Quotulatiousness

February 14, 2024

“… one of the most contemptible pieces of legislation since the introduction of the Indian Act in 1876″

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

In the National Post, Stephen Buffalo explains why many Canadian First Nations people are angry with NDP MP Charlie Angus for his recently introduced Private Member’s Bill in Parliament:

“Charlie Angus at convention 2023 2 (cropped)” by DrOwl19 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

First Nations people used to consider NDP MP Charlie Angus an ally, as he has been outspoken on issues of Indigenous poverty and government mismanagement. Canadians do not want to know what many Indigenous people are calling him these days.

Last week, Angus tabled a private member’s bill, C-372, that is one of the most contemptible pieces of legislation since the introduction of the Indian Act in 1876. Angus’ proposed fossil fuel advertising act would outlaw oil and gas advertising and the “promotion” of fossil fuels, even by some private citizens. If passed, this would be the most egregious attack on civil liberties in recent Canadian history.

It is astonishing that an experienced parliamentarian like Angus could bring such nonsense forward. All Canadians, of all political stripes, should be outraged at this attempt to stifle public discussion.

Through actions like this, Angus and his environmental supporters — like the Sierra Club, Suzuki Foundation, Earthjustice, Greenpeace, 350.org and others — have shown themselves to be no fans of Indigenous peoples. These single-minded environmentalist organizations ignore the interests of First Nations, Metis and Inuit communities, except when they want to impose their will on them.

Angus has thrown his lot in with the wrong people. They are happy to tell us what to do on energy and environmental matters. But they are never around to fix our water issues, health-care problems, housing crises and rampant drug challenges. They clearly want Indigenous people to stay silent and follow their lead. No wonder many Indigenous folk describe environmentalists as the “new missionaries”.

While some of our members share the views of Angus and his ilk, most First Nations people support carefully managed resource and infrastructure development. We need our own resource revenue to break free from our dependence on government and to chart our own futures. Indigenous communities finally have prosperity and independence in sight.

People like Charlie Angus may agonize over our hardships, but they are content to maintain the Indian Act-style paternalism that created so much of the pain we endure. They must back off. First Nations, Metis and Inuit folk will not accept being shut up and will not tolerate people trying to tell us how to use our land and our resources.

February 11, 2024

Charlie Angus, Canada’s one-man campaign for struggle sessions, re-education, and prison for people who say things he doesn’t like

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper imagines the inside thoughts of NDP MP Charlie Angus, who introduced a Private Member’s Bill this week to criminalize speech that even hints at not being fully onboard with Team Climate Catastrophe, especially anything supporting the use of fossil fuels:

“Charlie Angus at convention 2023 2 (cropped)” by DrOwl19 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Monday
It’s an odd thing to work in the House of Commons; a place where the country’s most cynical, power-mad misanthropes are gathered together into one distilled mass of treachery.

This is why I aligned myself with the only true bastion of moral rectitude in this wretched, faithless town. The NDP does not court power, and thus remains untainted by it. Only by insulating ourselves against the corrupting lure of ambition can we truly know we are on the right side of history.

And today, more than ever, I know the only true moral course is to introduce a federal program of jailing any Canadian who expresses positive opinions of a non-renewable fuel source. Not every Canadian, mind you, just those who can’t provide evidence that an oil company doesn’t indirectly benefit them in some way.

Tuesday
As predicted, the usual agents of disinformation have libelled my bill as “illiberal” or “fascistic”. We’ll prescribe appropriate criminal consequences for this kind of mendacity in due course, but for now I would only ask these deceit-merchants to consider what we’re up against.

Oil companies are, quite literally, the knowing architects of the complete destruction of the human race. If the so-called “market” had been left to its own devices, the world would currently be a utopia of bottomless green energy. But instead, the oil and gas industry has tricked humanity into believing that fossil fuels are bringers of anything except slavery.

