Quotulatiousness

March 19, 2024

Canada’s new international role: the object lesson in failure and tyranny

Tristin Hopper rounds up some of the foreign impressions of Canada’s descent into the west’s object lesson in what not to do in almost every area:

In just the last week, there have been two separate columns in British newspapers framing Canada as a model of what not to do.

Both were inspired by the tabling of Bill 63, the Liberals’ Online Harms Bill. The Spectator said that it effectively engendered the founding of a Canadian “thought police”. The Telegraph cited it as evidence that “Canada’s descent into tyranny is almost complete”.

This didn’t used to happen. It wasn’t too long ago that Canadian politics were famously inaccessible to the wider world. For Canada’s 2008 federal election, The Spectator covered it with a blog post that mostly mused on how nobody cared. “It’s curious that Canada receives almost no foreign coverage, even in Britain where there are, after all, plenty of people with Canadian relatives or connections,” it read.

But now – on topics ranging from assisted suicide to housing affordability to internet regulation – it’s not infrequent that Canada will be cited in foreign parliaments and in foreign media as the very model of a worst-case scenario.

It was just six months ago that The Telegraph scored a viral hit with a mini-documentary framing the political situation in Canada as a “warning to the West”.

“Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has sought to position itself as the global bastion of progressive politics,” reads a synopsis for the film Canada’s Woke Nightmare, which has garnered more than five million views.

The documentary notes that Canada is now at the absolute global vanguard of progressive issues including harm reduction, assisted suicide and gender ideology.

[…]

If the Online Harms Act is suddenly garnering headlines across the rest of the Anglosphere, it’s not because Canadian politics are inherently interesting to the wider world. Rather, it’s because Bill C-63 – just like any number of Trudeau policies before it – is proposing to do things that no other Western democracy has yet proposed.

While plenty of Canada’s peer countries have hate speech controls, Bill C-63 was able to raise even European eyebrows with life sentences for “advocating genocide”, and a provision for police to mandate house arrest merely on suspicion that a Canadian was likely to commit a hate crime.

The Wall Street Journal, for one, profiled the bill as a real-life example of the 2002 film Minority Report, which depicts a dystopian future in which citizens are jailed for “pre-crime”.

Or in the critical words of The Spectator, “this legislation authorises house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime … if that’s not establishing a thought police, I don’t know what is”.

March 16, 2024

Canadian courts bracing for a “tsunami” of Pretendians

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper on the dawning realization among Canadian provincial courts that they are facing a huge increase in the number of offenders hoping to take advantage of the reduced sentences available to First Nations people:

“The Pretendians”, a CBC documentary – https://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/episodes/the-pretendians

A B.C. judge has warned that a “tsunami” of fake Indigenous people are set to hit the Canadian court system as offenders increasingly claim Indigenous status in a bid to obtain lighter treatment.

“A Tsunami is coming; driven by the desire of non-Indigenous people to get what they perceive to be the benefits of identifying as Indigenous,” B.C. Provincial Court Judge David Patterson said in a decision published this week.

Patterson warned his fellow judges “to be alive to the issue of Indigenous identity fraud” and begin demanding “proof” that offenders are “entitled to be sentenced as an Indigenous person”.

The decision was in regards to a Prince George, B.C., pastor, Nathan Legault, who was convicted of several charges related to the sexual victimization of young girls under his supervision, including a conviction for the making of child pornography.

But before the sentencing, Legault told the court he now self-identified as Métis, and should thus be subject to Gladue Rights — a system wherein judges are required to consider lighter and “alternate” sentences for Indigenous offenders.

First written into the Criminal Code in 1995 and then encoded in the 1999 Supreme Court decision R v. Gladue, these principles were explicitly introduced to reduce rates of Indigenous incarceration by requiring judges to consider “the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders” before applying a legal sanction.

R v. Gladue states specifically that the principle is “not to be taken as a means of automatically reducing the prison sentence of aboriginal offenders”. The decision also says that it’s “unreasonable to assume that aboriginal peoples do not believe in the importance of traditional sentencing goals”.

Nevertheless, lighter sentences and more ready bail are often the effect — to the point where the Gladue process has been criticized by Indigenous women’s groups for favouring Indigenous male offenders at the expense of Indigenous female victims.

March 15, 2024

Toronto’s blue-uniformed surrender monkeys say … just make it easier for criminals and maybe they won’t hurt you

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Crime has been increasing lately, and Toronto’s boys, girls, and all 57 other genderbeings in blue have their very best advice for you: surrender now.

