Quotulatiousness

February 24, 2024

Justin Trudeau is his own Messiah

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson gets up a full head of steam (to borrow Matt Gurney’s phrase) over the Prime Minstrel’s brief visit to Alberta and what he revealed about his worldview and his sense of his own importance in an interview with a non-mainstream journalist:

Watching Prime Minister Justin Trudeau give an extended interview to Alberta’s Ryan Jespersen is the first time I’ve ever felt visceral concern about the man leading this country.

I genuinely don’t mean this in any mean or partisan sense. What I mean is that this interview raised serious concerns about Trudeau’s headspace, his judgment, and whether or not this man in particular should be leading the country right now.

The interview wasn’t a disaster: Trudeau brought up fair points that deserve more consideration in Alberta, and I will discuss them here.

But on the whole, what I see here is a man who has wildly inflated his own policy achievements while in office. What I see is a man who cannot accept responsibility for his shortcomings, nor for the real decline in both state capacity and quality of life now affecting Canadians. What I see is a man who won’t take accountability for his own unpopularity.

And, most concerning, what I see is a man who thinks of himself as a messianic figure; a man blind to his own partisan ideology and bad behaviour, but hyper attuned to the same in others. A man who divides the world between black hats and white, and cannot admit the possibility of a legitimate alternative viewpoint — and can, in fact, only explain the very existence of such viewpoints by resorting to the belief that all of his critics have been fooled. Fooled. A word he uses over and over and over again, without realizing the contempt this word betrays of his own feelings toward his audience.

This is a prime minister who cannot see the beam in his own eye; who exemplifies the trait — best summed up by National Post columnist Chris Selley and cited often here at The Line — that Liberals are the sort of people who are sincerely convinced they would never do the sorts of things they routinely do, or are in fact currently doing.

Let’s start with the quotes.

Trudeau starts out by noting that right-wing politicians create wedge issues. “A lot of what the right is doing is about stoking up anger without offering any solutions.” And insisting that right-wing politicians have “realized it’s easy to instrumentalize anger and outrage to get people to vote in a way that is not necessarily in their best interests”.

The last two elections called, Mr. Trudeau. They would like to discuss guns, abortion, vaccine mandates, and pretty much every single other ballot question the Liberals have abused to squeak out minority victories by maximizing vote efficiency in crucial central Canadian ridings.

Of course, it doesn’t count when Liberals court disinformation, or stoke irrational fear about their opponents, because when they do it, they have Canadians’ best interests at heart. They’re the good people, you see.

For when you’re on the side of the angels, on a mission to preserve democracy itself from the manipulative wiles of right-wing politicians out to fool people from holding wrong opinions, what means are not justified?

I would also point out that in the same way that it would be insulting and inappropriate for me to delegitimize Trudeau’s authority by arguing that he obtained two weak majorities by fooling Canadians via manufactured outrage on wedge issues, so too is he required to show some deference to the will of the voters of Alberta. One does not have to agree with everything Premier Danielle Smith does or says or proposes to demonstrate respect for the fact that she is the elected leader of the province, a role she secured in a free and fair election. But, alas.

Donna LaFramboise also reacted to the Ryan Jesperson’s interview of Justin Trudeau, saying that he’s like the Borg from Star Trek:

While visiting Alberta this week, Justin Trudeau was interviewed live by Ryan Jespersen, a former Edmonton morning show host whose podcasts are available on YouTube and elsewhere. That’s when our Prime Minister said the following:

    There is, out there, a deliberate undermining of mainstream media. There are the conspiracy theorists, there are the social media drivers who are trying to do everything they can to … prevent people from actually agreeing on a common set of facts — the way CBC and CTV, when they were our only sources of news (and Global) used to project across the country at least a common understanding of things.

Screen capture from a YouTube compilation – “The Borg Collective Speaks”

Mr Trudeau referred to “people on the fringes” who eschew the “mainstream view”. He said his government’s trying to “make sure Canadians understand the importance of not being fooled by misinformation, by disinformation”. Earlier in the interview, he said Albertans were being “fooled by right-wing politicians” and that oil sands workers have “been fooled” by energy companies.

Mr Trudeau is the Borg from Star Trek. He doesn’t respect alternative views. He has zero interest in listening or negotiating. If your analysis conflicts with his, you’re the problem. Renounce the fringe. Fall into line like the other Borg drones. Adopt the common understanding of things being fed to you by the government funded mainstream media.

