Quotulatiousness

July 10, 2023

Barbara Kay – “[M]any Canadians [suffer] from highly contagious, patriotism-suppressive Post National Syndrome”

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

Canadians are deluged with messages that imply — or explicitly demand — that they should be ashamed of Canada and of being Canadians. That there is nothing to celebrate in our history or cultural achievements and instead we should humbly beseech forgiveness for our many, many, many sins. Barbara Kay disagrees:

On Canada Day, near St. Sauveur, Quebec, we were treated to torrential rain, hail, nearby tornado warnings, and continually flickering power. Not a day for fireworks. Just as well, since fireworks are the last thing one craves when one suffers, as many Canadians do, from highly contagious, patriotism-suppressive Post Nationalism Syndrome.

This scourge cannot yet be cured, since it was intentionally cultivated and released into the environment by the current government. Only herd immunity can end it. However, the symptoms of Post Nationalism Syndrome can be alleviated by certain traditional antivirals, like National Postism. Last Saturday’s NP featured several commentaries that buoyed my spirits, in particular Michael Higgins’s misery-loves-company column, “Stop shaming and start celebrating Canada”.

Higgins enumerates recent examples from a tiresome litany of complaints by our elites that “want to turn us into a nation of self-flagellating penitents”. The National Gallery of Canada insinuates that Canada’s iconic artists, the Group of Seven, are linked to white supremacy; a parliamentary motion endorses the residential school system as “genocide”; the attorney general actively considers legal sanctions against “denialism” — dissent from genocide as a proper descriptor (including me); and the erasure of Sir John A. Macdonald’s name from the eponymous Parkway.

In a nearby feature, the false claim that Macdonald was a guilty party in the alleged schools genocide was handily demolished by lawyer Greg Piasetzki, titled, “John A. Macdonald saved more indigenous lives than any other prime minister”. This evidence-based rejoinder to sticky defamatory myths about Macdonald is an excerpt from a new book of essays by 20 writers, The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should be Cherished — Not Cancelled, published by the Aristotle Foundation, and edited by its founder and president, Mark Milke. 

Piasetzki’s essay mirrors the 19 others in its forthright challenge of our culture’s reigning anti-western dogmas, which brand Canada as a failed nation. Every author encourages the pride in being Canadian that has not dared to speak its name since Justin Trudeau came to power. I highly recommend it. If enough Canadians read it, we might arrive at herd immunity to Post Nationalism Syndrome.

July 7, 2023

Justin Trudeau says that Canada is merely defending itself from the “attack” by Facebook

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

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has never faced a situation he couldn’t get histrionic about:

The government escalated the battle over Bill C-18 yesterday, announcing that it was suspending advertising on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms due the company’s decision to comply with the bill by blocking news sharing and its reluctance to engage in further negotiations on the issue. While the ad ban applies to federal government advertising, Liberal party officials confirmed they plan to continue political advertising on the social networks, suggesting that principled opposition ends when there might be a political cost involved. At issue is roughly $11 million in annual advertising by the federal government, a sum that pales in comparison to the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s estimate of at least $100 million in payments in Canada for news links from Meta alone.

In addition to raising the economic cost to Meta for stopping news sharing, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau increased the rhetoric, describing Canada as having been “attacked” by Meta and likening the government’s fight over the bill to defending democracy in Ukraine or during the Second World War [at 13:30]:

    Facebook decided that Canada was a small country, small enough that they could reject our asks. They made the wrong choice by deciding to attack Canada. We want to defend democracy. This is what we’re doing across the world, such as supporting Ukraine. This is what we did during the Second World War. This is what we’re doing every single day in the United Nations.

There are strongly held views on both sides of the Bill C-18 debate, but the suggestion that stopping sharing news links on a social network is in any way comparable to World War 2 is embarrassingly hyperbolic and gives the sense of a government that has lost perspective on the issue. Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has repeatedly described the manner of compliance with Bill C-18 as a business choice for the Internet companies, yet the Prime Minister now calls that choice an attack on the country.

If it were truly comparable to a world war, then surely the Liberal Party (joined by the NDP) would not continue to advertise on the platform. Yet since the 2021 election call, the party alone has run approximately 11,000 ads on Facebook and Instagram. That is separate from individual MPs, who have also run hundreds of ads. The Meta Ad Library provides ample evidence of how reliant the party has been on social media. For example, since the start of the year, Anna Gainey ran over 500 ads as part of her by-election campaign in Quebec. David Hilderley, who was a candidate in the Oxford by-election, ran approximately 180 ads on Facebook during the same timeframe.

June 12, 2023

It’s an insult to Chuck Barris and The Gong Show to compare it to the Justin Trudeau Show

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

In the weekly dispatch from The Line, the editors defend the honour of the original Gong Show and say that it’s not fair or right to compare that relatively staid and dignified TV show to the Canadian government’s performance art on the foreign interference file:

When the news broke late Friday afternoon that David Johnston was resigning from his position as special rapporteur on Chinese interference, the general reaction across the chattering class was a variable admixture of amusement and scorn. There’s probably a German word for it, but the security and intelligence expert Wesley Wark captured the tone of it with the headline on his Substack post, which said, simply: “Gong Show“.

We’re somewhat inclined to concur with Wark, except the three-ring train wreck that has marked Johnston’s time as Justin Trudeau’s moral merkin has been so disastrous that we think apologies are due to Chuck Barris, in light of the relative sobriety of his famous game show.