… Toronto Police have reflected on the problem. They’ve mulled it over. Thought long and hard. And they’re advising people just give up. To stay safe.

This advice came out at a community safety meeting between Toronto Police officials and concerned citizens last month. (The meeting was covered by City News Toronto, but didn’t get widespread coverage until this week, when clips went viral online. Tell me that isn’t a microcosm of the 21 century.) In remarks to the citizens at the meeting, a Toronto police constable said this: “To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs by your front door. Because they’re breaking into your homes to steal your car. They don’t want anything else. A lot of them that [the police] are arresting have guns on them. And they’re not toy guns. They’re real guns. They’re loaded.”

Oh. Okay.

Look, it’s not bad advice, in any individual circumstance. There probably are a lot of people out there who’d be relieved if someone kicked in their door, grabbed the fob and took off. And it’s certainly not novel advice from a police service. We’ve all heard variations of this before, right? “Just give up your wallet” when you’re mugged. “Just get out of the car” during a carjacking. You can always replace things. Right?

The problem is that, in the other scenarios above, you’re out and about in public. There’s no guarantee of safety in public, as much as we all wish otherwise. The advice now being given by Toronto police isn’t what to do when someone jabs a gun into your ribs in a seedy back alley, but how to avoid being harmed by bad guys in your own home. And the police advice is “Make it so easy on them that they have no reason to hurt you”.

There’s no charitable read on this, and in this case, truth isn’t a defence. I accept that the police are giving their real, best, true advice. I accept that they are being sincere. That’s the problem: the police are sincerely surrendering. They’ve given up, and they think it would be best if you gave up, too. These violent robberies are just going to continue, and it’s on us — the public — to minimize the bloodshed and risk to ourselves by … submitting.

I try to avoid hyperbole in columns, with the odd exception for comic effect. But this isn’t funny at all, so I won’t make a joke of it. Let’s be extremely serious for a moment. If this is where the Toronto Police Service has landed in terms of their best advice for the public, as a member of that public and Toronto resident, I’d like to ask this: why stop with leaving my fob by the front door? I have a laptop computer. It’s a few years old now, but still in workable condition. It’s worth a few hundred bucks. Maybe I should leave that by the door, too? I don’t keep a lot of cash on hand — who the hell does, in 2024? — but there’s usually a few bucks in my wallet, or my wife’s. Should part of our nightly routine now just be emptying our wallets into a little bowl that we can leave on the radiator by the front door, and come morning, if the door hasn’t been kicked down and the cash grabbed, we can just put the money right back into our wallets as we get the day started? I’m not really a jewelry guy, but my wedding band is worth something, I guess. Pop that into the bowl with the cash?

After all, the bad guys have guns. Real guns. Loaded guns. And there is apparently nothing to be done about this except submit and co-operate. So say the police.

<sarc>No, that can’t be right. Justin Trudeau made guns illegal, so the bad guys just can’t have guns. It would be against the law, and they might get in trouble.</sarc> Oh, and should the propitiatory offerings be placed inside or outside the door? I guess outside, to make it even easier for them, but make sure everything is protected from rain or snow … it’d be risky if they had to pick everything up soaking wet and they might take it out on you and your family.

That’s Matt Gurney from The Line, so you really should read the whole thing.

March 14, 2024

Oddly, Jen Gerson finds her fears about the Online Harms Act unassuaged

There was a point during the last Line podcast where Jen Gerson used the word “assuaged”, and then realized that although she knows what it means and when it’s appropriate to use it, she didn’t know how to say it out loud (a problem I’ve encountered many times in my life, having read widely but not listened to lectures on the various topics I’ve read about). I reference that in the headline, as she recounts going through a belated “technical briefing” on the already tabled bill:

Let’s start by noting that it’s a little bit odd for a government to hold a technical briefing for a bit of legislation more than a week after that legislation has been tabled. Usually presentations of this kind are held for media, MPs, and various stakeholders as or just before a complicated issue or bill is about to be announced to the public.

For the federal government to hold a briefing on the Online Harms Act on March 6 — as it did — raises questions. Questions like “Why?” Questions like “Is this really a ‘technical briefing’ or is this an attempt to assuage concerns about what is actually written in the bill?” And, most importantly, questions like “Am I so assuaged?”

I think, dear readers, that I am not.

Let me explain by appending a caveat about the Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63, which was tabled about two weeks ago. About 75 per cent of what’s in this bill is either good, or benign but potentially useless, and is genuinely focused on mitigating real online harms like child porn and revenge porn. I might nitpick some of those parts if it weren’t for the rest of it. The rest of it consists of “will result in the most significant expansion of Canada’s hate speech laws and create one of North America’s most rigid regulatory environments for media and social media companies”, as law firm Norton Rose Fulbright put it.