Against this kind of perfidy, I was forced to devise legislation that was broad enough to eliminate any conceivable loophole. If we banned pro-oil commercials, they would simply pour their advertising dollars into billboards. If we banned billboards, they would start embedding secret pro-gasoline messages in popular music. If we banned that, they would train armies of crows to attack e-cyclists while cawing the words “Suncor” and “pipelines”.

And you know what they would say when I tabled a bill to ban the attack crows? They would call it “illiberal”.

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.

January 11, 2023

“The PM and the public safety minister were lying to the public. That should matter.”

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

The editors of The Line regretfully return from holidays to start a new year, and the federal government’s gun confiscation bill (not called that, of course) gets both barrels:

The first item worth mentioning: remember how back in November and December the prime minister and the public safety minister, Messrs. Trudeau and Mendicino, were dismissing any suggestion that they were banning hunting rifles as hype? Or Conservation misinformation? When they were saying that the suggestions were false, and those making them were sowing confusion?

Well! Funny thing happened over the break. The PM, in his year-end interviews, is now admitting that the suggestions were, in fact, right. 

Take this, for example, from his sit down with CTV News (our emphasis added): 

    “Our focus now is on saying okay, there are some guns, yes, that we’re going to have to take away from people who were using them to hunt,” Trudeau said. “But, we’re going to also make sure that you’re able to buy other guns from a long list of guns that are accepted that are fine for hunting, whether it’s rifles or shotguns. We’re not going at the right to hunt in this country. We are going at some of the guns used to do it that are too dangerous in other contexts.”

We’ll skip much analysis here. We think this is dumb policy, and we’ve explained why before, but it’s at least an acknowledgement of what their policy actually is, and very obviously was since the very time it was announced back in November. There’s no room for any confusion or doubt here. The Liberals spent weeks crying LIES! and MISINFORMATION! at people who were accurately describing what they were doing.

You can support the policy being proposed — again, we don’t, but that’s fine — but you can’t excuse this. The PM and the public safety minister were lying to the public. That should matter.

We’ll have more to say on this later. But for now, that’s the update: The Liberals now admit they’re trying to do the dumb thing they spent weeks insisting they weren’t doing.

This is, incredibly, a kind of progress.

Related somewhat to the above: a smart friend of The Line, who cannot be named as this stuff is their day job, told us weeks ago to watch for a schism in the NDP over this issue. For the Liberals, their dumb policy proposal still makes political sense. Well, it probably does — we have some suspicion that the LPC has maxed out the electoral utility of hammering on guns, and may now face more blowback than benefit, but time will tell. Still, the proposal may make sense for the Liberals: they are utterly dependent on urban and suburban women to survive, and the dumb gun proposal apparently resonates with them. And that’s true for part of the NDP’s base, too, but, critically, our friend reminded us, not for all of it.

The federal NDP of today is a strange creature. It’s partly very much a party of the deepest, wokest downtown ridings, but there’s also a big contingent of Dipper MPs from places like northern Ontario and rural parts of Manitoba and British Columbia. Cracking down on guns just plays differently there. When the policy was first announced, this division among NDP MPs didn’t take long to come into public view. Jagmeet Singh, himself very much of the NDP’s woke urban contingent, was quiet for a few days before very clearly and obviously pivoting to oppose the proposed expansion of the banned firearms. The Liberals can afford to write off their last remaining rural, non-urban MPs. The NDP simply can’t.

And, our friend told us — again, this was weeks ago, right at the outset — if Singh didn’t get the message pronto, the party would fracture over this … and that Wab Kinew, leader of the Manitoba NDP, would be the leader of the rebels.

We aren’t experts on Kinew, or in internal NDP power dynamics, so we simply thanked our friend for the tip and analysis, and assured them we’d keep an eye on it. And we did.

And wouldja look at that.

Interesting, eh?

Anyway. As of now the Liberals are still talking tough on the amendment. But they need at least one party to work with them to push it forward. We can’t say for sure, but we wonder if the Liberals are comfortable talking tough about it because they now accept they can’t push it forward — at least not any time soon. The Bloc seems wary of getting saddled with this and the NDP, indeed, might split over this issue if Singh were to try.