Reporters at the Globe and Mail and Global News started breaking stories about Chinese interference in Canadian elections a few months back, based largely on leaks from inside the Canadian intelligence apparatus. Almost immediately it was clear that the Liberals had a major problem on their hands, one that was going to require levels of transparency, good judgment and political even-handedness that this government has manifestly failed to achieve during its almost eight years in power.

Yet when Trudeau announced that he was going to appoint an “eminent Canadian” as “special rapporteur” to do an investigation and report back to the government with recommendations for how it should tackle the issue, we gave a collective groan here at The Line. Given the endless similar tasking of retired Supremes passim, it was clear that the pool from which Trudeau was going to fish his eminent personage was very shallow, and pretty well-drained. Indeed, at least one of us here was willing to bet large sums that it would be David Johnston.

What do we make of all this? Here’s the situation as we see it, in bullet form for brevity’s sake:

  • Johnston should never have been offered the position of special rapporteur
  • Having been offered the job of special rapporteur, Johnston should never have accepted it

And that is basically it. But given that Trudeau had the poor judgment to ask him, and Johnston had the poor judgment to accept, we think everything that has happened since was pretty much inevitable. We couldn’t have guessed at all the details of how this would have played out, especially the delicious elements beginning with the decision to hire Navigator to provide strategic advice (to manage what, exactly?), the revelation that Navigator had also provided strategic advice to Han Dong (who, recall, Johnston more or less exonerated), the firing of Navigator and the involvement of Don Guy and Brian Topp … this is really just gongs piled upon gongs piled upon gongs.

But the overall trajectory of Johnston’s time as special rapporteur? If you had told us ahead of time that this was more or less how things would go, we wouldn’t have been much surprised. Why? Because we live in Canada. And this is how Canada’s governing class behaves. It is a small, incestuous, highly conflicted and enormously self-satisfied group of people that is so isolated from the rest of the country they don’t even realize how isolated they are.

Honestly. What in heaven’s name gave Trudeau the idea that it would be smart to ask a former governor general to help launder his government’s reputation? And why on Earth did Johnston think it was a good idea to accept? Forget the Navigator stuff, this turkey was never going to fly. Johnston’s report was not accepted as the wise counsel of a wise man; instead it was seen as a partisan favour by a conflicted confidant. Sure, Johnston was subject to some pretty unfair attacks from the opposition, but what did he think was going to happen? Has he paid any attention over the last decade? But pride is a form of stubborness, and even after parliament voted for him to go, Johnston insisted he would stay on to finish his work. Until, on Friday afternoon, he decided he would not.

We’re not going to speculate about why Johnston finally pulled the chute. We’d like to think that the former GG in him thought it best to obey the will of the House of Commons. We rather hope it had nothing to do with some pointed (and unanswered) questions put to Johnston’s office by the Globe and Mail, asking whether Navigator had been given a heads-up on Johnston’s conclusions on the Dong file.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. As Paul Wells put it in a recent column, Trudeau sought to “outsource his credibility by subcontracting his judgment,” where credibility was supposed to flow from Johnston to Trudeau. Instead, and we would say, inevitably, the flow went in the opposite direction. If the prime minister had any credibility to lead the country on this issue, he wouldn’t need a special rapporteur in the first place. The fact that Trudeau felt the need to appoint one is a tacit admission that he knows he doesn’t have the trust of the people.

And that is the real problem here. The Johnston saga has ended where it was always going to, with a once-honorable man’s reputation in tatters and the problem he was brought in to address still unresolved. David Johnston has resigned, as he must have. In our view, that’s one resignation too few.

May 27, 2023

“David Johnston is an honourable man”

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

From this heading, you might be a bit reminded of Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar, as imagined by William Shakespeare (well, I was, so you’ll have to suffer a few lines of iambic pentameter):

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.

Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into the opening line of Philippe Lagassé’s article about former Governor General David Johnston’s role in whitewashing the Trudeau running dogs, however:

David Johnston is an honourable man. As a former governor general, he holds the title of Right Honourable and he wears it better than many former prime ministers who share that moniker. Johnston is also a champion of trust in democratic institutions; he literally wrote a book called Trust: Twenty Ways to Build a Better Country.

Although his appointment has been plagued by questions about his perceived conflicts of interest, it’s hard to accept that Johnston set out to protect the Liberal party. Whether one agrees with him or not, Johnston’s conclusions were arrived at sincerely and in keeping with his view that “Democracy is built on trust.” Unfortunately, his recommendation against a public inquiry is not only bewildering from a political perspective, but could erode the very trust in democracy that he wants to strengthen.

Whatever we think about Johnston’s first report, we should be concerned with his appointment as the special rapporteur. Aside from the perceived conflicts of interest, we should ask why a former governor general accepted the role in the first place. Serving as a vice-regal representative should be the last public role an individual performs. Any other public duty performed by a former governor general or lieutenant governor, however well-intentioned and performed, carries risks that can diminish these offices. Johnston’s experience is a cautionary tale for future vice-regals.

The governor general is the second-highest office of the Canadian state, under the monarch alone. The King’s representative performs most of the Crown’s head of state functions in Canada, both constitutional and ceremonial. Official independence and non-partisanship are essential parts of the head of state function. Canadians should be able to trust (there’s that word again) that governors general will be impartial in the exercise of their constitutional powers. We need only look at the 2008 prorogation controversy and the 2017 election in British Columbia to see why this matters for Canadian democracy.