In C-63, and its attempts to explain this bill, this government has consistently muddied the waters that delineate between hate crimes and hate speech, and has demonstrated a deep unwillingness to deal with the philosophical problem of defining hate speech in a way that is clear, consistent, and fairly and evenly applied. More specifically, the bill’s attempts to increase the penalties for “advocating genocide” to life imprisonment; the use of peace bonds for pre-crime hate speech; and the re-introduction of Section 13, to be administered by the already questionable Human Rights Tribunal apparatus. All of these present such punitive measures that they would have a chilling effect on speech that is fundamentally incompatible with the freedoms we expect in a Western liberal democracy.

There’s no nice way to put this. These measures reveal deeply authoritarian instincts toward speech and regulation, all the more pernicious as they’re being introduced by people who are absolutely convinced of their own righteous good intentions.

And that brings us back to the aforementioned technical briefing, which attempted to address each of these concerns in turn. I should note that I don’t believe I was invited directly to this briefing — and as I’m not in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, this is not surprising or unusual. I was, however, provided a copy of the briefing in its entirety, and I was told that I was free to quote from it, provided I did not name the Department of Justice official speaking.

To that end, I’d like to provide some excerpts and paraphrases from this briefing, followed by my own observations on what was being presented to an audience of, broadly speaking, laymen. I’ve also run these observations by criminal lawyers to ensure my understanding of the law is sound. If I am in error in any point, I welcome any correction.

“The dark world of pediatric gender ‘medicine’ in Canada”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The release of internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) revealed just how little science went into many or most juvenile gender transitions and how much the process was being driven politically rather than scientifically. Shannon Douglas Boschy digs into how the WPATH’s methods are implemented in Canada:

An undercover investigation at a Quebec gender clinic recently documented that a fourteen-year-old girl was prescribed testosterone for the purpose of medical gender transition within ten minutes of seeing a doctor. She received no other medical or mental health assessment and no information on side-effects. This is status quo in the dark world of pediatric gender “medicine” in Canada.

On March 5th Michael Shellenberger, one of the journalists who broke the Twitter Files in 2022, along with local Ottawa journalist Mia Hughes, released shocking leaks from inside WPATH, the organization that proclaims itself the global scientific and medical authority on gender affirming care. The World Professional Association of Transgender Health is the same organization that the Quebec gender clinic, and Ottawa’s CHEO, cite as their authority for the provision of sex-change interventions for children.

These leaks expose WPATH as nothing more than a self-appointed activist body overseeing and encouraging experimental and hormonal and surgical sex-change interventions on children and vulnerable adults. Shellenberger and Hughes reveal that members fully understand that children cannot consent to loss of fertility and of sexual function, nor can they understand the lifetime risks that will result from gender-affirming medicalization, and they ignore these breaches of medical ethics.

The report reveals communication from an “Internal messaging forum, as well as a leaked internal panel discussion, demonstrat(ing) that the world-leading transgender healthcare group is neither scientific nor advocating for ethical medical care. These internal communications reveal that WPATH advocates for many arbitrary medical practices, including hormonal and surgical experimentation on minors and vulnerable adults. Its approach to medicine is consumer-driven and pseudoscientific, and its members appear to be engaged in political activism, not science.”

These findings have profound implications for medical and public education policies in Canada and raise serious concerns about the practices of secret affirmations and social transitions of children in local schools.

These leaks follow on the recent publication of a British Medical Journal study (BMJ Mental Health), covering 25-years of data, dispelling the myth that without gender-affirmation that children will kill themselves. The study, comparing over 2,000 patients to a control population, found that after factoring for other mental health issues, there was no convincing evidence that children and youth who are not gender-affirmed were at higher risk of suicide than the general population.

In the last week, a second study was released, this one from the American Urology Association, showing that post-surgical transgender-identified men, who underwent vaginoplasty, have twice the rate of suicide attempts as before affirmation surgery, and showing that trans-identified women who underwent phalloplasty, showed no change in pre-operative rates of suicide and post-operative.

These and other studies are now thoroughly debunking the emotional blackmail myths promoted by WPATH, that the absence of sex-change interventions, suggest that gender-distressed children are at high risk of taking their own lives.