So we’ll keep watching this, and particularly Mr. Kinew, who may indeed covet Mr. Singh’s job.

To our friend: you were right. Thanks for the tip.

June 4, 2022

Ontario’s election – “This was a weird campaign during a weird moment in history. Adjust your hot-takes accordingly, friends.”

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

From the Ontario election wrap-up post from the editors of The Line:

Newly re-elected Ontario Premier Doug Ford, seen here at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York, Canada.
Photo via Wikimedia.

Doug Ford and the Ontario Progressive Conservatives obviously feel pretty good this Friday. They really did about as well as they could possibly have hoped to do. Still, we urge our readers and all the analysts and pundits out there not to overreact to Ford’s victory. He’s not a political genius, he’s not some sort of colossus standing astride our politics, and he is not the man who must be immediately beamed into the federal Conservative leadership so that he can slay Trudeau’s government and win 200 seats.

Doug? He’s just a guy who got lucky last night. (Politically, we mean. Get your minds out of the gutter.)

We’re not taking anything away from Ford, or his campaign leadership, or all the people who worked hard for the PCs over the last month. They did a lot of smart things, they did them well, and they are reaping the benefits. It was an effective campaign. It rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, but your Line editors suspect it rubbed people the wrong way precisely because it was an effective campaign. Keeping Ford out of sight, avoiding a lot of questions, keeping things low-key … these weren’t accidents. These were deliberate decisions. You have to start any analysis of the PC campaign by granting that. Yeah, it was well conceived and well executed. A hat tip to the people behind it.

But the point that we want to make, and it shouldn’t take away from anything said above, is that the Progressive Conservatives maxed out the luck-o-meter. If this election had been a year ago, coming off the government’s catastrophic handling of Ontario’s third wave, it probably would have been Doug Ford resigning last night. The government caught an enormous break because factors well beyond its control shifted the public’s focus off its greatest vulnerability, the management of the pandemic, and put it solidly on economic and cost-of-living issues that the PCs are much, much more comfortable talking about.

So yeah, the PCs had a good campaign, but you couldn’t buy that kind of luck. None of it happened in Ontario or even Canada. This was a global trend. After two years of pandemic, people are tired and they’re getting worried about other things. The timing for Ford could not have been better. So we absolutely give full credit to his campaign for a good job, but we also insist on acknowledging the huge role of luck and timing. We don’t know if it’s better to be lucky than good. But we certainly know it’s nice to be both at once.

We raise this as a note of caution before the punditry gets too carried away. This election is undoubtedly a huge victory for the Tories. But it is also a really, really weird election. The circumstances of it are very unique. The combination of low turnout, pandemic fatigue, Ford’s personal political brand in Ontario, bizarrely lacklustre campaigns by the opposition, and a confluence of global trends that all netted out in Ford’s favour don’t tell us anything about the state of the conservative coalition in Canada, who would make a good federal leader, or what’s going to happen at the next federal election. This was a weird campaign during a weird moment in history. Adjust your hot-takes accordingly, friends.

Campaigning from your basement worked very well for Joe Biden, and now it’s done the job for Doug Ford. It probably wouldn’t work for Justin Trudeau — if he’s not performing for the camera, it’s not clear whether he actually exists. Ford certainly benefitted from the small attention his opponents on the right — the New Blue and Ontario parties — although minor parties have pretty much always been a non-factor in Ontario politics. They were summoned into existance by the way Ford and the Progressive Conservatives governed during the pandemic … almost indistinguishable from the federal Liberals under Justin Trudeau. The PCs seemed to rely on their “progressive” urges at the expense of anything remotely “conservative”.