Although less vital, independence and non-partisanship are also important for the governor general’s ceremonial roles. Having the governor general bestow honours ensures that Canadians are recognized by a neutral, but high-standing, representative of the state. An ardent Conservative can receive the Order of Canada while a Liberal government is in power without wincing, since the prime minister and cabinet are kept at a safe distance from the whole thing.

[…]

Former vice-regal representatives should take heed. They would do well to avoid becoming a new set of “retired Supreme Court justices”, whose judicial halo effect has become comically overused to stem political controversy. Indeed, Canadians should insist that the governor general’s salary and annuity come with a tacit bargain: you were set for life to ensure your impartiality and independence, now we never want to hear you wading into political controversies or see you hold another public office again.

This should not be too much to ask of the King’s representatives. No other public role has the formal role stature of a vice-regal office, aside from the monarch, and none are as carefully insulated from partisan battles. The office of governor general should be held by those at the end of a remarkable career, as a final act of independent and impartial public service.

Also in The Line, Mitch Heimpel seems to be a bit less willing to tolerate the use of a former Governor General as ablative shielding for a compromised government:

In the end, David Johnston proved himself to be exactly what his critics argued he always was.

A fervent defender of his advantaged status quo. Another among the thoroughly compromised set of politicians, senior civil servants and academics who have, over the decades when it comes to Canadian foreign policy regarding China, taken the money and run. The idea that he was ever going to be anything else was a figment of our own collective fantasy.

We believed we were a serious country. David Johnston has laughed in our faces at the very thought.

The families of members of Parliament have been targeted for possible “sanctions”? No matter.

Our elections are the subject of coordinated foreign intelligence operations? Well, sure. But what is democracy really?

Really, you see, Johnston told us — without ever being quite so direct about it, because people of Johnston’s polite air are rarely so crass — the media was your problem. They published things without the appropriate “context.”

Choosing Johnston was always a bit grubby. It was meant to politically neuter Conservatives because, after all, Stephen Harper appointed him to be the governor general. How could he possibly be compromised? Yes, he’s known the prime minister whose government he was investigating since Justin Trudeau was a small child. And, yes, as a university president, he was long an advocate for more open relations with China. And, yes, he involved with the Trudeau Foundation, which has found itself at the heart of the question of foreign interference coordinated by the Chinese Communist Party, but …

No, there is no “but”.

There is no other democracy which would have successfully conducted an elaborate farce of this magnitude to tell its citizens what it is painfully obvious that it wanted to tell them all along: You have no right to know.

May 15, 2023

Paul Wells – “Unworkable and swiftly-disavowed tinpot dictatorship is, statistically, one of the least damaging forms of tinpot dictatorship”

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

Paul Wells follows up last week’s rather disturbing report that the Liberal Party’s big gathering in Ottawa extruded a resolution to get “The Government” to work toward forcing journalists (and those peasant bloggers like Paul Wells) to only publish things that the sources informing it could be “traced” by that same authority:

Last Friday I wrote about a policy resolution at the big Liberal Party of Canada national convention that was, in my opinion, bad. This was the resolution that would have the party “request the government explore options” to “hold on-line information sources accountable” by requiring that they “limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced”.

How do you limit publication to traceable sources? I have to assume you clear the sources. “This resolution has no meaning,” wrote I, “unless it means I would be required to clear my posts through the federal government, before publication, so the ‘traceability’ of my sources could be verified.”

Some people disagreed, but I had a hard time getting them to describe what it could mean if it wasn’t what I thought. I was careful to note that party conventions aren’t binding on governments. Commenters sympathetic to the Trudeau government latched onto all the this-might-mean-nothing language, the stuff about “request” and “explore options.” At their convention, a tiny minority of registered Liberal delegates attended a “policy workshop” at which nothing was debated. Amid considerable confusion about where these resolutions were in the party’s own process — Althia Raj covered it on Twitter; go look if you like — this resolution became party policy with no discussion at all. That was on Saturday.

On Tuesday, Justin Trudeau went before reporters and said no Liberal government would ever implement this Liberal policy. Other cabinet ministers followed suit, and one MP who didn’t benefit from the counsel of the Monday-morning issues-management call had a rougher time executing the U-turn.

Look, I think the amount of self-inflicted ballistic damage to the government’s own foot here is minor. Unworkable and swiftly-disavowed tinpot dictatorship is, statistically, one of the least damaging forms of tinpot dictatorship.

But I want to let everyone in on a secret of my journalism, and indeed of most journalism: Criticism of politicians is often advice to politicians. I actually don’t spend a lot of time hoping governments and opposition parties will keep pursuing self-destructive and country-destructive choices indefinitely. I always hope a bit of mockery, especially pre-emptive mockery, will help inform their choices. If it stings when Wells writes it, it might sting worse when everyone is saying it.

Ministers of the Crown who didn’t need to wait for the Monday-morning issues-management meeting to tell them what to think could have spent the weekend thinking for themselves. They might even have invited their own staffs, riding executives, and Liberals at large to think for themselves. A dozen or so hardy souls, out of 3,500 registered delegates, might then have showed up to the policy workshop willing to debate.

“Uh, Paragraph Two looks hinky. How would a government enforce that?”

“Well, it doesn’t apply to reputable journalists.”

“Great, thanks. Remind me who decides who’s reputable? Any thought on who’ll be making those calls once we’re no longer in government?”