Book Reviews – Juno Beach and the Canadians

Filed under: Books, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

WW2TV
Published Dec 5, 2023

A short live show where I talk about my favourite Juno Beach and Canadian focussed Normandy books

WW2TV Bookshop – where you can purchase copies of books featured in my YouTube shows. Any book listed here comes with the personal recommendation of Paul Woodadge, the host of WW2TV. For full disclosure, if you do buy a book through a link from this page WW2TV will earn a commission.
UK – https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/WW2TV
USA – https://bookshop.org/shop/WW2TV

March 13, 2024

The true “Online Harms” are coming from inside the bill

Even the state media lapdog CBC admits that the Trudeau government’s proposed Online Harms Act is an incredibly authoritarian piece of legislation:

Justice Minister Arif Virani is defending his government’s Online Harms Bill after celebrated Canadian writer Margaret Atwood shared views comparing the new legislation to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The award-winning author took to social media late last week to share an article from the British magazine The Spectator titled, “Trudeau’s Orwellian online harms bill”.

“If this account of the bill is true, it’s Lettres de Cachet all over again,” Atwood wrote on X, referring to letters once sent out by the King of France authorizing imprisonment without trial.

The federal government introduced late last month its long-awaited Online Harms Bill, which proposes to police seven categories of harmful content online, including content used to bully a child, content that sexualizes children or victims of sexual violence, content that incites violence or terrorism, and hate speech.

As part of proposed amendments, “hate speech” would be defined based on Supreme Court of Canada decisions.

“The possibilities for revenge false accusations + thoughtcrime stuff are sooo inviting!” Atwood wrote.

In Orwell’s cautionary novel about a totalitarian society, thoughtcrime is the illegal act of disagreeing with the government’s political ideology in one’s unspoken thoughts.

Atwood famously tackled authoritarian regimes in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which a religious patriarchal society forces women to bear children and those who speak freely are severely punished.

March 12, 2024

The recently admitted “death spiral” for the Canadian Armed Forces is nothing new

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

“Shady Maples” outlines just a few of the historical procurement fuckups Canada’s armed forces have had to work through, showing that the recent admission that the armed forces are in a “death spiral” by MND Bill Blair is almost “situation normal” for the troops:

The Canadian Armed Forces are fucked. By this term of art, I mean that the CAF:

  1. are in dire circumstances; and
  2. are being used for such aggressive political gratification that it’s practically perverse.

You don’t have to take my word for it. The Minister of National Defence made the following remarks last week:

    because, the bottom line is the Canadian Armed Forces must grow. We’re short a lot of people. Almost 16,000 in our regular forces and reserves.

If that wasn’t bad enough, he added:

    more than half of our trucks, more than half of our ships and more than half of our planes are not available for service because they are in need of parts and repair. We’re going to have to do better.

Translation: we are fucked.

The MND’s remarks come eleven months after the CDAI published an open letter on the state of national security and defence:

    Years of restraint, cost cutting, downsizing and deferred investments, have meant that Canada’s defence capabilities have atrophied. Our military capabilities are outdated and woefully inadequate to protect our landmass and maritime approaches. We have also fallen short in meaningful contributions to burden sharing for the collective defence and security of our allies and partners.

Translation: we have been fucked for awhile.

More recently, the Vice Admiral Tophsee made waves on the RCN’s official YouTube channel by stating the obvious:

    Colleagues and Shipmates, the RCN is facing some very serious challenges right now that could mean we fail to meet our Force Posture and Readiness commitments in 2024 and beyond. La situation est grave mais nos problèmes ne sont pas uniques et je sais que l’aviation et l’armée sont confrontées a des défis similaires. [The situation is serious, but our problems are not unique, and I know that the Air Force and the Army are facing similar problems.]

Translation: we will be fucked for the foreseeable future.

He then shows that this sort of thing has been part-and-parcel of Canada’s delusionary approach to national defence since the year before Confederation. Canada’s WW1 army was sent off with fantastically bad equipment — from rifles to web gear, from automobiles to artillery ammunition — all scandals of the day that no lessons were learned from.

Soldiers and officers at the tactical level will readily tell you that these headlines are only surprising because senior leaders are finally saying the quiet part out loud: the CAF is undermanned, under-equipped, under-trained, and unprepared. We know this because we live it every day: situation normal, all fucked up. But you don’t need a source or a leak to learn about our deplorable state of readiness. Here is a link to DND’s 2023 audit and evaluation reports. They paint a bleak picture: we have insufficient equipment and what we have keeps breaking. We have insufficient personnel to match with commitments, and we are struggling to recruit, train, and retain more. Go have a look at the reports, they lay it all out.