Moving on to the other two major parties … it’s not pretty:

Preliminary riding-by-riding results from the 2022 Ontario election.
Blue – Progressive Conservative, Orange – New Democratic Party, Red – Liberal Party, Green – Green Party

Okay, let’s do the NDP first. The NDP is probably feeling pretty good today. We get it. Even a week or two ago polls were suggesting they were about to lose their hold on official opposition to the Liberals. That would’ve been a disaster for the party. There’s no way around that. They’ve avoided that fate. The NDP has remained in second, although they lost a bunch of seats to the PCs (see above). In the days to come, the party is going to have to take a few cold showers, give their heads a vigorous shake, and realize that warm feeling they’re enjoying right now isn’t the afterglow of victory, it’s the fading adrenaline rush of a near-death experience. Avoiding annihilation shouldn’t be good enough. But that’s all they did.

Andrea Horwath, long-time leader of the party, has already announced that she is stepping down. And rightly so. The Line has some fondness for Andrea. God knows we’ve had the opportunity to get to know her during her tenure as provincial NDP leader, which basically overlaps entirely with our entire careers in journalism. She is a decent person with a better sense of humour than often comes across in public, and she has nothing to be ashamed about. She has taken the party as far as she can, and it’s time for someone else to take over and deal with what might be a changing environment — one that is not obviously changing in the NDP’s favour (again, see above).

[…]

Writing critically about the Liberal campaign today feels a little bit like flogging a dead horse, and then shooting it a bunch of times, and then setting it on fire, and then hunting down all of its little horsey relatives and shooting all of them too. And then peeing on them. But still. It was a really bad campaign by the Liberals. The leader was bad. We’re sorry, but he was. If Steven Del Duca ever encountered charisma we suspect his body would reject it like a donated kidney. The party’s campaign platform was a weird mishmash of stuff that sounded vaguely on point for 2022, but also often read like something copied and pasted directly out of Ontario Liberal campaign platforms going back as far as the 1990s.

Some of the problems the campaign experienced had easy explanations. The party’s 2018 performance was so terrible they lost official party status, and the access to budgets and staff in the legislature that goes along with that status. The party has been trying to rebuild with at least one hand tied behind its back ever since. The campaign team was quite lean, and as a series of ejected candidates show, it was not able to properly vet the full slate of candidates it ran. You can understand how the lack of personnel and money contributed to those problems. But what we can’t understand is why the campaign insisted on making so many weird decisions. Handguns and abortion as campaign issues? In a provincial campaign? Talking up free transit rides, which will only appeal in the deepest downtown cores, where all they could do was hurt the NDP? A mid-campaign pledge to make COVID-19 vaccinations mandatory for school children, which was then never really mentioned again?

The NDP ran a bad campaign, but the Liberals just seemed to be totally disjointed, as if there wasn’t any agreement among the party leadership on what the platform should be so random unrelated items got floated as trial balloons on almost a daily basis, with no follow-up on most of them. Perhaps the party couldn’t afford the cost of proper in-depth pre-election polling or perhaps this was the party leadership’s belated buyer’s remorse over the leader they’d elected.

March 28, 2022

The only question in my mind is why the NDP thought they’d benefit from propping up Trudeau the Lesser

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

The editors at The Line, having taken last week off to look after kids on March break, sent out a brief round-up post on the deal Jagmeet Singh made with the Devil Justin Trudeau to keep the Liberals comfortably in power for (potentially) the full term:

The key question here that we can’t really think up an answer for is what this deal changes. In big picture terms, the NDP is going to keep the Liberals alive for a while, and the Liberals will serve up some goodies the NDP base will like. That’s what the parties have agreed to, distilled to the most basic essence.

And this is new how? This has changed what?

The NDP doesn’t want an election right now. The Liberals don’t want an election right now. The Liberals are led by a guy who has already moved the party toward the left and seemed quite happy to do it. The Liberals were getting along just fine with NDP support until they rolled the electoral dice and tried to secure a majority in summer of 2021; they fell short, and now they’ll continue getting along just fine with NDP support.

Well, gee. Stop the presses.

Yes, yes, there’s more specific commitments. The parties have put on paper what they’ll work jointly to achieve. But look at those commitments. Anything surprising? Is this not precisely what any random collection of reasonably bright high schoolers in a mandatory civics class could have guessed when their teacher told them to write a five-paragraph essay on things the NDP and Liberals agree on?