Maybe somebody would have added a friendly amendment. “For greater clarity, nothing in this paragraph impinges …”

I can even imagine a cabinet minister showing up for those floor debates and influencing the party’s direction single-handed. I’ve seen it happen in other parties. But I had Liberal friends over the weekend explain to me that no such thing ever happens. Fine, it’s your funeral. Basically we’re watching a party choose between two different models of public-policy deliberation:

OPTION 1: Smart people think and talk.

OPTION 2: Everybody in the party defends rickety thinking until it blows up in their faces.

I’m not kidding when I tell you most people in political communications would defend Option 2. We’re living in a time that values message over thinking. But folks can’t say I didn’t warn them.

Would Canadian voters welcome a new “actually centrist” political party?

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

Tasha Kheiriddin on the possibility of yet another political party contesting that mythical centrist voting bloc in Canadian elections:

By now, you have probably heard of Centre Ice Canadians. The group was co-founded a year ago by former two-time Conservative leadership candidate Rick Peterson. It made its debut as Centre Ice Conservatives, during the Conservative leadership process, holding a policy conference in Edmonton, followed by similar events in Halifax and Toronto. It published numerous op-eds and got the Canada Pension Plan to disinvest from funds profiting from slave labour in China. It positioned itself as a home for the politically homeless, chiefly Red Tories and Blue Liberals, who felt that neither of their parties were listening to their ideas.

Last week, Centre Ice announced that it would explore the possibility of registering as a political party. It did this following both an external opinion survey of 2000 Canadians, which found that 32% of those polled would likely consider voting for a centrist party in the next election, and a callout to its roughly 2000 supporters, which saw most respondents approve of the concept.

A working group headed by Peterson and New Brunswick MLA Dominic Cardy is now investigating the idea, including a draft constitution, fundraising and a new name, until September 20, at which point Centre Ice will formally decide whether it goes down that road. Observers posit that it could “disrupt the political system”, evoking memories of the Reform Party which did the same thing thirty years ago.

[…]

There’s another saying which management seems to have overlooked: “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”. Leaders traditionally neutralized their opponents by keeping them busy and giving them reason to be loyal. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney made a place for former rival Joe Clark; Stephen Harper brought Peter MacKay into cabinet. In the Liberal camp, Jean Chretien had Paul Martin helm the Finance Portfolio; Trudeau gave Marc Garneau Transport and then Foreign Affairs.

That type of thing hasn’t happened in the current scorched earth climate. Animated by Twitter, where we’ve all said things we regret, it has instead produced a toxic purity test that excommunicates anyone who challenges the party line or criticizes the leader. Only the worthy are allowed in the tent.

That applies equally to the Liberals, who draw lines in the sand for their faithful on all manner of issues from abortion to gun control to internet regulation. Which is why the Centre Ice movement isn’t just about the Conservatives. Many of the people signing up on the organization’s website aren’t members of any party, but they would like to be. But they don’t like the climate of fear in either of the main parties.

They want to be able to express an opinion without being trolled. They want a place that eschews groupthink for group discussion. Whether such a party can exist in today’s politics, or whether it could make any headway in an election, is an open question.

What isn’t in question is that both federal parties have become polarized to their respective ends of the political spectrum: wokeism and populism. That is more unusual for the Liberals than for the Tories – the Liberals were traditionally the party of the centre, derided as the “mushy middle” for their ability to morph into whatever voters wanted at the time, as well as conflating their brand with the image of Canada (tolerant, multicultural, bilingual) in a way the Conservatives did not manage to do.

May 14, 2023

Garbage data informs the Canadian government’s approach to gun control issues

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Tim Thurley points out the (totally expected) bias of the data being considered by the federal government:

A selection of weapons (mostly restricted or prohibited in the hands of most Canadians) displayed by Toronto police after confiscation.
Screencap from a CTV News report in 2018.

The Mass Casualty Commission’s firearm recommendations were, rightly, overlooked in the initial phase after the report’s release. They have become relevant these past weeks as gun control groups, the NDP, the Bloc, and the Liberals used them to advocate for sweeping changes to Bill C-21, the government’s controversial gun-control proposals. The Liberals have thus far declined to adopt the MCC’s recommendations, at least in whole, and that’s encouraging. Our lawmakers should be careful. The Mass Casualty Commission’s concluding recommendations on guns and homicide share a problem common to any data analysis. If you use the wrong data, you get a bad output.

Or, to be blunt: garbage in, garbage out.

R. Blake Brown, a professor who contributed a commissioned report to the MCC, suggested that the MCC got all the best research together and simply found the arguments made by gun control groups to be more convincing.

He’s wrong. While the MCC could have been a completely neutral panel objectively weighing the evidence before it, the nakedly selective choice of data inputs and slanted interpretation meant that no unbiased outcome was possible. Indeed, the MCC inputs seem heavily weighed to advance a pro-control agenda, and do so in such an obvious way that the resulting flaws should be immediately clear to those with even a passing knowledge of the study of firearms and firearm homicide.

[…]

Dr. Caillin Langmann is a well-known name in Canadian firearms research, and by far the most prolific author using rigorous statistical methods to examine the effects of gun control on Canadian firearm mortality. No serious analysis of Canadian firearm mortality is possible without his work, and yet his work does not appear on its own and is not cited in the Negin Report. Indeed, his and other critical research does not seem to have informed the final Commission report or recommendations at all.

