“I’ve ranted a lot about youth voter turnout and garnered some attention just because I lead a public life,” Mercer said  about the project. “There are so many people who keep our democracy moving in private and never get recognized. How and why someone gets involved shouldn’t be a state secret—it should be a state celebration.”

The goal of having a less cynical political population seems to be related to low voter turnouts and polls showing democratic satisfaction is at an all time low in Canada (55%).

Samara co-founder, Michael MacMillan, addressed the need for more recognition at the grass roots level, saying: “Everyday Political Citizens play a fundamental role in making politics work. And unlike volunteers in other sectors, these individuals too often go unrecognized, as politics is not seen to be a worthwhile place for good, honest people to invest time, these people are the antidote to today’s cynical views on politics.”

Now, my nature is to be skeptical of this kind of thing. Peppered throughout the Samara press releases are buzz words like “democratic vibrancy” and cliches like “building a better country”. It’s hokey. But I think it’s a worthwhile effort. The civic minded people of this country deserve better, and at least recognizing that they exist is optically important at this time.

The typical avenues used to engage people in the democratic process clearly aren’t working. Tools like attack ads and finger pointing are a huge turn-off for most, and simply saying “make sure you vote folks” is just another phrase we tune out at this point. I say we embrace the earnestness of this award, even if it may not feel right.

Oh, feel free to nominate me here. I voted in two of the last three elections!

It’s easy to conclude from the video that, more accurately, It Mostly Seems To Get Better For White People Who Work In The Arts, and I’d hardly be the first to criticize the project for its blithe elision of wide swathes of the queer experience. The project has taken some flak—I would say deservedly—for being lily-white, for being classist, for being ableist,, for being just plain factually incorrect, or for being downright smug. But it’s Friday! Let’s look on the bright side. A bunch of Canadian celebrities are telling queer kids to hang in there, and that’s just swell.

But if you’re looking for videos and stories that better reflect the actual diversity of the population, I’d suggest taking a look at the We Got Your Back Project from the U.S., which explicitly aims to solicit and highlight It Gets Better stories from people of colour, people with disabilities, working-class people, and others who seemed underrepresented in the original version. There’s something sanctimonious about Rick Mercer or George Smitherman telling you how nifty their lives are now that they’re all grown up, financially secure, and working in positions of power: like, duh—of course it got better for them. Hooray.

Anyway, Canadian queer celebrities! Passive-Aggressive High Five!

MIT Professor Sheila Kennedy's solar-energy-producing textiles. Courtesy Sheila Kennedy.

Rick Mercer’s quip during the Copenhagen climate conference last December summed it up best: “So [Stephen] Harper flew to Copenhagen to have a club sandwich and hide in his room?”

The post-Copenhagen doldrums were still bringing us down when Thomas Auer, managing director of Transsolar, the German climate-engineering firm assigned to the Manitoba Hydro Place, stepped onto a stage at Toronto’s Interior Design Show in January to explain his vision on designing a world without oil. The future in sustainable architecture is about harnessing daylight and fresh air, he declared.

The theme that came up again and again in presentations from renowned engineers, architects, designers and futurists at IDS was if we are to kick our oil addiction, guilt-tripping us won’t work. But seduction through innovative design just might. As design guru Bruce Mau said, “I don’t believe we can succeed in sustainability without making it more sexy and beautiful.”

So imagine, for example, a beach house with billowing curtains that harvest sunlight and convert it to energy— enough to juice up your laptop or illuminate your bedroom at night. Sheila Kennedy, architect, inventor and MIT prof, has done just that. Her sensuous textiles (including lace) are implanted with ultra-thin photovoltaic strips that produce electricity when exposed to light.

For Fritz Haeg, desirable objects took a backseat to the human condition. A geodesic-dome-dwelling architect based in California, Haeg says the story of oil is one of disconnection. There was a time when we used the resources immediately within our reach and dealt with our waste locally as well, Haeg says, but oil took this away and unintentionally led to our present ignorance about the environment.