We aren’t particularly swayed by arguments, largely from angry Conservatives, that this deal suddenly leaves the Liberals immune from accountability. Again, the NDP was already playing ball to avoid an election. A week ago, the Liberals were going to be held precisely as accountable as Singh found convenient, and that’s just as true now as it was then. It’s not that the angry Conservatives are wrong about the Liberals being immune from accountability. It’s just that they essentially already were, NDP protestations aside. The NDP will tighten the screws enough to make Trudeau uncomfortable but not enough to trigger an election. They won’t be an opposition, but they’ll play one on TikTok. This sucks, but it is what it is, folks.

Nor do we expect the deal to last the full four years. Hey, it could happen. Both parties could find reasons to keep it going. But remember: this is a gentlemen’s agreement between gentlemen that don’t like each other. Gentlemen who are both pursuing different personal and political agendas. This deal will last right up until the moment one of them sees more advantage in stabbing the other guy than in continuing to play nice-nice.

We admit we really aren’t sure what the Liberals are thinking here. Trudeau had a largely free hand already. This is, to us, baffling.

And as for the NDP, well, gosh, all we can say is good luck, fellers. An old grizzled political observer your Line editors once knew liked to joke that being the junior partner in these kinds of arrangements is like being the mistress of a rich, married man. If you don’t know that you will be dumped while your former lover runs back to his family — the base voters, the caucus, the donors — well, sorry, sweetheart, but that’s on you. We saw a version of this play out in Ontario just a few years ago: the provincial NDP propped up the minority Liberals in exchange for a pledge to cut auto-insurance premiums. The Liberals failed to deliver, ran another election, won another majority and shrugged off the NDP’s complaints. The auto-insurance promise? Meh. That was just a stretch goal.

October 2, 2021

Federal NDP going through the six phases of political campaigns – enthusiasm, disillusionment, panic, the search for the guilty, the punishment of the innocent, and the promotion of the uninvolved

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

The NDP had high, high hopes for the September election, largely pinned on the undoubted popularity of their leader among young voters. As Joshua Hind shows, it didn’t work out at all the way they had hoped:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the NDP leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Only the most die-hard supporters of the New Democratic Party thought the recently-concluded 2021 federal election was winnable in the way 2015 felt very winnable in the early days. Still, the NDP’s showing at the polls — a single-digit increase in popular vote and a single new seat — is undeniably disappointing for a party that spent big to win back seats.

With that disappointment gnawing at them, the NDP and its faithful are bound to want to assign some blame, a process which always starts with the leader. But that’s a uniquely tough proposition for the NDP, who not only has Canada’s Best-Liked Leader™ in Jagmeet Singh, but has also positioned Singh to be the entire personality and profile of the party. In trying to create another singular figure like Jack Layton, the NDP has painted itself into a tight corner.

In project management there’s an old joke about the “Six Phases”. Like the stages of grief, the six phases of project management are the various emotional states into which all large projects — construction, software development, political campaigns — can be divided. They are: enthusiasm, disillusionment, panic, the search for the guilty, the punishment of the innocent, and the promotion of the uninvolved.

It’s easy to see the first three in an election, where enthusiasm, disillusionment and panic often happen all at once. Now in the post-election period, parties must wade into the more fraught final phases.

The search for the guilty started the moment the networks called the election for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, and Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is already under scrutiny. The Greens, for their part, got a head start on punishing the innocent by pinning their party’s staggering immolation exclusively on their (now former) leader, Annamie Paul.

For the NDP, things are more delicate.

Jagmeet Singh, who’s personable, well-spoken and very photogenic, was front and centre in every aspect of the NDP’s campaign. Their bus exclusively featured his name and picture, the first page on their website is simply labelled, “Jagmeet”, and every campaign stop was focused on the leader and his appeal. But the “leader first” tactic that arguably got the most attention was the social media campaign, specifically Singh’s appeal to young voters through TikTok.