I asked Dr. Langmann about his exclusion. He told me he offered to appear to present his research but the Commission declined.

It may not be a coincidence that the exclusion of Langmann and other researchers without explicit gun-control agendas was due to the fact — the fact — that the Canadian and comparable research substantively contradicts the Negin Report and the MCC recommendations on firearms. An examination of already-implemented Canadian gun laws including various factors such as prohibition of “paramilitary style” rifles and magazine capacity restrictions all found no impact on mass shootings or mass homicide overall in Canada or on associated fatalities. Instead, mass homicide by both firearm and non-firearm causes gradually declined on its own. The lack of association between gun control and decreased mortality is replicated multiple times in Canadian research.

Guess what? It is also replicated in a detailed statistical analysis of Australian data not mentioned by the Negin Report.

The core research inputs to the Mass Casualty Commission were commissioned from parties with well-established and acknowledged positions on firearms. Written by literal gun control advocates without substantial input from other sources, the contrary research is either ignored or not treated with due academic respect. This damages the credibility of the Commission findings, giving the perception that they were gathering conclusions in search of evidence.

Again, it must be made clear that this wouldn’t have been a problem if the MCC had treated the Negin Report as just one part of the firearm policy research puzzle. It was their failure to do so and the consequent lack of neutrality, lack of engagement with solid research, and complete disregard for engagement with different academic perspectives despite obvious relevant expertise, that taints the Mass Casualty Commission firearm recommendations and severely limits any useful policy conclusions we can gather from their report.

May 7, 2023

The Line reports on “a Liberal policy convention in Fantasia”

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

It used to be said that the marketing department in any given organization was where the rubber met the sky (three drink minimum), but the Liberal convention in Barad-dûr-by-the-Rideau now owns that territory:

Once upon a time, Canada was led by a serious man named Pierre Elliot Trudeau. No matter what you think of his tenure as prime minister, there is no question that he took the job, and the country, seriously. Today his offspring, both biological and ideological, prance around the Canadian political landscape, smug and entitled and all the rest of it. But none of them has the foggiest idea of what they are doing with with the power they inherited, or why, or for what purpose.

[…]

For the evening entertainment on Friday, they brought out Jean Chrétien — another fantastically unserious person — to do his usual petit gars de Shawinigan routine. And did the old coot ever deliver, bragging yet again about keeping Canada out of Iraq, jabbing at Pierre Poilievre, and joking that he expects The Globe and Mail to call for a royal commission into Hillary Clinton showing up at the Liberal convention and interfering in Canadian elections.

Oh, our sides. They split. No matter that two days ago was World Press Freedom day. No matter that Friday also happened to be NNA night, where the Globe and Mail won nine awards. This is the Liberal convention after all, where one of the main policy proposals up for debate is a suggestion from the B.C. Liberals to essentially nationalise the news. Why not aim a few kicks at the media. The Liberals are paying for it anyway, aren’t they?

In his speech, Chrétien played to the latest Liberal idée fixe, which is that all of the party’s troubles since 2018 — from SNC Lavalin to WEgate to the egregious handling of Chinese interference — are all due to the clickbait chasing yellow journalists at the failing Globe and Mail.

For those of you who weren’t lucky enough to live through the nineties, Chrétien is the Liberal prime minister who brought you such hits as “what me worry?” about a Quebec referendum on secession; a joke about his PMO ordering the RCMP to pepper spray UBC students protesting his decision to invite a brutal dictator to dinner on their campus; and the Shawinigate and Adscam scandals, both of which are still routinely taught and referenced as case studies in ruling party greaseballery at its most unctuous.

But Liberals be Liberals. As National Post columnist Chris Selley noted: “This is deadly serious shit and this buffoon is playing it for laughs, just like [he] always played deadly serious shit.”

The “deadly serious shit” Selley had in mind is surely the river of scandal coursing through the Liberal Party in Ottawa over Chinese interference in Canadian politics, with tributaries flowing in from riding associations across the country, the Trudeau Foundation in Montreal, and numerous other parts of the Canadian political landscape. On Monday, the Globe and Mail reported on a CSIS analysis from 2021 which alleged that the family of Conservative MP Michael Chong was targeted by China’s security apparatus for unknown sanctions, in response to Chong’s sponsorship of a House of Commons motion calling China’s persecution of the Uighurs a genocide.

On Tuesday an understandably alarmed Chong was given an emergency briefing about the threat by CSIS director David Vigneault, in a meeting arranged by the prime minister.

This isn’t just about Michael Chong. Every member of parliament, every member of the government, should be up in arms over this. The Chinese diplomat in Canada involved, Zhao Wei, should have been sent home immediately, but Melanie Joly is still weighing the pros and cons.

As appalling as the targeting of Chong is in its own right, more scandalous still is the government’s response — equal parts utterly incompetent, unbelievably shady, and shamelessly partisan.

The scandal begins with the fact that Chong himself was never told about the CSIS report. Why is that? On Wednesday, the prime minister claimed it was because the threat identified in the CSIS report wasn’t deemed serious enough by the intelligence agency, so it never circulated outside of the agency. The first Trudeau had heard of this, apparently, was when he read about it in the newspaper.

But on Thursday, Michael Chong told the House of Commons that he’d been told, in a call from Trudeau’s current national security advisor Jody Thomas, that the report had actually made its way to the desk of one of her predecessors. When Trudeau was asked to explain this apparent contradiction on Friday, he said: “In terms of what I shared, I shared the best information I had at the time on Wednesday, both to Mr. Chong and to Canadians.” When asked who had given him this information, Trudeau declined to answer.

