

On March 22, Nintendo launched their second game starring Princess Peach in 18 years, Princess Peach: Showtime! Public reception toward the game has been fairly positive, but that’s enough fun and games – what do The Game Boys think of the Princess’ latest excursion? 

Christian Roethling–– 

Here’s the thing about Princess Peach: Showtime!: it’s not perfect, but it does so many things right that it’s hard not to find something to love about it. 

Princess Peach’s second adventure is everything that Super Princess Peach – which was released for the DS in 2005 – should have been. While that game likely aimed to increase female representation in the Super Mario universe by featuring a woman as the protagonist for the first time in series history, it ultimately seemed degrading and reductive. 

The 2005 title saw Peach traversing its world by using her emotions to interact with the environment, meaning she would need to cry or go into a fit of rage to advance in certain sections, for example – something quite dehumanizing toward women when this is the game meant to put them in the spotlight. 

Princess Peach: Showtime! takes a vastly different approach. In the game, Peach must save the Sparkle Theater from the mysterious Sour Bunch, who have corrupted each of the shows playing in the theatre. The shows have become overrun with enemies and the star performers have been captured, leading Peach to team up with the theatre’s guardian Stella to save the day. 

Throughout the game, Peach visits a series of performances where she dresses up as the main character in each respective show, allowing her to inherit the abilities of that character. For example, when dressed in the appropriate garb, she becomes an expert Swordfighter who skillfully slashes her way through waves of enemies. The message here seems to be that Princess Peach is capable of anything she puts her mind to, a wonderful sentiment in contrast to her previous outing’s patronizing approach. 

From a gameplay perspective, each of these transformations keeps the game fresh and interesting. It’s similar to Kirby’s inhaling ability, but the difference is that Peach’s transformations don’t just change her abilities, they change the entire genre of the game. 

One performance might see Ninja Peach sneaking past enemies in a stealth mission, while the next has Detective Peach interrogating suspects to solve a mystery. None of these missions ever go very in-depth; they all feel like they could be the opening concept to a larger game based on each stage, but they still do a great job keeping the player on their toes. While some transformations had stronger gameplay loops than others, none of them stood out as particularly bad, and it’s nice to revisit them in sequel performances as the game goes on. 

Unfortunately, as unique as the game is, it makes a few serious missteps that prevent it from ever reaching true excellence. 

For one: the game is mind-bendingly easy. It’s very clear what age demographic the developers had in mind. While it’s nice to see a game for younger players, the game feels almost patronizing toward anyone who has any sort of gaming experience whatsoever. It would have been nice to have later levels ramp up the difficulty, or at least include an increased difficulty option for older gamers, but unfortunately the game will simply fail to provide any sort of challenge for anyone who’s ever held a video game controller. 

Furthermore, the game is very short, and can be beaten in five to six hours on a casual playthrough. I have no problem with shorter games; in fact, I think they can be a nice change of pace and be far less intimidating than a 50-hour RPG. However, I don’t think it’s quite right to charge full price for a game this short, even if it’s full of love from the developers. 

Frankly, I see no reason why this five-hour experience should cost as much as something like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Fire Emblem: Three Houses, each of which take multiple times longer to complete and have far more content for the player. 

All in all, Princess Peach: Showtime! is an excellent step forward for the character and female representation in the Super Mario universe. It delivers what it set out to do and vastly improves on its predecessor, but her inevitable third outing will have to deliver a bit more value if it hopes to be a true showstopper. 

Andrew Hawlitzky–– 

Of the two games in the Mario franchise starring female protagonists, Princess Peach: Showtime! is unquestionably the best. 

The first game in what might be eponymously called the “Peach” franchise, Super Princess Peach, constructs a rocky and sometimes controversial foundation for the series.  

Super Princess Peach’s reliance on emotion-based abilities opens the game up to some stereotypical portrayals of women in games. Some have gone so far as to call the 2005 title embarrassingly sexist, however, others claim that the expression of emotions to progress through levels is not an inherently degrading mechanic but the fact that this feature was only present in the one Mario game with a leading woman makes it a very slippery slope.  

18 years later, Showtime! flips the script with a whole new direction for Peach’s controls. In the game, Peach must defend the Sparkle Theatre from Grape using several setting-appropriate costumes which grant her different abilities.  

The game’s constant willingness to switch up the playstyle has drawn several comparisons to the Kirby franchise. But unlike Kirby, the level each costume is used in changes to a different genre. The Swordfighter levels are more combat-focused as opposed to the Patissiere levels which are more a design and baking-style game. 

Each level of Showtime! attempts something different and consistently takes the game in a different and often unexpected direction.  

There are, however, some noticeable downsides to Showtime! 

Like Super Princess Peach, Showtime! is a remarkably easy game with very few challenges that can’t be brute forced and requires little to no problem-solving. The level design, though beautiful and artfully thespian, offers the most rudimentary platforming sections. Bosses are exceedingly simple considering that Peach can take 5 hits (or more with power-ups) and all levels are replete with extra health.  

The control scheme is exceedingly simple. Players will only need to press two buttons for nearly the entire run of the game with almost no opportunities for combos. The A button is your all-in-one jump and dodge, and your B button uses your special costume-specific ability – usually some kind of attack.  

The target demographic for Showtime! seems to be very young Nintendo fans rather than women gamers as some may have predicted. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, however, Showtime!’s child-esque difficulty is one carry-on from the previous Super Princess Peach.  

Regardless, the attention-grabbing mixup of genres, the wondrous theatre-aesthetic that pulls the game together and the unapologetically euphoric musical score make Princess Peach: Showtime! one of Nintendo’s best games this year and offers great potential for future games starring the eponymous princess.  