February 6, 2024

On gender issues, “Progressives may even find themselves — dare we say? — on the wrong side of history”

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

In the portion of The Line‘s weekly dispatch that’s visible to freeloaders, the editors discover to their horror that they have to weigh in on the gender fracas:

So to be clear, we really don’t have any problem with Alberta restricting elective gender-related surgeries on minors under the age of 17. While we are rather concerned about the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones among minors, we also suspect that trying to ban these drugs for absolutely everyone under a certain age represents an overreach by the state.

Also, bluntly, we don’t think that in an ideal world, the state should be involving itself in most of this stuff at all. We want to exist in a country in which sports leagues, doctors, schools and teachers can be trusted to make sensible, evidence-based decisions on a case-by-case basis.

Take sports, for example: does a rec-league pickleball tournament need to have the same rules around trans participation as a competitive women’s rugby league? And do we really want any state regulation bulldozering over the people who are actually on the ground, and best understand the physical and cultural realities of that sport?

Or take puberty blockers.

Should we really be treating a 12-year-old who has displayed severe and crippling gender dysphoria since the age of three with the same treatment protocol as a depressed 14-year-old boy who comes into the gender clinic for the first time attached to a Munchausen-by-Proxy mom documenting every moment of her child’s transition for TikTok? Do we want politicians in Edmonton writing the precise rules that will be faithfully applied in both those situations?

Sigh.

We understand how we got here. Any discussion around trans issues is now highly insane; in a hyper-polarized, borderline hysterical moment, we actually can’t trust our institutions to possess the requisite reserve and dispassion needed to make credible and defensible decisions. These institutions are, or are perceived to be, too ideologically captured to be trustworthy.

For an example that just happened to cross our path today, take this quote from Dr. Simone Lebeuf, a pediatrician in Edmonton who specializes in gender-diverse youth. In it, she notes that restricting puberty blockers to children over the age of 15 effectively makes the treatment useless, as they would be administered at an age well past the onset of puberty.

“It’s done. The window has passed,” the doctor told City News. “And we really look at puberty blockers as an option for kids to have some space and time to make decisions about their future selves and who they might want to be as adults. Their puberty is not benign, it is not a nothing process to go through. The physical changes with puberty are permanent.”

Right off the bat, a statement like this ought to raise eyebrows, and not only because it’s a talking point we’ve already heard dozens of times on TikTok. This doctor — a physician who is actually treating children — is conflating the harms caused by artificially delaying a natural process with the apparent harms caused by the biological process itself. That logic is not sound. There is a clear difference between, say, permanent loss of sexual function and bone density caused by interfering in the natural course of puberty, and the harm of allowing a child’s body to grow an Adam’s apple despite that individual feeling like a woman.

Secondly, Dr. Lebeuf isn’t addressing the core concern with puberty blockers, above and beyond their physical side effects. The majority of children who present with gender dysphoria are not trans. Most of them turn out to be simply gay — a fact they discover via the process of growing up and sexually maturing. By delaying or denying a gender dysphoric child the opportunity to experience normal puberty, critics of these treatment protocols fear that a doctor may be preventing the very process by which gender dysphoria would resolve itself without medical intervention. Most — certainly not all, but most — gender dysphoric children would otherwise grow up to be at ease with their natal sex. But once kids start with the puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones, this process of medical transitioning may be psychologically self reinforcing, pushing physically healthy minors into pursuing more and more unnecessary and invasive interventions with serious lifelong consequences.

In short, puberty blockers are not magic cures for gender dysphoria. They might be appropriate for some kids with lots of supports and monitoring. But they could be disastrous for others, and we have no foolproof way to know in advance which kids will fall into what camp.

This stuff is complicated, and it’s made more so because it’s difficult to study objectively in ideologically captured environments dominated by activists on all sides who muddy the waters with emotionally charged rhetoric, and confuse good science with bad. If you want to understand why people are turning to Danielle Smith instead of the Alberta Medical Association to address their fears, quotes like the one above are a prime example.

And, by the way, we include “The Media” writ large as having failed on this file. The lack of skepticism and neutrality that the media has demonstrated on even the most maximalist and unpopular positions on gender and sexuality has — to our mind — significantly contributed to the radical decline in its collective credibility.

February 4, 2024

“[L]et’s face it head-on: you’re a social and political outlier, a dangerous extremist”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

You, yes you are exactly the kind of dangerous extremist that mature and sensible journalists at all the right media outlets have been warning us about for years:

You’re very weird.