Look, we’ve seen this game before, countless times, with this government and this prime minister. Trudeau’s habit of responding to allegations of wrongdoing or incompetence or mismanagement by first denying any knowledge of the issue, then discrediting the source, and finally throwing unidentified third parties under the bus, is a well trod path for this deeply unserious man.

Given the pattern, we’re pretty skeptical of Trudeau’s claim that he’d been given incomplete information. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise us in the slightest if it turns out that he just made the whole thing up.

May 6, 2023

The federal Liberals want even more control over the internet

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

Paul Wells notes that a policy proposal at the Liberal conference this week indicates just how much the Liberal Party of Canada wants to control free expression on the internet:

Here on the 2023 Liberal convention’s “Open Policy Process” page are links to “Top 20 Resolutions” and “Fast-Tracked Resolutions”. The latter go straight to the plenary floor, the former go through a smaller preliminary debate and, if they pass, then on to the plenary. These things move fast because, in most cases, Liberals are paying only listless attention to the discussions. Policy is for New Democrats. Well, I mean, it used to be.

But sometimes words have meaning, so this morning I’m passing on one of the Top 20 Resolutions, from pages 12 and 13 of that book. This one comes to us from the British Columbia wing of the party.

It’s in two screenshots simply because it spreads across two pages. This is the entire resolution.

BC Liberals want “on-line information services” held “accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms” by “the Government”. The Government would, in turn, “limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced”.

This resolution has no meaning unless it means I would be required to clear my posts through the federal government, before publication, so the “traceability” of my sources could be verified. I don’t suppose this clearance process would take too much more time than getting a passport or a response to an access-to-information request. Probably only a few months, at first. Per article.

After publication, “the Government” would hold me accountable for the veracity of my material, presumably through some new mechanism beyond existing libel law.

I’m not sure what “the Government” — I’m tickled by the way it’s capitalized, like Big Brother — would have made of this post, in which I quote an unnamed senior government official who was parked in front of reporters by “the Government” on the condition that he or she or they not be named. But by the plain meaning of this resolution, I would not have to wonder for long because that post would have been passed or cleared by the Government’s censors before publication, and I’m out of recourse if that process simply took longer than I might like.

May 4, 2023

Despite all the evidence, Canada’s official motto doesn’t translate as “we broke it”

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

In The Line, Justin Ling adds more to the towering pile of evidence that “Canada is broken”:

If The Line has an editorial position, it is probably thus: Everything is broken.

This newsletter, of course, comes at the idea more earnestly than, say, the leader of the Conservative party. When my friend Matt Gurney advances that proposition, it is a lament. When Pierre Poilievre does: It’s wishful thinking.

While citizens of this country can’t always agree on what, exactly, is busted in our country, or why, or who is responsible — we can all agree, I hope, that things in this country could use a tune-up, at the very least. Canadians, after all, are imbued with a cloying optimism. An insufferable belief that things can be fixed. It’s a good thing.

Lucky for us, we have plenty of words written about how to fix much of what ails us. Because we, as a country, have a compulsive need to inquire about those problems. Our national pastime isn’t hockey, it’s the royal commission.

And we’ve got a government in office that loves to study the nature of the problem. There’s good work, these days, for the special rapporteurs and retired judges amongst us. And if you’re a Canadian that loves a good public consultation, you must be run ragged.

Yet we also have a government in office that has a pathological inability to take advice. And this problem may help explain why it feels like we’re sliding backwards.

[…]

When the government tapped an expert panel to study the use of solitary confinement in Canada’s prisons — literally torture — Correctional Services Canada blocked them from doing their job, and the public safety minister ignored their cries for help and then let their contracts lapse. Thanks to some scrutiny, the government renewed the study, then ignored it when the numbers showed they were still torturing people. Oops!

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians — a body Trudeau created — warned in 2019 that Ottawa wasn’t taking foreign interference seriously, particularly when it came to China. “In short, government responses were piecemeal, responding to specific instances of foreign interference but leaving unaddressed the many other areas where Canadian institutions and fundamental rights and freedoms continue to be undermined by hostile states.” Prescient!

One of the most absurd examples is the sexual misconduct crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces. When Trudeau came into office in 2015, he had an external review on his desk from Marie Deschamps. One good external review deserves another, so the Liberals ordered one from Louise Arbour in 2022. What she found was harrowing: “We have been here before. Little seems to change.” Not only had the government failed to implement the Deschamps report, it was still failing to live up to the recommendations from the 1997 Somalia Inquiry. Fuck!

[…]

At the very centre of this tootsie-pop is, surprise, elitism. This Liberal government, armed with its paper-thin mandate, is convinced that they — and only they — are the verifiers of good ideas. And we should be grateful for whatever decision they deign to make.

If they farm out an idea to the public service, and the idea doesn’t come back in the form they envisioned, no matter: Send out the McKinsey signal. For just a few million dollars, their crack team of subject matter non-experts can prepare a PowerPoint presentation laying out the exact policy the political staff wanted in the first place.

The Liberals take a similar approach to consulting with the unwashed masses. When the government consulted the public on their plan to police “online harms,” they published a “what we heard” report that was broadly supportive of their plan.

Can we see the submissions? Journalists and academics asked. No. Came the reply.