Singh is the undisputed Canadian political TikTok champion, with nearly 850,000 followers and videos that regularly rack up millions of likes. His content is charming and apparently quite credible with TikTok users, at times fun, mischievous and pleasantly silly. It’s also clearly the platform Singh likes best. His Instagram account is mostly reposts from Twitter, and his Twitter account, while popular, doesn’t get nearly the response he earns on TikTok. Because it’s so important to Singh, and presumably the NDP, it can also form the basis for appraisals of both, and that creates new challenges.

September 11, 2021

Thursday’s debate was “a grand Kabuki theatre, increasingly divorced from any grounded reality about our fiscal situation, or our ability to deliver on complex programs or problems”

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson offers her observations of the debate on Thursday night among most of the federal party leaders — missing, of course, the participation of the PPC’s Maxime Bernier who was pointedly not invited:

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

No one can be said to have “won” such an exercise. You “win” these “debates” not by proposing the best policies, or offering competing philosophies, or even by presenting the best rhetoric. Rather, a “winner” is determined by who comes off the best to a general public that largely doesn’t follow the minute differences of respective platforms.

By that measure, no one really won Thursday’s debate, but Trudeau especially did not win it. I imagine that one of the problems of being raised as a spectacle of wealth, privilege and popularity is that it doesn’t quite prepare you for the moment when the worm turns, when people learn to dislike you for all the right reasons; when you are no longer given the proper deference and respect you feel is owed to you.

Trudeau came off as defensive, and flustered, taking hit after hit from other party leaders on topics ranging from his record, reconciliation and, especially, his self-interested decision to call a party in the first place. That he lacks a credible answer to why we’re holding this election at all three weeks into this campaign is a deep failure, one large and deep enough to consume his prospects of forming a majority government — and his hold on the party leadership along with it.

Annamie Paul offered the best performance of the night by far, and demonstrated that the Green party as a whole is unworthy of her. Whatever private internal dramas that may be unfolding, in public that party condemns itself to obscurity by refusing to get behind a woman who is, by every measure, impressive.

Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet made himself into an idealized avatar of a whiny and aggrieved Quebec nationalism that puts Alberta to shame. It takes a real special lack of self-awareness to imagine that Quebecers have had it rougher in this country than Indigenous people. Or that Blanchet, by virtue of his French ancestry, has suffered from greater oppression than, say, Annamie Paul. One day, the rest of Canada is going to stop humouring these insulated, thin-skinned delusions — but not before Quebec’s seat count declines relative to the rest of the population’s. In the meantime, Blanchet’s ability to beam pure DGAF energy into the English debates at least made him seem like a human, albeit a delusional and unpleasant one.

By this measure, Erin O’Toole “won” the debate by not losing it. I can’t remember a single thing he actually said, and in such a setting this can only work to his favour.

I mean, what is there to say? On actual substantive policy issues, I couldn’t escape the sense of watching a grand Kabuki theatre, increasingly divorced from any grounded reality about our fiscal situation, or our ability to deliver on complex programs or problems.

June 21, 2020

Jagmeet Singh’s social media moment in the sun

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

Most Canadians seem to have forgotten about federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, so this parliamentary kerfuffle — perfectly timed for maximum social media attention — is a great boost to his political visibility.

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia.

In this woebegotten year of 2020, blessed is the politician who can stumble into a scandal perfectly tailored to the tyranny of Twitter.

As protests, riots, and rage make their mark across the world in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh got himself ejected from the House of Commons for calling Bloc MP Alain Therrien a “racist.”

It was an act of civil disobedience, well suited to the passions of the moment, that generated overwhelming support for Singh.

“Only in a racist country does a brown man get ejected from parliament for insisting that the denial of systemic racism is racist,” was a fairly typical, and popular, example on Twitter.

I’m not interested in disputing the point, but rather deconstructing it. So let’s start, for a moment, with the prim prohibitions on unparliamentary language.

In keeping with the long-standing “tradition of respect for the integrity of all Members,” elected officials are barred from using personal attacks, obscenities and insults while in the House of Commons.