In fact, let’s face it head-on: you’re a social and political outlier, a dangerous extremist. Your views put you firmly on the fringe, and that fringe is becoming a real problem. For example, the Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, has just embraced a bunch of radical fringe policies about parent notification and consent regarding schools and transgender children, simultaneously limiting the ability of young children to have their bodies medically altered to match their declared gender — and some pretty disturbing people are supporting this crazy stuff. Look how appalled normal Canadians are by these extremist maneuvers to keep parents involved in the lives of LGBT children:

See the whole poll here, if you can stand the disgust from seeing extremist material, or see a detailed report on a poll of Californians that offers similar results.

Fortunately, the responsible mainstream leaders of the Liberal Party and NDP are standing strong with the 14% in the majority who want parents out of the lives of transgender children, rejecting the fringe views of the 78% who live at the extremist edges.

At the same time, the New York Times has just published a remarkable opinion piece on the growing concern among longtime transgender advocates, including transgendered clinicians, about the casual and rushed process by which American pediatric gender clinics are pushing children into gender transition. The essay centers on detransitioners, trans youth who change their minds and accept their biological sex.

This being the New York Times, the author is compelled to mention the true danger: “The real threat to transgender people comes from Republicans who wish to deny them rights and protections.” Ahh, but watch what comes next:

    But the doctrinal rigidity of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is disappointing, frustrating and counterproductive.

    “I was always a liberal Democrat,” one woman whose son desisted after social transition and hormone therapy told me. “Now I feel politically homeless.”

    She noted that the Biden administration has “unequivocally” supported gender-affirming care for minors, in cases in which it deems it “medically appropriate and necessary.” Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”

Democrats are doctrinally rigid, and a top health official in the Biden administration says proudly that there is no debate. See, everyone believes the same thing, except mean Republicans, but that’s also now understood to be a sign of excessive ideological rigidity. Then the same piece in the Times also says a whole bunch of things like this:

    Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.

I’ve removed the links from the quoted paragraphs, because they don’t work well after cutting and pasting, but you can find them all at the link to the non-paywalled opinion piece.

Well, I guess the secret’s out:

October 19, 2023

The evisceration of Bill C-69 (aka the Impact Assessment Act)

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

The decision of the Supreme Court of Canada to strike down large parts of the federal Impact Assessment Act caught a lot of people by surprise. The court hasn’t made much of a habit of rejecting the federal government’s ever-increasing encroachments on provincial jurisdiction, so this ruling is a bit of a black swan. It’d be nice if the Supremes were going to be more vigilant in future, but that’s unlikely. Colby Cosh explains why this is a “remarkable political moment”:

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screen capture from CPAC video.

To hear the Liberals talk now, you would think that the Supreme Court’s 7–2 rebuke of C-69 was a mere bump in the road. Steven Guilbeault, the federal environment minister, appeared on CTV’s Question Period to reassure the public that the law can be “redefined” to accomplish its grandiose intentions; it’s just a matter of “course-correct(ing)” the text a smidgen in order to “comply with the spirit” of the ruling.

Here’s an idea for the minister: maybe just go ahead and comply with the ruling, period?

Comply with the spirit, he says. Having taken the trouble to decrypt the ruling, which is not exactly a masterpiece of lucid clarity, I wonder at the environment minister’s priorities. Rather than appearing on television with a bunch of happy talk, he ought to have been mopping up the seas of blood left by the court’s evisceration of his Impact Assessment Act.

In essence, the Liberals created an apparatus whereby a federal panel would perform environmental and social assessments of major infrastructure projects based on the possibility that they might “cause adverse effects within federal jurisdiction”.

The underlying pretext is that the federal government’s powers are sometimes engaged by the creation of mines, wells, roads and other such projects — even when they are confined within one province’s borders — because they can conceivably affect federal matters such as fisheries, migratory birds, Aboriginal welfare, treaty obligations and other “national concerns”.

This is true as far as it goes, but the court majority’s finding was that this constitutional pretext for creating a federal assessment scheme isn’t actually reflected in the scheme itself. The Liberals, asserting a right to investigate hypothetical infringements on the federal sphere of power, created a law that essentially allows them to veto anything that a province might want to permit.

As the law is written, the initial assessment-agency decision to “designate” a project for assessment can be based on just about anything, including “any comments received … from the public” and “any other factor the Agency considers relevant”. In the final decision-making phase, which is to be based on the “public interest”, specific federal heads of power are also cast aside: whoever makes the final call at the cabinet level is to evaluate a project for “sustainability”, for example.