Canada is rapidly becoming “a cauldron of authoritarianism”

The degree of control exercised over individual Canadians by various levels of government was already on the increase before the human rights disaster of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic handed the power mongers even more control than they’d dreamed of. In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill outlines the horrific Online Harms Act provisions for even more dystopian government oversight if it is passed in its current form:

It seems Justin Trudeau isn’t only a dick – he also gets his ideas from one. Philip K Dick, to be precise. Trudeau’s government has proposed a new law that would give judges the power to put an individual under house arrest if they fear he might commit a hate crime. That’s right – might. It’s right out of The Minority Report, Dick’s 1956 dystopian tale of a future America in which a “Precrime” police division uses intelligence from mutants known as “precogs” to arrest people before they’ve committed an offence. Welcome to woke Canada, where Dickian nightmares come true.

It is courtesy of Bill C-63 that the pitiable citizens of Canada might soon find themselves languishing in court-ordered confinement despite having committed no crime. The bill is devoted to tackling “hate” on the internet. As is always the case when officialdom puffs itself up and declares war on mean words online, it is riddled with draconianism. For example, the mad law, if passed, would allow people to file complaints (shorter version: snitch) to the Canadian Human Rights Commission if they spot “hate speech” online. Those found guilty of this sin of making a nasty utterance could be ordered to pay victims up to $20,000 in compensation. [NR: Other reports say it’s up to $50,000 with an additional $20,000 in fines … per complainant.]

Imagine the levels of grift this would give rise to. The offence-seeking snowflakes of the phoney left would finally be able to monetise their hurt feelings. Call a “transwoman” a fella and he (yes, he – sue me) could potentially drag you to the CHRC for a nice little payday. The law would incentivise complaint-making. Worse, it would foster self-censorship. Who would risk getting angry online, far less logging on when drunk to wind up the woke, when it’s possible they’ll have their pockets turned out by a misnamed Human Rights Commission so that some professional victim can be compensated for the pain of having seen a word or idea he doesn’t like?

It really is possible it will be ideas, not just blind hatred, that will be punished under C-63. The justice minister Arif Virani’s promise that speech that is “awful but lawful” will not be censored, and that a “high threshold” will have to be met before people are penalised for what they post, is not reassuring. After all, Canada’s a country in which entirely legit publications have found themselves under investigation by the Human Rights Commission just for publishing controversial matter. Maclean’s magazine had its collar felt by the human-rights overlords following a complaint from the Canadian Islamic Congress about an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn. The CHRC also launched an investigation into Alphonse de Valk, a priest, after he raged with passion against same-sex marriage.

I’m not confident that a nation that has such an inquisitorial body, a body whose very description of itself as a “human rights” commission is a brazen act of Orwellian deceit, will keep its promise of permitting the expression of “awful” thoughts. So much is branded “hate speech” these days – from correctly calling “transwomen” men to saying Islam has a lot of dumb ideas – that it feels inevitable that the expression of fairly normal ideas that Canada’s woke regime just doesn’t like will get swept up in this crusade against “hate”. Indeed, under Canada’s C-16 gender-identity law, “deliberately misgendering” a trans person is treated as a potential “violation” of their human rights. I predict that C-63’s incentivising of snitching will cause an explosion in complaints of “misgendering”. Perhaps Canada will become a no-go zone for thoughtcriminals like JK Rowling.

But it is C-63’s proposal to introduce something like precrime into Canada that has caused most waves. The idea is that individuals who are talking shit online, especially if they’re aiming their invective at minority groups, could be ordered to stay indoors or to wear an electronic tag if a judge fears there could be an “escalation” in their behaviour. Precrime, then. Dick’s idea made flesh. The newspaper headlines give a sense of how chilling this suggestion is, how headlong Canada’s descent into dystopia has become. “Justice minister defends house-arrest power for people feared to commit a hate crime in future”, says the Globe and Mail. Mate, when you’re defending the confinement of people who’ve broken no law, it’s surely time to stop and think.

March 8, 2024

Know Your Ship #20 – Flower Class Corvettes

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

iChaseGaming
Published Oct 27, 2014

Episode 20 of Know Your Ship! In this educational video I cover the Flower class corvettes. These corvettes used by the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Navy to great effect during the Battle of the Atlantic. The Flower class were built quickly and cheaply in order to provide as many ships for convoy duty and anti-submarine operations as possible. The Royal Canadian Navy in particular achieved significant success and became experts in anti-submarine operations. Sadly, these ships and their crews are mostly forgotten with the passage of time as attention is mostly given to the surviving capital ships. It is my hope that this educational video will help people to understand and know these important ships that helped safeguard the convoys during World War 2. The only remaining ship of this class is HMCS Sackville which you will see later in this episode.
(more…)