April 14, 2023

From “cash for access” it’s a very short step to “cash for influence”

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

Ted Campbell shut down his blog some time ago — unfortunately for those of us interested in Canadian military affairs — but he’s still active on Twitter. Here he responds to a tweet from Sam Cooper of Global News:

Andrew Coyne highlights some of the boggling details in this thread:

March 31, 2023

Bill C-11 should properly be called the “Justin Trudeau Internet Censorship Bill”

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

In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya explains why the federal government’s Bill C-11 is a terrible idea:

Canada’s Liberals insist the point of Bill C-11 is simply to update the 1991 Broadcasting Act, which regulates broadcasting of telecommunications in the country. The goal of the bill, according to a Ministry of Canadian Heritage statement, is to bring “online broadcasters under similar rules and regulations as our traditional broadcasters”.

In other words, streaming services and social media, like traditional television and radio stations, would have to ensure that at least 35 percent of the content they publish is Canadian content — or, in Canadian government speak, “Cancon”.

The bill is inching toward a final vote in the Canadian Senate as soon as next month. It’s expected to pass. If it does, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said in an October blog post, the same creators the government says it wants to help will, in fact, be hurt.

[…]

If you’re confused by all this — if you’re wondering why the Liberal Party and its allies in these quasi-governmental organizations are suddenly so worried about Canada’s national identity — that’s understandable.

In a 2015 interview with The New York Times, Trudeau proudly declared, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” Canada, he explained, is “the first postnational state”. The authorized, two-volume biography of Trudeau’s father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, is called Citizen of the World. Pablo Rodriguez maintains dual citizenship — in Canada and in Argentina, where he was born.

So why is Trudeau, of all people, championing this legislation? There’s an easy explanation — and it has nothing to do with borders or culture.

“Bill C-11 is a government censorship bill masquerading as a Canadian culture bill,” Jay Goldberg, a director at the conservative Canadian Taxpayers Federation, told me. Referring to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Goldberg said, “The government is intending to give the power to the CRTC to be able to filter what we see in our news feeds, what we see in our streaming feeds, what we see on social media.”

Supporters of Bill C-11 emphasize it would affect only YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, TikTok, and other Big Tech platforms; the Heritage Ministry statement notes “the bill does not apply to individual Canadians”. But the language is so vague that it’s unclear how it would actually be implemented.

For example, it would be up to CRTC regulators to decide what constitutes “Canadian” content. The singer The Weeknd was born in Toronto but now mostly lives in Los Angeles. Does he still count as Canadian? What about rock n’ roller Bryan Adams, who was born in Kingston, Ontario, and spends a great deal of time in Europe?

Canada’s not-so-secret ruling class – the Laurentian elite

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

Yuan Yu Zhu explains why Canada, despite its huge geographical spread, is ruled almost exclusively by people drawn from a very small, very incestuous ruling class:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

Unlike many countries’ socio-political elites, the Laurentians are not readily identifiable on sight. They have long abandoned their differentiated mid-Atlantic drawl; their houses do not have moats.

What distinguishes them above all else is the uniformity in their outlook. Britain is often said to be run by a consensus blob; but its Canadian equivalent make the Westminster blob seem positively anarchical.

As John Ibbitson, the great chronicler of the Laurentian elite, has written:

    Although they often disagree among themselves, they share a common set of assumptions about Canada: that it’s a fragile nation; that the federal government’s job is to bind together a country that would otherwise fall apart; that the biggest challenge is keeping Quebec inside Confederation; that the poorer regions must forever stay poor, propped up by the richer parts of the country; that the national identity — whatever it is — must be protected from the American juggernaut; that Canada is a helpful fixer in the world, a peacekeeper, a joiner of all the best clubs.

Latterly they have added to this list the belief that Canada is a genocidal state built on stolen land, which should atone for its past through part-performative truth and reconciliation – without, however, actually giving any of the stolen land back. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that they are almost all small-l and/or big-L liberals.

This is not to say that their class background (in a country whose official ideology denies the existence of such a thing) is not highly homogenous. They are generally to be found in the two or three large cities of Ontario and Quebec. They tend to be from the upper-middle class families and be secularized.

Many will have been educated in the same private secondary schools; most will have attended a smattering of universities in Ontario and Quebec: the University of Toronto, Queen’s, and McGill (which Johnston headed when Trudeau was a student there).

A large number of them are bilingual, in a country where real bilingualism remains the exception.

Many have post-graduate degrees, often from abroad; something like a quarter of Mr Trudeau’s cabinet ministers have degrees from Oxbridge alone, a shocking figure given how uncommon they are among the population at large.

They then tend to gravitate into the same professional occupations, and they even live in the same few neighbourhoods in the same few cities. Sometimes, like the prime minister and his special rapporteur, they even end up sharing adjoining vacation cottages literally in the Laurentians region.

March 25, 2023

Canada’s ChiCom influence scandal – “All of the damage has been self-inflicted”

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

The Trudeau government has been expending a lot of time, effort, and political capital trying to avoid an open scandal. So much, so typical. What isn’t typical for the federal Liberals is just how badly they’re going about doing everything all of a sudden:

None of this ought to have been a shock, and none of it needed to put the Prime Minister’s Office in its current state of calcified pickle. After all, rumours and off-the-record chats about this stuff have been going around for literally years.

No, how this crew has chosen to handle these stories at every single step has made the scandal worse for themselves. Every. Single. Step. All of the damage has been self-inflicted.