October 5, 2023

“Canada, where truck drivers are Nazis and Nazis are war heroes”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Donna LaFramboise on the “Coutts Four” — bona fide political prisoners of the Canadian state:

Gord Magill has a lengthy article over at Newsweek titled Meet the Four Men Being Held as Political Prisoners in Canada. These individuals are jointly accused of conspiring to murder police officers during a protest in Coutts, Alberta around the same time that the Freedom Convoy truckers were in Ottawa.

That’s a very serious charge, of course, but evidence appears scarce. I’ve not personally investigated this matter, but a former Toronto police detective named Donald Best has. In July, he outlined a long list of concerns, in addition to pointing out that “Everybody makes bail in Canada” — including the man “currently accused of the first degree murder of Toronto Police officer Jeffrey Northrup”.

Yet the Coutts men — three of whom have no criminal record — have been held without bail for nearly 600 days. Since they are legally innocent until proven guilty, this is horrifying.

As Gord writes in Newsweek, we are a country in which hard-working Canadians are called Nazis by the same Prime Minister whose government recently recognized an actual Nazi with a standing ovation in the House of Commons. What a strange state of affairs.

After speaking to each of the Coutts four, Gord provides a wealth of new info about them. These are working class guys — a power lineman, the owner of a small construction company, a master electrician, and a contractor. Three of them have children as young as 9, 10, and 11. Gord says only two of them “knew each other prior to their arrest”. It’s difficult to imagine a more unlikely group of cop-murder conspiracists.

July 27, 2023

The tourism blues

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

I must admit I’ve never enjoyed the “tourist” experience. Partly because I’m not comfortable in big crowds and I prefer the company of a small group — or just one other person — to the “everybody into the pool” model that many people seem to thrive on. Back when we could still afford to take holidays, Elizabeth and I carefully planned our trips to avoid, as best we could, everyone else’s favourite attractions. There are some things where crowds are a given (Bourbon Street in New Orleans, anywhere in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, everywhere in or around London, etc.) but going as early as possible or at off-peak times helps keep the people-ness down to an almost acceptable level.

In The Line, Andrew Potter relates the lowlights of a trip to wonderfully scenic Banff, Alberta (which I visited once, and it was beautiful but very, very people-y even back in the 1980s):

“Banff Avenue, Banff” by InSapphoWeTrust is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

On an early-summer family vacation to the Rockies, we decided our first excursion would be to Johnston Canyon, which tops any number of “bucket list” rankings of things to do while in Banff.

Turns out we were just four of a few thousand other people who had the same idea. Despite getting to the parking lot just after eight a.m., we spent the next few hours shuffling along a narrow boardwalk, being pushed from behind by tourbusloads of Tilley-hatted boomers while dodging around young couples dragging infants in strollers up the canyon. At each prescribed Important Sight along the way, we’d stop for 20 minutes or so while everyone took turns taking selfies in every possible permutation of their group membership.

Back at the bottom, we vowed we wouldn’t do that again, so we spent the rest of our time in the area doing hikes drawn from the very bottom of the bucket lists, skipping the alleged must-dos like the Sulphur Mountain gondola, Moraine Lake, and Lake Louise. Apparently the town of Banff is lovely, but who knows. We never set foot in it.

Tourism presents the traveller with two main dilemmas: One is what it does to us (the visitors); the other is what it does to them (the visitees). These are problems, respectively, of authenticity and commodification. And as it turns out, they are just two ways of looking at the same underlying dynamic.

For many people, the aim of travel is self-perfection. We move about the Earth in the hope of having new experiences, discovering new cultures, feeling new emotions. We want to get out of our comfort zones, out of the ruts of the familiar and experience something exotic and authentic, as a way of getting in touch with our true or better selves.

The problem is other people have the same ambitions, the same drives and desires. And this creates a market amongst “locals” for these cravings for the authentic or the exotic, which gives rise to the modern tourist industry: Get on the tour bus; see the sight; do the thing; exit through the gift shop. This can be a highly dispiriting experience, leading one to question why one bothers going anywhere, ever.

July 11, 2023

QotD: The Calgary Stampede

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… there are those in Calgary who, in their most secret of hearts, would love to abolish the Stampede and wipe out its memory. The Stampede, to the Calgarian, is both curse and blessing, and when all the curses are thrown into the balance, you cannot help being impressed by their weight. For starters, the Stampede kills. And we’re not just talking about the chuckwagon races. There’s a scholarly paper from 2006 in which statisticians from Montreal and Edmonton wrote about their efforts to develop forecasting models for EMS demand in Calgary. They found the numbers don’t quite work unless the Stampede is included as a variable: ambulance and rescue services become so busy during the 10-day party that it throws all the equations off-kilter.