… 

In a world where Peach can be anything she desires, Princess Peach: Showtime! chooses to be an unmistakably fun and exciting triumph for the franchise.  

Click here to read the first part of this Pokémon retrospective, which focuses on Pokémon Black and White. Click here to read the second part, which focuses on Pokémon X and Y. Click here to read the third part, which focuses on Pokémon Sun and Moon. 

Throughout the 2010s, the Pokémon franchise was consistently going downhill, but it wasn’t until 2019 that it reached the point of no return. 

When Pokémon Sword and Shield were revealed for Nintendo Switch early in the year, fans were excited. This would be the first new Pokémon generation to ever be playable on the TV, meaning players would no longer be confined to the tiny screens of handheld platforms. 

This should have been a momentous occasion for the franchise, but because of their penny-pinching and rush to release the game by the holiday season, The Pokémon Company and developer Game Freak would squander this special moment. 

When the game’s reveal trailer dropped on Feb. 27, 2019, there was nothing blatantly wrong with it. In fact, the game looked pretty good. The graphical improvements since Sun and Moon looked worthy of a home console experience. There appeared to be interesting new locations to explore and the three new starter Pokémon – Grookey, Scorbunny and Sobble – looked cute and fun.  

Despite all the issues that the franchise had faced over the last two generations, fans seemingly still had a good experience to look forward to given what was gleaned from the pre-release promotion. 

But if things were that simple, you wouldn’t be reading this article, would you? 

Things wouldn’t go terribly wrong until June 11, when Shigeru Ohmori and Junichi Masuda – the game’s director and producer, respectively – sat down for a livestream during Nintendo’s annual E3 conference in which they would show off live gameplay from the new titles. 

During this presentation, an obviously nervous Masuda would announce a major change to the series: for the first time in series history, players would not be able to transfer every Pokémon species from previous entries into the new games. 

In previous entries, every single Pokémon species was compatible and could be transferred in. Hypothetically, a player could have caught their favourite Pokémon in an old game a decade earlier and then transferred that Pokémon into every subsequent generation so it stays with them throughout every new journey. However, with Sword and Shield, only the Pokémon found naturally within the region were compatible to be transferred, meaning many fan-favourite species would simply have to be left out. 

Instead, blacklisted Pokémon species could only be transferred into Pokémon Home, where they could not be played with or interacted with in any meaningful sense. The service is essentially a glorified Pokémon purgatory where you can stare at PNGs of your beloved creatures while they wait for a future title that they’re compatible with. 

Masuda said that the Pokémon roster had gotten so big that it was no longer feasible to make every species compatible with new entries, but the damage was already done. 

Sure, the franchise had over 800 unique monsters at this point, but it didn’t seem like much of an excuse when Pokémon is the highest grossing media franchise of all time. Many sources estimate that the franchise is worth nearly $100 billion USD, which puts it ahead of Mickey Mouse, Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

And Masuda’s trying to tell us that 800 characters, which often repeat animations and each only make a few unique sounds, is too much for the franchise to maintain? It seemed like a poor excuse for a franchise with mind-blowing amounts of money that they seemingly just weren’t willing to spend. This would be understandable for a smaller developer with fewer resources, but if you’re bigger than Star Wars, you don’t have much of an excuse. 

Furthermore, it felt like The Pokémon Company was spitting upon the very motto that the franchise was built upon: “gotta catch ‘em all!” How could this be the franchise’s slogan – the main draw of the franchise that had become its claim to fame – when its newest game literally wouldn’t allow players to “catch ‘em all”? 

The outrage was massive, and you could feel the fanbase’s collective hype for the game rapidly plummet. The same people who were excited by the reveal trailer in February had begun using Sword and Shield as a punching bag for anything they could find to make fun of – and boy, there was a lot to joke about. 

First, and perhaps most obviously, is the infamous in-game tree shown off in the same livestream that Masuda delivered his terrible news in. It looked reminiscent of trees from 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a game that was released two decades prior on far less powerful hardware. If this tree was a part of Sword and Shield’s sprawling new “Wild Area,” an open world part of the game that was a heavy point of marketing for the games, what other ugly textures and models were they not showing yet? 

The new Dynamax gimmick looked boring and uninspired, simply making Pokémon larger and more powerful for a few turns during battle. And worse yet, this mechanic fully replaced Mega Evolutions and Z-Moves from previous generations, meaning they were nowhere to be found in Sword and Shield. This worsened an issue present in Sun and Moon where Mega Evolutions were brushed to the side, but now, they were entirely removed. 

One of Game Freak’s excuses for cutting over 400 Pokémon from the game at launch – 234 after the DLC released in 2020, adding back some Pokémon behind a paywall – was that they would be focusing on “higher quality animations” for existing creatures. This explanation would have held more merit if critics didn’t quickly discover that Game Freak was seemingly copying many animations from 3DS titles, leading fans to question if they were telling the truth at all. 

Things only got uglier once the games were released. 

Sword and Shield’s Galar region, which is based on the U.K., is designed in such a linear fashion that it often feels like you’re walking through an extended hallway rather than a dynamic, vast region. Previous regions in the franchise felt wide and open in design, even if their individual routes were fairly linear, but in Galar it felt like the entire region barely deviated from being a straight walkway. 

The game’s animations were also lacking – if they even existed at all. Sword and Shield make a point of cutting to black during certain moments that would require animation and showing exciting events off-screen, presumably to save on cost and time spent animating. It’s incredibly clear when Game Freak cut corners during development. 

The game’s story is simply dreadful. At many points, it feels as though the player is an observer on their friends’ journey, with the beloved Champion Leon sometimes tackling problems across the region on his own while the player is left to come check up afterward to see the result. It barely feels like you’re on an adventure – it feels like you’re along for the ride. 