March 7, 2024

Canadian Armed Forces belatedly starts to worry that their pandemic fake news propaganda stunt might, somehow, undermine public confidence

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

When I first heard about this, despite all the evidence we’d seen during the Wuhan Coronavirus years of governments going out of their way to mislead and deceive the voters, I thought it was fake news. But according to David Pugliese’s report in the Ottawa Citizen, they really did do and and only now are starting to worry that they should not have done that:

A screenshot of the fake letter from the Nova Scotia government which was sent out to residents to warn about a pack of wolves on the loose in the province. The letter was actually a forgery by Canadian military personnel as part of a propaganda training mission.
Photo by NS Lands Forestry Twitter/X /Handout

The Canadian Forces worried the public would link its previous efforts to test propaganda techniques during the pandemic to a bungled exercise in which the military spread disinformation about rampaging wolves, according to newly released records.

Military officers worried the 2020 wolves training fiasco, combined with previous coverage in this newspaper about their efforts during the COVID outbreak to test new methods to manipulate Canadians, could have “the effect of undermining our credibility and public trust”.

The October 2020 exercise involving fake letters about wolves on the loose, which caused panic in one community in Nova Scotia, was a propaganda test gone awry, generating embarrassing news coverage across Canada and in some U.S. media outlets.

Just as that incident was being reported by media outlets, a non-government group called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project released details about the Canadian Forces spending more than $1 million on training on how to modify public behaviour. That training had been used by the parent firm of Cambridge Analytica, the company that was at the centre of a scandal in which personal data of Facebook users was provided to U.S. President Donald Trump’s political campaign.

In addition, this newspaper had reported months earlier, the Canadian Forces had tested new propaganda techniques during the pandemic and had concocted a plan to influence the public’s behaviour during coronavirus outbreak.

The various reporting set off alarm bells inside the military’s public affairs branch at National Defence headquarters in Ottawa, according to documents released under the access to information law.

Col. Stephanie Godin wrote Brig.-Gen. Jay Janzen on Oct. 16, 2020 warning that since the story about the fake wolf letters broke “there has been a resurgence of media and public criticism regarding perceived nefarious IO/IA (propaganda) against the Canadian public”.

She also noted how then-army commander Lt.-Gen. Wayne Eyre contacted Laurie-Anne Kempton, then the assistant deputy minister for public affairs at National Defence. Eyre wanted to “discuss how the wolf letter issue could be removed from being conflated with” the $1 million training course on influence techniques as well as the previous articles on military pandemic propaganda plans, Godin wrote.

I mean, did they hire George Monbiot as a consultant for this idiocy?

March 5, 2024

The National Microbiology Laboratory scandal in brief

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, Science — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper rounds up some of the eye-opening details of the security breach at Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Lab which certainly looks like a factor in the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic story:

Whether or not COVID-19 started as an accidental lab leak, the pandemic just so happens to have originated in the same neighbourhood as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, home to a coronavirus laboratory with a known history of lax security protocols.

For that reason alone it’s a major scandal that Canada’s own high-security biolab was employing two scientists – married couple Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng – who according to CSIS exhibited a reckless disregard of lab security and the protection of confidential information. Now, tack on the fact that both Cheng and Qiu are suspected of prolonged unauthorized contact with the Chinese government.

This week, Health Canada bowed to opposition pressure and published an illuminating package of more than 600 official documents detailing CSIS’s evidence against the couple, as well as internal emails from the Winnipeg-based National Microbiology Laboratory where they worked. The highlights are below.

The lab is surprisingly casual about shipping planet-altering pathogens

One of the main accusations against Qiu is that she sent lab samples to China, the U.S. and the U.K. without proper authorization. Around this same time, she also sent highly virulent Ebola samples to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

[…]

Cheng was accused of breaking virtually every cyber-security law in the book

If Qiu’s signature offence was sending out lab materials without proper authorization, Cheng’s was that he routinely ignored even the most basic protocols about computer security.

[…]

Throughout, both were in constant (unauthorized) touch with China

The CSIS reports don’t necessarily frame Qiu and Cheng as traitors.

[…]

The pair kept changing their story after being presented with smoking gun evidence, according to CSIS

Some of the documents’ more cinematic passages are when CSIS agents describe lengthy interrogations in which the pair were confronted about their alleged breaches of Canadian national security.

March 4, 2024

“Whatever his flaws, Brian Mulroney was a serious person”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free-to-cheapskates teaser from this week’s dispatch from The Line, nice words are said in memory of the late Brian Mulroney, former Prime Minister of Canada:

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Mila Mulroney, Nancy Reagan, and President Ronald Reagan at the “Shamrock Summit”, 18 March, 1985.
Photo from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Brian Mulroney died last week. He was 84.