The Stampede itself is very solvent, earning an operating surplus of $3.1 million in 2011, but if the costs and benefits to the city were all counted up, the former would have to include the salaries of the thousands of high-paid Calgary professionals who see major parts of their calendar devoured by Stampede preparations and aftermath. It would include the tacit outright cancellation of nine-to-five work for the duration of the Stampede at key Calgary oil patch companies and law firms. And it would include the arms race of conspicuous consumption that sees expensive entertainers like Cirque du Soleil and the Tragically Hip brought into town for exclusive corporate affairs at Stampede time.

Meanwhile, the perceived importance of the Stampede has led to the entrenchment of a shadowy, at least slightly sinister relationship between the city’s government and the Stampede board. It took a long skein of bailouts, sweetheart deals and low-interest loans from Calgary’s city government to make the show what it is today. Over the decades, Calgary has repeatedly used its power to borrow cheaply to fund Stampede expansions, and even expropriated land outright in the Victoria Park neighbourhood in the late 1960s when some homeowners were reluctant to sell. Because the city technically owns the Stampede grounds, the Stampede pays no property tax on them. Conflicts of interest are rampant and ignored, except on those occasions when the Stampede tries to pull off some particularly ambitious business or real estate deal. Local media know they must tread carefully before broadcasting or printing anything even slightly negative about the various entities that sustain the city’s totemistic event.

Of course the Stampede has made the name of Calgary world-famous. Calgarians abroad are as sure to be asked about their Stampede as Edmontonians are to be asked about their big mall. But the marketing effect is double-edged. Andy Sayers, a communications specialist for a mid-sized Calgary oil-patch-service company, says he and others in his field “struggle with themselves” every year as the bacchanal he compares to “the last days of Rome” approaches. “I spend most of my time trying to inculcate the image of our firm as ultra-modern thought leaders”, he says. “Then I have to create the invitations to our Stampede event. It’s tricky to wrap yourself in the blanket of the Stampede — to offer a down-home feeling to visitors without making yourselves look small-time.”

Colby Cosh, “The Calgary Stampede at 100: It may be over-the-top and at times dangerous, but Calgary’s Wild West show is the best party in Canada”, Maclean’s, 2012-07-06.

July 6, 2022

QotD: Like Communism, “true” Social Credit has never been attempted

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Brands die hard, in politics as in a grocery store. When Alberta Social Credit made its astonishing conquest of the Alberta legislature 84 years ago, the party was immediately accused by the crank inventor of the Social Credit economic doctrine, C.H. Douglas, of having gotten the theory all wrong. One suspects that Douglas, whose writings are incomprehensible when they are not preaching patent lunacy, would have said this as a matter of self-defence to any organized group that tried to use his theories as a basis for actual governing. Still, it technically means that no political manifestation of “Social Credit” was ever really Social Credit at all.

The bits of Social Credit that people in Alberta liked, amid the misery of the 1930s, were the hatred of high finance and the promise of an unearned monetary dividend. Alberta Social Credit tried to govern on this general basis, even after Douglas came to Edmonton personally and informed the cabinet that it had failed to comprehend his genius. Despite this, “Douglasite” true believers remained prominent in the party until shortly after the war, when premier E.C. Manning purged them from the Social Credit electoral apparatus. (Many were vague but obvious anti-Semites, like Douglas himself.)

Colby Cosh, “Social Credit may be dead. Long live Social Credit!”, National Post, 2019-04-22.

April 7, 2022

Alberta’s recall law

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Recall laws are not common in Canada, with Alberta’s new law being only the second example:

The Recall Act, which was part of a 2019 UCP platform pledge to “strengthen democracy and accountability in Alberta” mirrors the terms of the recall law enacted in B.C. after the 1991 election that swept a scandal-plagued Social Credit party out of power (and, a few years later, out of existence). Like Alberta’s law, the B.C. law requires the signatures of 40 per cent of eligible voters in a constituency gathered within a 60-day period to trigger a by-election. In B.C., this barrier has not yet been cleared despite 26 recall initiatives (although, in a few cases, politicians have resigned rather than fight).