The villainous organization setup attempts to repeat what Sun and Moon did, but here, it’s not executed well at all. Team Yell is the “evil team” this time around, and they’re nothing but a gang of hooligans who function as occasional battle padding, or worse yet, literal roadblocks to prevent the player from progressing until they’ve finished up their tasks in a given location. They are undoubtedly a less funny, more annoying version of Sun and Moon’s Team Skull. 

This time, the plot twist comes in the reveal that the rich chairman and the president of a major Galar conglomerate, Rose, is the true villain (who could have seen that coming?) and even his motivations are poorly executed. 

Essentially, Chairman Rose plans to bring about the “Darkest Day,” a sort of apocalyptic scenario for the Galar region that will cause Pokémon to grow gigantic and go berserk, in order to prevent a future energy crisis that is seemingly still many years away. He interrupts the player’s championship match to announce his plan, causing the player to rush off to defeat him. 

Why Rose is so intent on immediately bringing about an apocalypse that will prevent an energy crisis in the seemingly distant future is unclear and is a plot hole that can be chalked up to the game’s poor writing and lack of plot direction. It feels incredibly forced, almost as though the developers knew they needed a villain, so they threw one in at the last minute without providing any compelling motivations for the character. 

It’s true: Pokémon Sword and Shield are blatantly bad games, and they destroyed what should have been a special moment for the franchise. While previous entries such as X and Y or Sun and Moon came with their fair share of issues, they each came with positives that made the experience worthwhile. It’s difficult to say the same thing about Sword and Shield. Simply put, the games are terrible in just about every way. 

Let’s not forget the cherry on top of this absolutely disgusting cake: the computer mouse cursor that somehow made its way into the game’s final credits. While it’s seemingly a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, it somehow feels so representative of the entire Sword and Shield experience. 

These games should be considered an embarrassment for the highest-grossing media franchise in the world, and if they had been given proper care, love, funding, time and attention, they could have truly been something special. There’s no doubt that many developers at Game Freak love this franchise and likely want to develop something wonderful, but as long as they’re under a strict annual release schedule and aren’t given the resources they need to succeed, they’ll never be able to do so. 

Pokémon Sword and Shield are the most glaring examples of the downfall of the franchise, and it’s hard to imagine the franchise will ever return to the heights it once enjoyed. 

At least things can’t get any worse… right? 

This article is part of an ongoing retrospective on the downfall of the Pokémon mainline games. The final article in this series will cover the franchise’s ninth generation’s flagship titles, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. To remain updated on this series, stay tuned to The Brock Press. 

Services like OnlyFans and Uber point towards a new form of exploitation that is both hypermodern and feudal — all made possible by the Internet.  

You might be wondering how anyone could suggest that Uber and OnlyFans (OF) have any similarity beyond both being companies. While there are important differences about the specifics of the content of each service, when viewed at a macro-operational level their similarities become clearer. Both corporations are multinational monopoly digital platforms that use atomized labour from individuals who are viewed as flexible contractors, able to work whenever they so please with some caveats.  

Uber is a ridesharing and food-delivery app (Uber Eats) based in San Francisco, California. Beyond differences in the charging structures of Uber and taxis, which are important considering Uber capitalizes on the fact that many individuals own personal vehicles, they ultimately undercut the power of taxis who rely on scarcity of supply. Moreover, Uber doesn’t pay a cent on wear and tear of one’s personal vehicle or for gas when on the job allowing enough room from the lack of those fixed costs to charge less for rides and capture more of the market.  

The company is a successful example of Silicon Valley’s VC-infused tech-start-up sector which has a virtual monopoly on innovative high-technology production in the western hemisphere. Uber saw $1.8 billion USD in profit last year, the first time they posted profits since the now mega-corporation went public in 2019.  

While Uber is certainly a brilliant idea from a market standpoint, three important aspects of Uber’s model should be noted when thinking through how societally we are worse off with it around: 1) it makes use of already-existing infrastructure entirely created by the public sector in terms of roads and the Internet (which was largely developed by the US military); 2) it contracts labour from individuals who use their own labour (driving) and capital (a car) and are therefore treated as “independent contractors” despite being better described as employees; 3) most of its profits and taxed revenues don’t filter into the hundreds of cities and localities it operates in (other than Silicone Valley, California and the US federal government, but even those revenues being taxed can be avoided through tax evasion schemes like using a Dutch holding company to avoid taxes).  

Now consider OnlyFans, a London-based Internet-content subscription service that features mostly pornographic content from independent creators. OnlyFans makes revenue through fees, a 20 per cent cut on creators’ earnings and subscriptions.  

Again, the same three components are at play with OnlyFans: it uses the infrastructure of the already existing Internet; it considers its workers independent contractors who sell their labour (taking and posting erotic pictures and videos, usually of one’s own body); and the bulk of the company’s revenues are only being taxed in England and London.  

Much like how in the medieval period in Europe under manorialism, a lord owned a piece of land called a manor and had serfs work the land to support themselves and the lord, the “independent contractor” loophole on Uber and OnlyFans allows them to have no obligations to those who survive through working on their platforms, amounting to something like a digital fiefdom.   

In broad strokes, this is the argument posed by economist and former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis in his book released last year, Technofeudalism.  

In an interview with The Guardian, Varoufakis explains that the new lords of big tech “charge rent… The people we think of as capitalists are just a vassal class now. If you’re producing stuff now, you’re done. You’re finished. You cannot become the ruler of the world anymore.” 

While we can table the validity around the main thesis of Varoufakis’ book, that a techno-feudal system is replacing capitalism, his description of how big tech operates more like a feudal system than a capitalist one in the digital sphere perfectly describes the machinations of Uber and OnlyFans’ production model. Due to being considered “independent contractors” instead of employees, Uber drivers, for example, have had to fight in different countries and localities for employment status benefits like a minimum wage, health insurance and more.  