The first thing you could be forgiven for taking away from the news coverage is how far we have fallen.

Brian Mulroney did big things. Negotiating Free Trade. Fighting Apartheid. Getting the Americans to crack down on acid rain. Comprehensive tax reform that saw the old Manufacturers’ Sales Tax (which taxed productivity) replaced with the GST. Sending Canadians to war in Desert Storm. Striking the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People which led to many of the legal advancements Indigenous communities were able to make through the 90s and into this century.

Even when he failed, as he did at Meech Lake, Brian Mulroney was trying to do something fundamentally transformative in Canadian politics.

And nobody who came after him had anywhere near that kind of guts. Not one of them.

There are things people will gripe about when it comes to Mulroney. Karlheinz Schreiber will be pretty close to the top of that list. Mulroney also tends to poll pretty poorly out west for any number of reasons ranging from a perceived over-emphasis on Quebec via Meech Lake and Charlottetown, to awarding the CF-18 maintenance contract to Montreal’s Canadair after (allegedly) promising it to Winnipeg-based Bristol Aerospace.

Mulroney was not beloved when he left office, to put it mildly. His party was basically annihilated in 1993, and the Canadian conservative movement shattered — it has still, in some ways, yet to fully recover. These are facts about which no one made more, or better, jokes than Mulroney himself. But that fall from esteem was almost never seen internationally. As he watched his contemporaries pre-decease him, Canadians got to see how respected the man was on the world stage. Mulroney was asked to eulogize American presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as well as British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In this, Mulroney embodied one of the greatest cultural cynicisms of this country: sometimes, the only way for us to claim a Canadian as one of our own is to first watch them make it abroad.

Mulroney’s great triumph is free trade. Yes, because it meant jobs for millions of Canadians. Yes, because it locked us into an economic pact with the world’s powerhouse economy. But also because, in doing it, he went head-on at one of this country’s great cliches: the idea that reflexive, Laurentian, anti-Americanism was somehow a basis for governing instead of just the hallmark of a deeply insecure cultural elite.

Nobody is picking those fights now. Nobody is taking on the big battles to remake the country. We have been treated to almost 30 years of some of the pettiest, small-ball sniping imaginable. Various wedge issues are dusted off by either side, and hurled like stale buns at their opponents. Culture wars are imported for the purposes of giving our political class something about which they can feign moral outrage. Our leaders are afraid of big things either because they’re hard, or because they are unlikely to pay off in a single four-year election cycle. Mulroney is, arguably, the last Canadian prime minister whose vision of what Canada is, or could be, was not limited by a four-year horizon.

We are a serious country that is not led by serious people. And that is brought into focus when you lose a serious person.

Whatever his flaws, Brian Mulroney was a serious person.

The Line‘s editors say that Mulroney wasn’t well liked on leaving office, but the utter obliteration of the Progressive Conservatives in the 1993 federal election can’t be completely blamed on him. His successor as PC leader, Kim Campbell, went out of her way to alienate western conservatives and libertarians during her brief time in office and during the election campaign that followed. She became Prime Minister with a surprising level of tentative support that she jettisoned in record time, taking her party from a majority in the House of Commons to two (2) seats — only one other Canadian PM has ever been defeated in their own riding (Arthur Meighen … but he had it happen twice, first in 1921 and again in 1926).

March 3, 2024

From bank robbery to church burning to welfare state collapse

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kulak talks about an old Canadian TV show episode and how the lessons learned could be (and arguably are already being) used to undermine any western welfare state:

In a show that had helicopter escapes, motorcycle chases, modded out James Bond spy cars, teenage money forgers, veteran jewel thieves, super hackers, aviation engineer super smugglers … This one stood out for its nigh stupid simplicity.

He treated bank robbery as a literal door to door business.

Gilbert Galvan’s great innovation wasn’t any innovation, it was stripping bank robbery itself down to its barest essentials. And then repeating it at scale. To the point where he could rob one bank, and then rob the bank across the street whilst police were still in the first investigating (literally! this was how they found out he existed).

He’d line up with the rest of the customers, wait his turn, approach the teller, and then quietly show her his pistol before demanding the money, and WALKING out the front door of the bank, the person behind him in line never knowing that the robbery had even happened.

The limitation was of course he never hit the safe, and only got one teller’s worth of cash, about 5-20k per robbery (1980s dollars, so double or triple modern dollars), but wearing elaborate theatrical disguises for every heist the chance of of him ever being tracked down were effectively Zero. And needing only one man, there was no accomplice to rat him out.