Recall laws are not unique to Canada. The United Kingdom has had recall legislation since 2015, but it differs from the Alberta and B.C. laws in that it is triggered not by disgruntled voters but by MP wrongdoing, including being convicted of expense fraud, suspended from the House of Commons or sentenced to prison. Despite this extra requirement, the apparent criminal propensity of U.K. politicians plus a low threshold of 10 per cent of voters to trigger a by-election mean that the law has already been used successfully twice.

You may also remember the California vote last summer, in which the oleaginous Governor Gavin Newsom comfortably survived a state-wide recall. After some early uncertainty, California’s fit of popular pique ended in exactly the same place as the gubernatorial election three years earlier — literally, to the decimal place — with 61.9 per cent support for Newsom. After 18 months and half a billion dollars, all the process proved was that the period of appointed military governors from 1847-1850 remains the high-water mark for good governance in California.

The argument against recalls starts with the fact that they bear the same relationship to democracy that a mulligan does to the rules of golf. We already have regular elections to vote out unpopular politicians. A recall is for people who can’t wait four years to admit their own mistake. It is an impetuous power for impatient people. Besides, voting the bums out is the chief joy of democracy — surely we can wait a few years to savour the moment.

Some elected politicians are unworthy of the trust placed in them. But that is our fault as voters. Venting our frustrations at the people we elected is a cop out. Mencken infamously wrote that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” He was right. In an hereditary aristocracy, you can blame the bad luck of the genetic lottery, and in an autocracy you can fume about the injustice of might making right. But in a democracy, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We voted ’em in, and now we deserve to get it good and hard … for four years at least.

November 7, 2021

Prime Minister Look-at-my-socks loves the limelight at COP26

Jen Gerson on Canada’s fundamentally unserious Prime Minister Photo-Op grandstanding at the climate love-in in Glasgow:

In a rare moment of unity, both Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and NDP opposition leader Rachel Notley objected to Trudeau’s announcements.

“I don’t know why they would make an announcement like this without consulting with the province that actually owns the overwhelming majority of Canada’s oil and gas reserve,” said Kenney.

I mean, yeah. He’s right.

When asked for actual details about this brave new plan at COP26, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault didn’t have much to share … because the plan doesn’t exist yet. It’s a plan to make a plan.

“We will need to be developing this, and that’s exactly what we will be doing in the coming months,” Guilbeault said, according to the CBC. Both he and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson have asked the net-zero advisory board to help them come up with a plan. “Specifically, we seek your advice on key guiding principles to inform the development of quantitative five-year targets,” they said in a letter sent on Monday.

There’s no path, here. There’s been no discussion; no consultation, nothing. There’s not even a draft of an idea.

So why is Trudeau getting on a stage in front of the world’s leaders half-cocked with ambitious promises for an emissions cap before he’s worked out the details at home?

To quote Line co-founder Matt Gurney during our weekly meeting: “To ask that question is to answer it.”

Trudeau is signalling what he cares about and what he doesn’t. He’s more concerned with how the audience abroad perceives him than he is about the finer points of governing. It’s about getting back-pats by the Davos set, not actually running our embarrassing, open-pit G7 backwater.

It was hard to avoid the sense during the last election that Trudeau didn’t have his heart in the fight; that he’s more invested in acting the part of prime minister than being it.

I put little stock in rumours that the Liberal leader will soon leave his role — if you’re going to act a part, after all, there are few better. And what a great platform it provides for a launch to better things. But I do wonder: If someone offered him a ranking job at the UN or the WEF or something else with a suitably impressive acronym and a travel expense account, how long would he stick around?

October 20, 2021

Alberta and Quebec, the dark twins of Confederation

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson explains why the Alberta government is consciously taking some of its strategies for dealing with the feds and other provinces from the generations-long success that has been Quebec’s planbook:

Quebec — as the single largest recipient of equalization cash — is often a target of anger in these parts, but I’d encourage any readers from thereabouts not to read too much into this fact. Both Alberta and Quebec suffer from a culture of political grievance that feed off one another. Alberta resents the fiscal balances, often casting Quebec as an ungrateful recipient of the very oil wealth that the latter regards with contempt. And I can only imagine how Quebec must read this; as a signal of its own isolation from Anglo culture more broadly. On both sides, I see politicians who have made a generational art of milking these respective grievances.

So sometimes it’s worthwhile to point this out.

Alberta doesn’t hate Quebec.

The provinces exist on flip sides of the very same coin; they are each others’ dark twins, and Alberta seeks mostly to emulate its French sibling.