And, yes, I’m mentioning this point mostly for the joy of listing off some of the language that has been deemed “unparliamentary” in the past, including, my favourite; “Honourable only by courtesy” (ruled against in 1880), “Coming into the world by accident,” (1886) and “The political sewer pipe from Carleton County” (1917).

Whatever else we can say about the state of our political culture, the quality of our insults has declined alarmingly.

There are a few examples in the parliamentary record of the term “racist” being used in the House. In several instances, the record can’t identify who said it. Or the subject of the insult failed to call a point of order on the matter.

October 11, 2019

A spectre is haunting the Liberal war room: the spectre of Jagmeet Singh

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

In the wake of the English language debate, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is suddenly getting more of the kind of attention I thought he’d get from the media after he became party leader. Back in January, while he was campaigning for a seat in Parliament in a BC byelection, I wrote:

When Jagmeet Singh was elected NDP leader, I really did think he’d be a significant challenge to Justin Trudeau due to the media’s apparent fascination with Singh (a love affair that appeared to be as deep and lasting as that of Justin’s teeny-bopper [media] fan club for their darling), but it faded very quickly indeed. I guess as far as the Canadian media is concerned, there can only be one …

Now it appears that the Liberal Party backroom braintrust has suddenly woken up to the threat that Singh and the NDP are going to retain and even increase their support among left-leaning voters the Liberals had been taking for granted:

An even bigger risk for Trudeau is if lots of so-called low-information voters — who make their decisions late in a campaign — decide to cast a ballot for the charming Singh’s New Democrats.

But the biggest risk of all to the Liberals and Conservatives is if lots and lots of citizens give the finger to both parties and decide to vote NDP or Green to express their dissatisfaction with the status quo.

It looks like a long shot now with the economy humming along and a low unemployment rate.

But the same circumstances existed in B.C. in 2017. And plenty of voters decided that these were the right conditions for bringing the NDP back to power.

Nobody is expecting that Jagmeet Singh will be prime minister after the October 21 election.

But if he captures far more seats than the CBC poll tracker is projecting, it will be because of his genial nature and his ability to speak like a human being.

Surely, the Liberals realize that. The class differences between Trudeau and Singh are profound — and there are far fewer voters in Trudeau’s realm than Singh’s.

September 13, 2019

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh gets his tax plans vetted by the Parliamentary Budget Office

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

A recent innovation for political campaigns is that they can ask the Parliamentary Budget Office to provide an estimate for the impact of any taxation proposals, and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was the first out of the gate to have his “super-wealth tax” evaluated. The PBO estimates that the levy would net out some $6 billion in the first full year of implementation. Sounds like a lot of money! Colby Cosh explains why it’s not quite what it might seem:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia.

Alas, the bean-counters always swoop in to spoil things. Singh’s wealth-tax scheme is instructive not only because he availed himself of PBO costing, but because it usefully reveals the limits of what the PBO or any other economic modeller can do. Look, in other words, at the fine print.

The PBO’s job was to estimate what you can extract from “an annual net wealth tax on Canadian resident economic families equal to one per cent of net wealth above $20 million.” In the PBO model this is a simple multiplication, but the roughly $6 billion take is arrived at only by reducing the revenue by 35 per cent to correct for “behavioural response” — that is, lawful (and unlawful) tricks employed to avoid the new tax by the rich targets. The net revenue is what’s left after you deduct another two per cent to cover administrative costs.

And, as the PBO immediately insists, “the estimate has high uncertainty” on both counts. This means they’re educated guesses. Jennifer Robson, a social policy prof at Carleton University’s Arthur Kroeger College, pointed out on Twitter that right now we don’t tax economic families per se and we don’t report assets and debts routinely to Revenue Canada. Ideas for pure wealth taxation (which is rare in practice) are predicated on the creation of, essentially, a new tax system — one which would have to detect and perpetually update how much, for example, the furniture in your house costs. The 35 per cent loss from behavioural response is at the high end of historic estimates from real-world examples. Even within our current tax system, Robson observes, we only get two extra dollars for every one we spend on expanding collections and compliance against the existing tax base.