He carried out FIFTY heists this way, and to this day this remains the greatest lesson I’ve learned from the show… The devastating effect of simple marginally effective things, done at scale. It’s certainly served me well marketing this blog.

Now apply this lesson to the modern Cradle to Grave Total State

Since the Trudeau government funded media started promoting a blood libel against Christian church run Residential schools, falsely alleging ground penetrating radar had found “mass graves” at the site of the schools from the first half of the 20th century, over 100 churches have been attacked or burned in Canada.

Whilst the first few fires were probably set by the same person in British Columbia, once it became a national story with political valence disaffected copycats quickly sprung up around the nation. There is basically a zero percent chance the vandals on one end of the country know or have ever met the vandals on the other side. And basically no way that catching even one group of vandals or arsonists would stop the attacks.

Now I would like you to imagine the implications for civil strife in the US, and western welfare states, when this starts happening to government offices or schools which get embroiled in LGBTQ or Childhood transition scandals.

Remember that the average public elementary or high school has 1000+ students in it, the bottom 10-20% of whom absolutely despise the place. People always wonder at how many mass shootings there are in the US, I’m always shocked at how few there are. there are 40,000 suicides a year in the US, and while the numbers are hard to grab at least 10,000 of those are youth suicides. That so few decide to take classmates with them always struck me as bizarre, given human beings have killed 100s of millions of each other in the past 100 years, but then isn’t it also interesting the number of mass shootings has risen so rapidly since Columbine and the media cycle popularization of it public conciousness?

Likewise half a million Americans are treated for self inflicted injury every year, of which over 100k are Youth, and 424,000 youth are arrested on some crime or other every year.

I’m going to call it right now:

In the next 5 years someone out there, might be in America, might be Europe, is going to start burning down schools for some ideological reason, we might never even know why if they are never caught.

And At that point copycat school burnings will become one of the most dramatic and prominent trends in western life as it’s quickly copied around the western world. In the past 3 years of those 100 Canadian churches vandalized, 33 burnt right to the ground (10 per year). If you assumed the same number with no boost from all the students/parents who despise their school or maybe even feel mortal danger from them, that’d still be (population adjusted) something like 100 schools per year burning in America, probably til the end of time. Assuming those government buildings have the usual ludicrous construction costs of 20ish million … that’d be about 2 billion dollars per year in lost buildings, which lets be honest probably won’t get replaced in a timely manner.

There are 97,500 public schools in America, assuming just that Canadian Church burning rate of attacks that’d be more than 1% of American public schools gone in a decade.

March 2, 2024

Brian Mulroney, RIP

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In a guest post at Paul Wells’ Substack, Ian Brodie describes former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s role in ending the Cold War:

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Mila Mulroney, Nancy Reagan, and President Ronald Reagan at the “Shamrock Summit”, 18 March, 1985.
Photo from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Mulroney’s role has long been poo-poohed by intellectuals on the Canadian left. He was said to have an unhealthy obsession with pleasing the Americans. As a young boy, his fine voice won him an opportunity to entertain visiting American executives with a song. Amateur psychologists diagnosed a disturbing link between Mulroney’s having grown up in a company town, under the shadow of a US owned mill, and his reinvigoration of St. Laurent’s post-war grand strategy.

Mulroney never automatically fell in with US positions on the global issues of the day. His opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa ran counter to the positions of both Reagan and Thatcher. But he drove the effort to link the American and Canadian economies through the free trade agreement. He backed our allies in the strategic competition with the Soviet bloc. And in helping to create the International Democratic Union, he helped put the west’s centre-right parties on the side of international political cooperation on the side of democracy, liberty, and the rule of law. The contrast with an earlier prime minister who could not bring himself to condemn the declaration of martial law in Poland a few years earlier was clear.

His personal relationships with a generation of American leaders gave substance to the transactional successes. As the Soviet Union came apart, he secured a spot for Canada as the first NATO country to recognize Ukraine’s independence and bolstered the independence movements of the Baltic republics. When Iraq tried to establish a precedent that, following the Cold War, large, powerful countries could invade their neighbours with impunity, Mulroney backed the US led coalition to liberate Kuwait with all the diplomatic and military power he had on hand.

And along the way, he so closely befriended both Reagan and the first Bush that he was given a privileged platform at two US state funerals, an honour never extended to a Canadian leader before and unlikely to be extended to one again soon.

Mulroney deserves to be remembered along with St. Laurent as Canada’s grand strategist of the 20th century. A trusted confidant of world leaders.

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