One of Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates. Courtesy Fritz Haeg.

Edible Estates, Haeg’s ongoing gardening project, is trying to change that. By turning eight suburban front lawns from spaces you cut and “keep off” into productive gardens, Haeg wants to bring back a reality rendered invisible by oil. He’s not a Slow Food idealist; instead, Haeg says that questioning the front lawn is just the easiest first wedge into unraveling the old structure of our cities. But he acknowledges the idea will face resistance in suburbia. “How far have we come from the core of our humanity that the act of growing our own food might be considered impolite, unseemly, threatening, radical or even hostile?” he asks.

Yello Strom energy metre in use. Courtesy Yello Strom.

Like Haeg, Ted Howes of global consultancy IDEO believes that we have to turn energy from an invisible commodity into a tangible experience. And social media can help. The Yello Strom energy meter, which Howes helped develop for the German market, is a small wall-mounted box with a curvy bright yellow shell and a simple-to-read meter that could easily have been plucked from an Apple store window. It sends out tweets about your energy consumption and gives consumers direct access to Google’s energy management tool, PowerMeter. A phone app is sure to follow.

The attitude that we can wean ourselves off oil by finding more attractive alternatives may have ironically been best summed up by the man who was Saudi Arabia’s oil minister during the 1973 oil embargo. “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone,” sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani said recently, “and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

“We know that the greatest obstacles to technological progress are organizational, cultural, sociological,” says Anita McGahan, a professor who teaches “The End of Oil” [PDF] at the University of Toronto. “They’re not technical. We have the technology.”

Now we need the political leadership.

Update, Friday, March 19: It seems to me that it’s impossible to truly know where the government stands. One moment the foreign minister says birth control isn’t included in their G8 maternal health push. The next the prime minister’s backing up on that, saying discussion around birth control’s not out of the cards.

***

There were mumblings during the Olympics about our government’s plans to focus on maternal and children’s health during the upcoming G8 meeting in Muskoka. At the time, it was announced that abortion would not be discussed during the talks—an unfortunate revelation, but really not terribly surprising.

But now the Tories are saying they won’t even be discussing birth control during the meetings—yet another backwards decision from the powers that be in Ottawa.

The decision, they say, is based on the fact that they plan to focus discussion on “saving lives”—implying that birth control isn’t part of that. An article in the Globe and Mail quotes Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon as saying:

“It does not deal in any way, shape or form with family planning. Indeed, the purpose of this is to be able to save lives,” Mr. Cannon told the Foreign Affairs committee.

Maternal and children’s health will be forever tied to access to birth control, not least access to abortion. As comedian Rick Mercer wrote on Twitter when the news came out, “…caucus, read a book.” The idea that contraception use doesn’t have anything to do with saving lives is so out-dated I’m astounded the government would be actually say it out loud. Condom use decreases the spread of HIV/AIDS and other STDs, and it can be argued that hormonal birth control saves the lives of countless children who would have been born into dangerous, unhealthy situations.

Aside from this is the idea that women use birth control only because of the desire to not have children. Birth control is about more than just reproduction. There are a variety of health reasons as to why birth control is important. Many women risk their lives when pregnant due to underlying health issues. Many women are only able to stabilize and handle their monthly periods thanks to the hormones that birth control provides. And men avoid not only fatherhood, but sexually transmitted infections also through the use of condoms. Having, or not having, children is part of a more complex equation.

All of this to say that contraception will continue to play a role in saving lives around the world, and can have a strong impact in helping countries develop. The fear, of course, is that the Harper government is taking up right where the Bush administration left off—promising global health funding on terms that birth control not be included in the plan.

In a level-headed statement, the assistant medical dean at the University of British Columbia, Dorothy Shaw, told the Globe we need to focus on common ground to save lives. But in politics, common ground is uncommon—and I fear this is only one more step in eroding our government’s commitment not only to public health, but to women’s rights as well.