This government is the epitome of an organization that is tactically smart and strategically dumb. Not only has their damage control mirrored the response of the SNC scandal (that ended so well for them), but every misstep has had the result of slowly backing the prime minister into rhetorical traps he has set for himself. This is a government that knows how to win the daily news cycle by losing the game. One that can’t distinguish between legitimate criticism and bad-faith partisan attack — probably because it is so insular and bunker-bound that it sees the world before it divided between loyalists and blood enemies. It’s symptomatic of leadership that is in its final stages of terminal fatigue, and doesn’t yet realize it. These guys cannot help but win themselves to death.

[…]

Imagine, as more stories hit the wire, the government had skipped all of those unnecessary weeks of obfuscation and deflection and simply appointed a special rapporteur to examine the need for a public inquiry. In this counterfactual, let’s also assume that the person he picked isn’t a long-time personal friend. What if Trudeau took allegations of interference seriously at the outset, and his party avoided stunts like skipping committee meetings and filibustering to prevent the testimony of his chief of staff, Katie Telford?

Where would they be today if they hadn’t squandered every iota of credibility and goodwill with the press, the NDP, and his own intelligence services? To put it more directly, what if they hadn’t spent the past few weeks acting as if they had something to hide?

Would they be better off? Maybe?

As an aside, I notice that many of the Liberal proxies are out in force on social media attacking the media and CSIS in an effort to defend the sitting government. I have to ask: how’s that working for y’all? Are you getting the sense that Global News and Sam Cooper and the Globe and Mail have been successfully cowed? Have their CSIS sources stopped leaking? Has Jagmeet Singh been brought to heel?

I’m going to put something out for consideration: Perhaps the denials, obfuscations and attacks are only making the scandal worse. They’re convincing journalists that there’s a real story here while prompting an already pissy collection of national security sources to leak harder.

March 8, 2023

Perhaps the Prime Minister ran out of glitterbomb distractions?

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney speculates on why the federal government needed to be “punched in the face” for literally weeks before finally taking (some) action:

Let’s acknowledge something right at the top: no one really knows what the hell the prime minister proposed yesterday. Not in any specific policy sense, at any rate. But boy, did we ever learn something about how the Liberals are viewing this politically.

After weeks of bobbing and weaving and throwing out fistfuls of increasingly ridiculous chaff, Justin Trudeau has belatedly agreed to a series of actions to probe Chinese electoral interference in Canada. And maybe other interference? We don’t know. We do know it’ll involve NSICOP, which is an acronym in desperate need of an agreed-upon pronunciation, if Monday’s press conference was any guide. NSICOP is a joint House-Senate committee that reviews various matters relating to Canada’s national security and intelligence (read this on its website and you’ll know more than 99.9 per cent of Canadians do about NSICOP). There’s also going to be a splash of the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA), plus a special rapporteur. The special rapporteur will apparently be given broad powers and, should they recommend a full public inquiry, the PM will accept that.

Hell of an endorsement for someone who hasn’t been selected yet. It’s almost like the PM decided he had to make an announcement before he was ready to actually share many details about that announcement, for some reason. Like the announcement itself was the point. Weird, eh? Wonder what that was about. In any case, all we know is it’ll be an eminent Canadian.

Shoutout to all you eminent Canadians out there, I guess. Brush up those cover letters.

Winston Churchill frequently has this attributed to him: “You can depend upon the Americans to do the right thing. But only after they have exhausted every other possibility.” Our Canadian version might be that you can depend on Prime Minister Trudeau to do something, but only after he’s exhausted all of his glitterbombs on distracting public attention.

The way that the Liberals responded wasn’t shocking. They only have a few plays left in their playbook, and we’ve seen something just like this only a few weeks ago. (Which is why I’m wondering if they actually only have the single play left, come to think of it.) The Liberals have responded to the barrage of news stories over Chinese interference exactly the way they did over their controversial gun-control amendments from the fall. First, deny there’s a problem. Then accuse anyone saying there’s a problem of being Donald Trump 2.0 or somesuch. Then just cut right to the chase and call them racist. When that doesn’t work, wait a few days to see if the problem goes away. When it doesn’t — indeed, when it gets worse — that’s when you finally admit that you can’t just yell “DISINFORMING MAGA BIGOTS!” at people and watch as your problem magically evaporates.

With guns, after everything else failed, they withdrew the amendments (though I imagine they’ll try again, though probably with no better luck). With China interference, it was agreeing to some kind of process. All the unfilled blanks notwithstanding, even the fact that something is being agreed to shows a dawning of political reality in the PMO: ignoring this and hoping the leaks stop if you called enough people racist Trumpers wasn’t going to work. Clearly, sometime in the last few days, the PM and his staff reached the acceptance stage, and concluded that either they had to admit that there was enough here to warrant some kind of serious process, or they could just start randomly talking about abortion in the hopes that people fell for that.

No, no, wait. They tried that anyway.

It would be fascinating to know what specifically led to the mental breakthrough that enabled Monday’s announcement. Weeks of denials, evasions and counterattacks, a day of performatively fretting about abortion, and then, zap!, we’re getting an rapporteur — an eminent one! — and a process. Maybe they looked at some internal polling. Maybe they’re worried about a big scoop that’s yet to land. Or maybe they’re just tired of being on the defensive and figured that the proposals would stand a decent chance of smothering the issue to death with pillows stuffed with bureaucracy and abbreviations.

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