The biggest case of this linguistic-legalistic sleight of hand being undermined by collective action from couriers took place in Ontario, Canada.  

Uber Technologies Inc v Heller was a 2020 Supreme Court of Canada decision in which Ontario citizen and Uber courier David Heller and some of his colleagues argued they were entitled to a minimum wage and vacation and overtime pay under Ontario employment standards legislation. Uber fought this with the defence that being an “independent contractor” meant that one had flexibility over when to work and when not to, effectively making them not employees.  

The Supreme Court, however, reached an 8-1 decision in favour of Heller to proceed with a class action against the ride-share company, a decision many legal experts said constituted a major victory for labour rights in the grey zones of online “contract” work.  

Returning to the three previously outlined components that track in both OnlyFans’ and Uber’s business models, some of these shared characteristics can be solved in similar ways and others require more nuance to solve based on the content of the service. 

In Uber’s case, all three issues can be relieved by simply nationalizing the service.  

It makes sense if you consider that Uber is making use of public infrastructure in terms of roads, which take on wear and tear from their drivers, as well as the Internet, which was developed by United States’ taxpayers. As economist Mariana Mazzucato argues in her brilliant book The Entrepreneurial State, most of the greatest innovations of the past half century — the Internet, touchscreen technology, biotech breakthroughs, GPS, pharmaceutical NMEs, nanotechnology — were almost always first developed in the public sector and then the private sector later used the base innovation to create products like the iPhone.  

Another aspect to consider vis-a-vis nationalization is that most people can benefit from using an Uber-like service as most people today have a phone and because so much infrastructure in the modern world, especially in North America, is centred around the automobile. This means most people paying into a nationalized Uber-style service would reap the benefits at far lower costs.  

The knock-on effects of having a national Uber service would likely fix the “independent contractor” loophole as public sector employees, in general, have better benefits. Furthermore, the optics of a government employer skimping on standards protected in their own employee-standards legislation would be bad, to put it mildly.  

Nationalization would certainly fix the untaxed revenue issue with these platforms. The revenue would go directly back into the pockets of the governments offering the service, which could then be used to pay for more services for those governments’ constituents instead of doing what many large private firms do with their profits, i.e. buying back stock and boosting executive and shareholder pay as is the case in so many large publicly traded LLCs.  

OnlyFans is a trickier case when it comes to solutions.  

In many ways, OnlyFans is a far more safe and less viscerally exploitative platform for sex workers than in-person forms of sex work such as prostitution and stripping as one can create content from the privacy of their own home, circumventing the threats of rowdy customers, abusive management and the transmission of sexual infection and disease. With that being said, all the same issues around Uber in terms of the company avoiding providing basic employment benefits to their workers, avoiding taxes and using Internet infrastructure to build a private media empire are still at play with OnlyFans. 

However, it would be difficult to nationalize OF as one can anticipate with a reasonable degree of certainty that many taxpayers would not want their money funding a pornography-creator hub.  

Additionally, the service being a fully online digital commodity introduces other potential complications around access to foreign creators and consumers depending on how protectionist the platform policies are. If someone’s tax dollars going towards an adult-content platform wasn’t enough to disturb them, their tax support mainly helping creators outside their country who keep most of their earnings and who pay income taxes to their own governments just might. 

OnlyFans’ issues might be better treated by robust domestic legislation that takes its cue from the argument Heller brought to Uber, that OF is essentially an employer and needs to treat its workers as employees, providing benefits and so on.  

Beyond that, not much else can be done pragmatically to directly socialize a service like OF other than that and increasing regulation of sex work more generally, even when it’s purely an online commodity.  

Despite this, a wager might be made by the left that if other parts of society are cleansed of a logic dominated by capital, sex work — which will always exist of course — will be far less prevalent as people will likely feel less of a need to sell something as private as their naked body in a system that views people’s needs and unique abilities as far more essential than their ability to produce profits for a small amount of people in order to not starve, but I digress.  

All in all, platforms like Uber and OnlyFans signal a sea change in how we think about the direction the economy and society are moving.  

If Varoufakis is right, and a new kind of feudal political economy is emerging through big tech, that direction for all of us is likely not a better one, and OnlyFans and Uber are just the tip of the iceberg. 

Click here to read the first part of this Pokémon retrospective, which focuses on Pokémon Black and White. Click here to read the second part, which focuses on Pokémon X and Y. 

Ah, Pokémon Sun and Moon. These titles are full of nostalgic memories reminiscent of simpler times: the sun is shining; adventure is calling; and as I travel from destination to destination, my hand is being held so tightly that I’m simply begging to be set free. 

Pokémon Sun and Moon are the franchise’s flagship seventh-generation titles, and like their predecessor, they are Nintendo 3DS exclusives. 

The initial reveal of Sun and Moon poised the games as a major 20th-anniversary celebration for the franchise. The trailer hinted at an island locale for the titles, a vast departure from the urban themes of previous generations. While Generations One through Four were based on real-life regions in Japan, Generations Five and Six moved away from Eastern themes by taking inspiration from New York City and France respectively. 

With Sun and Moon’s tropical Alola region, though, the franchise appeared to be moving away from densely-populated urban cities and moving toward a more unique identity. This was something distinct for the series and wonderful to see in a franchise that had become reliant on tradition and repetition. 

Thankfully, this philosophy continued into the games’ greater design, with many gameplay concepts and plot points deviating from the franchise’s long-since-set norms. Unfortunately, as revolutionary as many of these new ideas were, they came with a few trade-offs that would end up making Sun and Moon simultaneously the most fresh and frustrating entries the franchise had ever seen. 