Kenney made this point entirely explicitly in the days leading up to the referendum.

“We’re using this to get leverage to basically take a page out of Quebec’s playbook in having successfully dominated the political attention of the federation for the last 40 or 50 years.”

What playbook was he referencing, here?

The answer is obvious; the separation referenda of 1980 and 1995. In fact, the whole logic of Alberta’s referenda last night was predicated on a novel reading of the Quebec Secession Reference, in which a clear majority on a clear question must force the federal government to the negotiating table in good faith. The fact that this reference spoke to a secession question — and not a longstanding quibble over an item within the constitution — is a material difference from a legal point of view, but not a psychological one.

The hope is that this referenda will give us somethin akin to the “leverage” Quebec has enjoyed vs. Ottawa since its failed separation referenda; and the disproportionate financial and cultural incentives that followed in the following decades. Essentially, Alberta is asking for the leverage of a true separatist movement without suffering the risk of actually separating. We are play-acting a little Potemkin secession referendum, here. If it falls to me to point out the show is a little childish and even a touch pathetic, well, so be it.

October 16, 2021

Alberta’s Equalization referendum is “political theatre, and it’s poorly timed political theatre at that”

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

The province of Alberta is unhappy with the current federal-provincial equalization arrangement. This is not new … it’s been the case off-and-on for most of my life, but this year the province is undertaking a formal referendum on the issue, as Jen Gerson explains in The Line:

Let’s start with all the usual but necessary rigmarole about the Alberta referendum on equalization: a “yes” vote won’t peel equalization from the constitution; even a resounding victory may not actually force the federal government to sit with the province of Alberta to discuss the matter. I mean, it might: this was Ted Morton’s idea, and his argument. That Alberta can force Ottawa and the provinces to engage in some kind of open-hearted exchange by piggybacking on the Quebec Secession Reference is not totally impossible, I guess.

As this Fraser Institute bulletin by Rainer Knopff points out, that reference is specific to questions of, well, secession and probably can’t be re-applied willy nilly to any old provincial grievance. However, Knopff goes on to note that the referendum is necessary to create a provincial legislative resolution on the matter, which would allegedly trigger some kind of duty to negotiate — although certainly no duty to come to an agreement that Alberta would find acceptable.

Most credible individuals begin to handwave furiously when asked to nail the technical legal details about how we’re going to make Ottawa cede a damn thing. Even Morton had to point out that the referendum’s greatest power lies in granting Alberta “moral force” on the question.

In other words, it’s political theatre, and it’s poorly timed political theatre at that.

Equalization is a perennial complaint in Alberta, and not one totally without merit. Although the province doesn’t cut Ottawa some kind of novelty-sized equalization cheque at tax time, we are a comparatively wealthy province, which means the province traditionally sends more money to the federal government through its income and business tax remittances than it receives in rebates and services. There is a sense of injustice, here, which notes that equalization-receiving provinces offer services like cheap daycare, and are now racking up rainy day funds as Alberta falls ever deeper into debt. Meanwhile, we can’t seem to get a pipeline built to transport the very product that provides so much of this national bounty and wealth because other provinces oppose them.

October 7, 2021

Alberta’s pantomime election to nominate a Senate candidate that Trudeau can ignore with great relish

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

In the latest NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh discusses the apparently ongoing non-binding election for Alberta’s next Senate seat:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S. Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

The prestige of Trudeau’s Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments must be maintained at all hazards, which is why the Prime Minister’s Office undertook, a little surprisingly, to provide our Ryan Tumilty with an official response to Alberta’s Senate election. The board, says the voice of the PMO, “evaluates candidates based on public, merit-based criteria”; it was not deemed necessary to finish the sentence with “… unlike the demented, bloodthirsty populace of Alberta, who will presumably just vote for the candidate who can devour the most tar sand at a COVID party.”

For our part, NP Platformed has always been a tad frustrated that smaller political groupings don’t welcome Alberta Senate elections as a chance for a low-stakes, low-cost electoral push toward the limelight. Now that federal and provincial Conservative parties are united, for the moment, 2021’s Senate election has not been accompanied even by the quiet campaigning or the minuscule media attention that the first four elections involved. It is probably to be expected that the three Conservative Party of Canada candidates on the Senate ballot will accumulate enough semi-automatic votes to be nominated.