Let’s start with the positives. 

The Alola region, a core facet of the games’ identity, is uniquely memorable and forms a brilliant contrast with the series’ big-city urban traditions. The region is comprised of four islands which are explored linearly, and like Super Mario Sunshine, the games usually make every effort to stay true to their tropical source material. 

Throughout their adventure, players visit sandy beaches, tropical cities, dense jungles, and even a massive volcano. The game takes some creative liberties with locations such as a snowy mountain, but it’s understandable that Game Freak wanted some further diversity in the types of locations the player explores. 

Speaking of the tropical setting, the lineup of new Pokémon species is fantastic in Sun and Moon. More than ever before, the new species feel truly in line with the game’s setting, and the creatures genuinely feel like they came straight out of an island paradise. There have been previous Pokémon species that felt inspired by their respective region, but as a whole, the seventh-generation Pokédex feels more committed to its region than ever before. 

Standouts include creatures based on geckos, sand castles, sea cucumbers and – perhaps the most obvious example – a wreath of flowers. 

But the 86 new species introduced in Sun and Moon aren’t all. The game also introduces “Alolan Forms” of already existing Pokémon, which are redesigns of old species that are supposedly only found in the Alola region. Alolan Forms were only given to first-generation Pokémon, but they breathed new life into old, familiar designs. 

The game introduces some user-friendly features like revealing the effectiveness of a Pokémon’s moves before you use them, and the removal of the long-frustrating Hidden Machine (HM) system. Some might be concerned that these changes make the game too easy, but I argue that there’s a difference between features that smoothen the game experience – commonly referred to as quality-of-life features – and removing meaningful challenges from the actual turn-based gameplay. 

For the first time in series history, Sun and Moon drop Pokémon Gyms, replacing them with similar-yet-different Island Trials. Each Trial requires the player to finish a different task around the island, whether that means progressing through an area, winning a spot-the-difference challenge, foraging for materials or successfully passing a quiz. Each Trial concludes with a boss battle against a powered-up Totem Pokémon, which tests the player’s team. Progression-wise, they serve a similar purpose to Gyms, but they’re a nice change of pace for the once-formulaic franchise. 

The villainous team of antagonists in Sun and Moon is also a major improvement in comparison to X and Y.  

The games feature the organization Team Skull: a group of trouble-causing knuckleheads with no clear ambition in mind. They’re easily the least intimidating “evil Team” out of the franchise so far, but this works because they’re clearly written as comic relief rather than the usual terrorist organization. The games make a big joke out of Team Skull, and the game never asks the player to take them too seriously. 

What’s interesting about the setup is the eventual plot twist. It’s eventually revealed that the Aether Foundation, an organization that is initially treated by the game as a group of people wanting to rescue and help injured Pokémon, is the game’s true antagonist. Unbeknownst to the player throughout most of their adventure, the Aether Foundation’s leader is driven by an obsession for otherworldly “Ultra Beasts,” and her true ambition is to open a dangerous wormhole to another world so she might become closer to them. 

It needs to be mentioned that plot twists are incredibly unusual for Pokémon titles. Normally, villainous teams are obvious antagonists from the very beginning, so it’s another nice change to reinvent the Pokémon formula. 

That’s about everything the game does right, and with all those changes, it’s definitely a much more interesting adventure than the preceding X and Y. However, it wouldn’t be a modern Pokémon game if it didn’t mess up somewhere, and sure enough, the game has several issues that make it much less enjoyable than entries like Black and White. 

The game’s biggest flaw can be summed up in one word: handholding. 

Throughout the entire adventure, the game constantly check-ups on the player and reminds them where they need to be going or what they should be doing next. The games strip away any sort of independence from the player, and at times, you have to wonder if the game designers just think you’re a complete and total idiot. 

While older Pokémon titles felt like you were stepping into the world to go on a grand adventure of independent discovery, Sun and Moon feel more like you’re being led on an overly scripted tour. Rather than letting the player discover the world for themselves, the game has constant NPCs waiting around every corner ready to deliver long walls of text to the player. Frankly, it’s annoying, and it often feels like the game needs to put far more trust in the player. 

Imagine you’re on a tour of a tropical resort and you want to explore, but after every 50 steps you take, your tour guide freezes you in your tracks and forces you to listen to a boring monologue. Congratulations: you’ve just had the Sun and Moon experience. 

It may sound like a small point especially when contrasted against the long list of positives that Sun and Moon offer, but remember that this is constant throughout the whole experience. This doesn’t just affect a short portion of the game – it’s a major downfall for the entire experience and makes it significantly less fun than it could have been with fewer restrictions. 

This might be nice for people who don’t often play video games or enjoy text-based experiences, but for the plethora of returning players and series’ veterans, it’s condescending and patronising. 

A connected issue is the massive amount of text throughout the whole adventure. For those who don’t skip through dialogue by mashing the A button, a considerable amount of time playing Sun and Moon will likely be spent reading. 

In fact, when the games’ definitive versions launched a year later as Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, an interview with Game Freak revealed that those versions actually double the script from the original Sun and Moon, meaning the problem is twice as bad in those versions. How is that a selling point? 

It’s not a visual novel. It’s Pokémon. Cut the crap and get on with it already. 

The other major issue with Sun and Moon is that they almost ignore the highly popular Mega Evolution feature from X and Y. Now, Sun and Moon do technically feature Mega Evolution, but it’s swept to the side in favour of a new (and much less exciting) gimmick, Z-Moves. In short, Z-Moves are powered-up moves for different types and species of Pokémon. They’re interesting, but they pale in comparison to Mega Evolution, which felt like extensions of old tried-and-true creature designs. 