The Liberals and New Democrats, on an official level, stayed further away from the Senate election process than ever. Duncan Kinney, a totally-independent-from-the-NDP left-wing journalist and fellow of the Broadbent Institute, is appearing on the ballot as part of a sort of none-of-the-above campaign. His entire platform is “this Senate election is illegitimate and stupid, but wouldn’t it be amusing if I won anyhow?” (We’ll take the bait: yes, it would!)

And the People’s party has taken the opportunity to pick three official nominees. If you ask us, the Mad Max party absolutely ought to have hung onto some of what it spent on the federal election and devoted the funds to making a big splash in this one. The TV networks and newspapers would ululate with helpful rage if some PPC creature topped the Senate ballot. Heck, Maxime Bernier has always been able to personally attract big crowds in Alberta. If he had planned ahead and squatted here for six months to meet the residency requirement, he could have run in the Senate election himself.

His proxies probably won’t get anywhere, but we’ll see. There really is an opportunity for a bit of chaos here, since anyone who can break into the top three on this ballot would become an Alberta “senator-in-waiting”. Some of the independent candidates, including former Slave Lake mayor Karina Pillay and former Alberta finance minister Doug Horner, have name recognition that could count for a lot in a low-turnout vote.

August 14, 2021

Great Moments in Unintended Consequences (Vol. 3)

ReasonTV
Published 7 May 2021

Good intentions, bad results.

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Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
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Window Wealth
The Year: 1696
The Problem: Britain needs money.

The Solution: Tax windows! A residence’s number of windows increases with relative wealth and is easily observed and verified from afar. A perfect revenue generator is born!

Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

To avoid higher taxes, houses were built with fewer windows, and existing windows were bricked up. Tenements were charged as single dwellings, putting them in a higher tax bracket, which then led to rising rents or windowless apartments. The lack of ventilation and sunlight led to greater disease prevalence, stunted growth, and one rather irate Charles Dickens.

It took more than 150 years for politicians to see the error of their ways — perhaps because their view was blocked by bricks.

Loonie Ladies
The Year: 1992
The Problem: Nude dancing is degrading to women and ruining the moral fabric of Alberta, Canada.

The Solution: Establish a one-meter buffer zone between patrons and dancers.

Sounds like total buzzkill! With puritanical intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

It turns out that dancers earn most of their money in the form of tips, and dollar bills don’t fly through the air very well. Thus, the measure designed to protect dancers from degrading treatment resulted in “the loonie toss” — a creepy ritual where naked women are pelted with Canadian one-dollar coins, which are known as loonies.

Way to make the ladies feel special, Alberta.

Gallant Grocers
The Year: 2021
The Problem: Local bureaucrats need to look like they care.

The Solution: Mandate that grocery stores provide “hero pay” to their workers.

Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

Besides the fact that these ordinances may preempt federal labor and equal protection laws, a 28 percent pay raise for employees can be catastrophic to grocery stores that traditionally operate on razor-thin margins. As a result, many underperforming stores closed, resulting in a “hero pay” of sudden unemployment.

Don’t spend it all in one place!

Written and produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg; narrated by Austin Bragg

July 2, 2021

QotD: Quebec’s legendary sensitivity to criticism

We have a generally pro-Quebec stance; however, these annual meltdowns because Some Anglo Said Something Mean About Quebec are getting really tiresome. Somehow this province has managed to prove itself to be even more thin-skinned than Alberta — yes, we said it. Quebec is more reactive than the province that last week suffered a fit over an unflattering children’s cartoon.

And for some reason, the rest of Canada continues to treat these tantrums as if they are very weighty and serious matters meriting news coverage and discussion by very weighty and serious people. Canada’s indulgence of Quebec’s inability to tolerate pointed criticism is probably why the province gets away with passing racist legislation like Bill 21. And no one — least of all politicians — dare say boo because they’re all too eager to win seats in a populous province perpetually in play.

Attaran’s tweets wouldn’t even be worth our lowly mention, except that they prompted response from Justin Trudeau himself, who responded by saying: “Enough of the Quebec bashing.” That’s right, what we have here is Prime Minister Brownface condemning the tweets of an Iranian-Canadian professor who called Quebec racist by declaring such comments “Quebec bashing.” People, we are down the rabbit hole.

Earlier in this dispatch, we called Attaran a bit of a dumbass, and maybe some of you found that assessment a bit harsh. Others, perhaps not. We leave ourselves open to be capably judged by you, our dear readers. But we must ask this: What kind of dumbass do you have to be to make a figure like Amir Attaran into a national hero on free speech grounds? Good lord.

“Dispatch from The Front Line: Doing the Code Dance”, The Line, 2021-03-26.

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