Instead, Mega Evolution feels like an afterthought that was included as a technicality. The player only unlocks Mega Evolution after beating the game, and it’s clear that Z-Moves are now the main focus. 

On its own, this may not be a big deal – after all, Megas are still in Sun and Moon – but the problem is that this move started the trend of abandoning gimmicks in favour of new ones, something that would become even worse in subsequent generations when Mega Evolutions and Z-Moves were dropped entirely. Fans were excited by Mega Evolution when they launched in X and Y, but apparently, it was just a gimmick meant to be forgotten about by the next generation. Despite featuring Mega Evolution in the post-game, I argue that Sun and Moon are still the first entries responsible for this terrible tradition. 

All in all, Sun and Moon aren’t inherently bad games. There’s a lot they do well; the problem is that their positives are each dragged down by poor development decisions that burden the entire experience. Their highs are a lot higher than that of X and Y, but similarly, their lows are a lot lower. 

Unfortunately, like X and Y, a lot of the problems seen in Sun and Moon would carry into later games in the franchise. These issues aren’t one-and-done; they’re omens of worse things to come. 

Perhaps Pokémon Sun and Moon would be remembered as better games if their issues didn’t continue into subsequent generations, but as it stands, it’s hard not to see them as anything but the games that launched the series further into unending freefall. 

This article is part of an ongoing retrospective on the downfall of the Pokémon mainline games. The next article in this series will cover the franchise’s eighth generation’s flagship titles, Pokémon Sword and Shield. To remain updated on this series, stay tuned to The Brock Press. 

Notorious video game hacker Gary Bowser deserved to be punished for his actions, but Nintendo’s response to the situation was too severe with Bowser’s life being ruined as a result. 

At one point in his life, Bowser had an innocent love of electronics. He ran an internet café and completed additional work repairing devices. Much of his life purpose, it would seem, revolved around his understanding and love of electronics. 

The ironically named Bowser would eventually join Team Xecuter, a notorious group that created hardware able to circumvent anti-piracy measures on popular video game consoles such as the Nintendo Switch. The group would illegally create and sell this hardware for profit, allowing them to make money by stealing the work of legitimate, hardworking video game developers. 

At first, Bowser was mainly responsible for keeping their website updated, but thanks to his extroverted nature, his role in the group would become more widespread as time went on. 

“I started becoming a middleman in between the people doing the development work, and the people actually owning the mod chips, playing the games,” said Bowser in an interview with The Guardian. “I would get feedback from the testers, and then I would send it to the developers… I can handle people, and that’s why I ended up getting more involved.” 

Despite functioning as a middleman for a group with several members, Bowser would eventually become a scapegoat for Team Xecuter and, to a large extent, everyone involved in video game piracy. While many of Team Xecuter’s members continue to walk free, Bowser has seemingly taken on the brunt of the group’s punishment. 

Nintendo is aware of this, and it appears their harsh punishment for Bowser is an attempt to make an example out of him. 

Indeed, Bowser’s actions were wrong. While there’s a case to be made for the ethicality of emulating retro products no longer available on store shelves, there’s no justification for stealing the work of developers whose work is easily accessible and available on store shelves. It’s not much different from shoplifting, albeit in a more roundabout way. 

The problem is that Bowser has still taken on a punishment that should be shared across Team Xecuter, not placed on only his person. It appears Nintendo has ruined his life in an attempt to scare others away from engaging in piracy, but it is still unethical to impose such heavy consequences upon one person in a criminal organization. 

On the night he was captured, Bowser was in his bed when he awoke to several rifles pointed at his head. He was promptly put in the back of a pickup truck and sent to the Interpol office before being sent to a series of prisons to serve his 40-month sentence. He served 14 months before being released for good behaviour, but those 14 months were anything but easy. 

Nintendo and Bowser came to an agreement that – after paying for personal necessities like rent – Bowser would have to pay Nintendo 20 to 30 per cent of everything else he made as part of the $14.5 million he’s been sentenced to pay. As such, when he was paid morsels to counsel his distraught fellow prisoners, he was already paying Nintendo around $25 per month. 

Bowser’s medical situation was also being neglected during his time in prison, a situation worsened by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which required him to spend time in isolation. His left leg has elephantiasis, but because of the pandemic, he couldn’t leave his cell often and spent most of his time sitting down. At one point, he couldn’t get his shoe onto his foot, so he would walk around barefoot. 

Now, after his release from prison, Bowser lives in relative misery. He goes to physical therapy to treat his disability three times a week, but that comes with a financial cost, and Nintendo’s likely keeping a careful eye on his payments. He’s also estranged from his family and relies on his friends to keep him clothed and fed. He’s landed a few coding jobs since his release but hasn’t found anything long-term – and of course, any reputable company performing a background check would likely throw his application away immediately given his infamous legal history. 

Again, this is an interesting scenario because Bowser does deserve punishment for his actions, but it’s hard to deny that the severity of his consequences is unfair and cruel. There are murderers who have gotten off more easily than Bowser.  

Nintendo understandably wants to scare people away from committing piracy, but in doing so, they’ve effectively ruined Bowser’s entire life. 

One might argue that Bowser ruined his own life through his illegal choices, but again, the consequences far outweigh the crime here – especially when they’re burdened upon one individual on behalf of a group of criminals. 

In case it’s not obvious, Nintendo doesn’t actually need the money they’ll be getting from Bowser. Yes, Team Xecuter cost Nintendo quite a lot of money – about $65 million to $150 million in Nintendo’s estimation – but as the richest company in Japan with $11 billion of value and no debt, they’ll clearly be fine whether or not they get their $14.5 million from Bowser.  

With this in mind, it’s easy to surmise that this settlement’s main purpose wasn’t to save the company or even recoup losses; it’s purely to punish Bowser into oblivion and destroy his life in a way that no one would ever want to risk following. 

The severity of Nintendo’s punishment for Bowser is unethically extreme. While he did deserve punishment for his actions, he didn’t deserve to have his life entirely destroyed. 

Originality should not be the bottom line of making art. 

Anybody who creates knows the burden of originality. Sessions of creative flow can often be interrupted by thoughts of, “this has been done before,” or “this is just a mixture of pre-existing works.” 

In the digital age, where shows and movies are churned out at such a rapid pace, and where people have hardly any time to digest content before moving on to the next thing, creating meaningful, original content can feel impossible.  

So much has been made. Not only do we compete against the millions of other people creating today, but there are already millennia of pre-existing and culturally significant art. Even filmmaking goes back a century, or longer if you consider theatre productions as a form of proto-film. 

But the reality is that barely anything is entirely original today, and the most popular creations are reminiscent of other successes. 

Dune: Part Two is one of the highest-rated films of 2024 – and the highest-grossing film worldwide at the time of writing. In my preparation to see the movie, I watched a 20-minute recap of Dune: Part One, in which the film was described as “Game of Thrones in space, with sandworms instead of dragons.” 

Game of Thrones is an incredibly popular series, but does its existence mean that all political high fantasy is off the table? Dune would disagree. The plot thickens when you consider how Frank Herbert’s original Dune novel came out in 1965, 34 years before George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones was published. 

The reality of it all is that creation has always been based upon intertextuality, or the relationship between texts across forms, genres and creators. 

Some narratives and archetypes have indeed been done to death (I’m looking at you, Luke Skywalker). Poets who compare their love to a bed of roses, or their grief to a black hole, aren’t going to win any awards. However, equating originality to that which has never been done before is a dangerous mindset for creators, especially those who are young or still learning. 

Getting inspired by other creators is nothing to be ashamed of; in fact, it may give your creation more merit to be compared to already-successful works. 

Nothing, for example, quite compares to the first Metroidvania-style game I ever played, Hollow Knight. But even Hollow Knight isn’t entirely original. It is essentially a combination of Super Metroid and Dark Souls, but it works because of the apparent love, dedication and unique elements that comprise it. 

Intertextuality speaks to the progression of art as a whole: creators building off of each other’s ideas throughout space and time. The earliest ancient Greek statues, like Cleobis & Biton, are heavily inspired by statues from ancient Egypt. 

“Entirely original content” would exist in a vacuum outside of all other art, forgoing the conversational and intertextual nature of content that already exists. Even highly experimental work often comments on the status quo in one way or another. It would imply a creator who does not engage in any form of art, and even someone like this might end up making something that’s “already been done.” 

In 2023, Ed Sheeran was sued for copyright infringement for his song “Thinking Out Loud,” in which he was accused of copying Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” Sheeran won the case by playing his guitar in court to perform a multitude of songs that all use the same chord progression – Sheeran explained the defence and partially performed it on The Howard Stern Show.  

Similar to tropes in fiction, or colours in a painting, chord progressions are “in a songwriter’s ‘alphabet,’ [their] toolkit, and should be there for [everyone] to use,” said Sheeran. Artists who pave an entirely unique path may be original, but there’s a reason why popular trends become popular in the first place. 

Experimentation is crucial for the progression of art, don’t get me wrong, but progress is defined by building upon a shared foundation. The Great Pyramid of Giza wasn’t built overnight, after all, and its conception wouldn’t be possible without the Egyptian architecture that came before it. 

At the end of the day, making art is an outlet for emotion and creativity, and every artist brings something new to the table or can spin a pre-existing trend in their own, unique way. Of course, copying work is nothing to be proud of, and plagiarising or using other people’s intellectual property can get you in hot water. 

Using other people’s specific characters, settings, or ideas is not what I’m talking about. You cannot make your own video game about Samus Aran without getting Nintendo’s permission, but you could craft a story about space warriors and aliens. Anyone engaged in the act of creating shouldn’t be concerned with whether their ideas are original enough, but you can always check Canada’s copyright laws to be safe. 

The best art comes out of play-work but getting bogged down by thoughts of “what if it isn’t good or original” is incredibly restrictive, especially in a society characterized by countless other stressors, and in which it can feel like everything has been done. 

But art has not ceased. Authors have not stopped writing novels, movies keep coming out to critical reviews, and billions of people still enjoy music and visual art.  

Art is everlasting, and the future of it rests in the palms of young creators, even those who think their work isn’t good enough, or not original enough. 

The Conservative Party endlessly repeats the same lies about the carbon tax. What they never show is the other side of the ledger, where it’s clear that the tax doesn’t harm those who they say it does.  

If you’ve ever seen an advertisement from the leader of the Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre, you’ve likely heard him target the carbon tax as something that’s hurting Canadian families and small farmers. The Official Opposition leader has been campaigning to remove Trudeau’s carbon tax with the #AxeTheTax branding phrase.  

However, Poilievre is prone to making declarative statements without showing his math. The most readily apparent example of this is how Poilievre’s campaign website for the imminent federal election in Canada features no actual analytic breakdowns of how he’ll help low-income families with, say, cutting the carbon tax or doing away with “red tape” and government bureaucracy.  

Meanwhile, former US Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders features numerical breakdowns of how to feasibly expand Social Security on his campaign website from the now long-past 2020 US general election.  

Understanding the carbon tax 

It’s important to note that Canada has had pricing on carbon pollution at a federal level going back to the late 1990s. What Conservatives are talking about when they complain about a cumbersome carbon tax on businesses and individuals today is Trudeau’s bill, the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act (GHGPPA), which passed in 2018.  

The GHGPPA levies a fee on carbon emissions where 90 per cent of the revenue is returned to households in the form of rebates with a graded scale of returns depending on income levels in order to help lower-income houses. The remaining 10 per cent of revenue is given back to small businesses and weaker sectors affected by the tax. As of now, the tax imposes $65 CAD per tonne of CO2 equivalent. This figure is set to increase to $170 CAD by 2030.  

This breakdown already punctures an important framing tactic that the Conservatives use to fearmonger about its harmful effect on regular Canadians: the revenues from the federal tax are returned to the localities from which they are taken. Conservatives leave this fact out becauseit makes it easier to pretend that the Liberal federal government is a kind of Leviathan stealing taxes from ordinary Canadians who rely on gas to get to their jobs in order to fill its Ottawa coffers.  

More importantly, when Conservatives only show the amount taken off the top to say the tax harmfully affects families and businesses, they do so by deliberately ignoring the other side of the ledger in terms of the returns from the built-in rebate system. “Through the Canada Carbon Rebate, eight out of 10 families in backstop provinces receive more money back than they pay into the system, with lower-income households benefiting the most,” explains the Canadian government’s website.  

This means in more cases than not, the average Canadian is making money from the carbon tax. Yes, even when considering the tax’s marginal effect on inflation (0.15 per cent of inflation numbers according to the Bank of Canada), the tax is helping middle- and low-income Canadians.  

Farming and industry under the tax 

Another rhetorical feature of Poilievre’s campaigns against carbon pricing is the claim that it harmfully affects businesses. He likes to point out specifically how the farmer is negatively affected as it taps into long-felt western alienation in Canada, making him seem more down to earth than Ottawa elites embroiled in their cozy white-collar lifestyles.  

Barring the rebate system seeing that more times than not — especially for lower-income Canadians through means testing — the tax gives back more than was paid into by individuals, farmers and industry in general are in a pretty good place due to special exemptions and alternative pricing systems.  

For farmers, there’s a clause carved out of the carbon pricing legislation that exempts all diesel and gasoline as well as biological greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) used for operations. In fact, for better or worse, about 97 per cent of GHG emissions are not subject to carbon pricing. So much for Poilievre’s back-pocket archetypal farmer being robbed by Ottawa for his cows’ collective flatulence and heating the barn.  

There are similar exemptions made for fishers as well. 

At this point the reader may ask: But what about the carbon tax making large-scale industry non-competitive? Well, fortunately this was already thought of and is why inside the GHGPPA there’s the Output-Based Pricing System (OBPS) which specifically ensures that the same tax on individuals based on CO2 equivalent isn’t applied to larger scale industry.  

If a business has a facility (or facilities) that exceeds 10,000 tonnes (10 kilotonnes) of carbon-dioxide equivalent GHG emissions, then that business is covered under the OBPS which exempts the business from the fuel charge. Instead, businesses protected by the OBPS must pass a threshold of emitting 50,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent GHGs to be subject to carbon pricing.  

Furthermore, there are special tax credits given to OBPS-subject businesses that invest in greener technology and that expend fewer emissions based on similar-activity/product averages, thus monetarily encouraging a transition to renewables and better industry practices: 

“The OBPS sets an emissions limit for each facility subject to the OBPS (covered facilities). This emissions limit is calculated using an emissions-intensity performance standard (i.e., a set level of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per unit of output) for a given product or activity. Facilities that emit less than their emissions limit earn surplus credits they can sell or save for later use. Facilities that emit more than their annual emissions limit must provide compensation for the excess emissions by a prescribed deadline. 

“By allowing facilities to generate and trade surplus credits for reducing their emissions below the limit, the OBPS ensures that the incentive to reduce emissions created by the carbon pollution price applies to every tonne of emissions from industrial facilities.” 

As such, the OBPS is a concession to large-scale fossil-fuel intensive businesses, likely the result of lobbying.  

For example, New Brunswick Green Party Leader David Coon suggested lobbying was behind Ottawa’s switching of the pricing cap in 2018 to have it where “natural gas stations face carbon taxes on emissions above 370 tonnes, oil on emissions above 550 tonnes and coal above 800 tonnes, a major concession to coal plants,” which ran against prior commitments from the Liberals to incentivize coal plants switching to natural gas. 

These price allocations make little sense when it comes to combatting climate change when considering that coal is the “dirtiest” fuel source when it comes to GHGs, accounting for 0.3 of the 1-degree Celsius increase in average global temperatures. Burnt coal emits nitrogen oxides which beyond creating visually impairing smog and haze is a major contributor to respiratory illness and lung disease including cancer. 

It’s interesting to see “coal concessions” considering the fearmongering that Conservatives project onto carbon pricing.  

However, this brings up another issue: do Conservatives have a plan to deal with climate change?  

Poilievre is running a campaign on getting the government out of the way, but with regulations and government out of the scene there will simply be no market-oriented solution to climate change, and if there is it will come too late as capital is always focuses on what’s profitable in the short-term.  

Without regulation and government planning, it will essentially be a rigged game of chicken between the major GHG-emitting industry giants: instead of their C-class employers and investors standing on the tracks waiting to see if their competitors will jump out of the way of the train of climate catastrophe first, it will be people like their workers who can’t financially shield themselves from the effects of climate catastrophe — extreme weather events, mass immigration, ecocide, famine, war — standing on the tracks.  

The point is that the train in this metaphor only comes because GHG-emitting capital is constructing the rails and choosing to mutually commission the train at the expense of the majority of us.  

While the carbon tax is not the royal road to sustainable energy consumption, it’s a push in the right direction. Conservative hyperbole around the tax’s negative impact is simultaneously a cover-up of their lack of plans to combat climate catastrophe and their stabbing the average Canadian in the back because of incumbent business interests who are their real party base.