As a practical matter, a wealth tax would mostly be, or would act most efficiently as, a tax on bank balances and investment accounts. Of course, there is always real estate. The super-rich seem to have a lot of that, and it is relatively easy to tax, and the resentment of Torontonians and Vancouverites who don’t own some is, for better or worse, a major reason the NDP is trying to weaponize envy.

But this reminds us that property taxes and taxes on property transfers perform a similar function, although they are not used primarily for income redistribution as such here — and in Canada ours are relatively high. The OECD does a little league table of tax structures, and compared with other industrialized countries Canada’s take from property taxes is about double the average. In a 36-country list we are near the bottom (33rd) in our dependence on taxing goods and services, and about average (12th) in dependence on corporate taxation, but fifth highest in dependence on personal taxation — and third in dependence on property taxes.

July 31, 2019

Federal NDP and Greens duel on climate platforms

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

Colby Cosh looks at the two most environmentally conscious federal parties’ climate change stances as we head into the next general election:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia.

So why are our most radical, eco-aware parties so easily distracted on this front? Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats talk tough on climate change in their “Power to Change” plan. It is maximum urgency right out of the gate in the preamble. “People across Canada are worried about the future.” True enough! They usually are! “Flooding and forest fires are threatening our homes.” Well, speak for yourself, but OK. “Polluted air and water are hitting communities hard.” Wait, polluted water…? Wasn’t this supposed to be a climate change thing? “And rising temperatures are threatening our farming and forestry industries.” Oh, good, back on track! “It’s clear there’s no time to waste.”

There is a whole load of radical measures in the NDP program, but they cannot resist this tendency to drag in grace notes of economic nationalism and other subjects at best vaguely related. They promise to “make it easier to own a zero-emission vehicle” in Canada, which might help with the Big Problem, but in mid-sentence they remember that they’re in hock to organized labour and add “and make sure those cars are made in Canada.” This means that if the price of a Tesla comes down to $500 tomorrow, you’ll still have to buy the carbon-neutral modern equivalent of a Bricklin, assuming someone can be found to try building one. Shouldn’t we be willing to buy zero-emission vehicles from Zanzibar or Antarctica if that’s the most efficient way, or the only way, to upgrade the fleet?

The document also smuggles in a promise to eliminate single-use plastic products, which take carbon from the bowels of Mother Earth and… restore it thither in landfills, with the evil molecules usefully imprisoned in polymer chains. We’ll be replacing all that plastic, presumably, with metal cutlery (from mines) and cloth bags (from forests) that have to be washed in hot water if you happen to be particular. There is no hint that this is an incongruous or irrelevant part of a climate-change plan.

So, perhaps a bit of mixed messaging there, as the NDP have to trim their sails in odd ways to keep some of their constituencies in line. How about the Green Party then?

Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May with Green candidate Christ Tindal in 2008.
Photo by Shaun Merritt via Wikimedia Commons.

The Green list of climate-change policies is much more radical and earnest in appearance; Elizabeth May’s political liquidators intend to abolish internal-combustion vehicles by 2040 (such dates are no longer sci-fi, oldies) and retrofit every single building in the country for carbon neutrality by 2030.

But what, as the University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach asked in a CBC editorial on Monday, is this about “ending all imports of foreign oil”? This autarkic flake out flies in the face of the Greens’ entire approach; some of the oil we produce here is (please imagine me whispering this part) somewhat carbon-intensive relative to the stuff Eastern Canada takes from elsewhere in the world. Moreover, increasing use of domestic oil even in the short term implies a pretty major program of, uh, pipeline-building.

Not to mention the new refineries. The Green Climate Change War Cabinet (a real thing they want) would permit “investment in upgraders to turn Canadian solid bitumen into gas, diesel, propane and other products for the Canadian market, providing jobs in Alberta.” By 2050, they envision shifting “all Canadian bitumen from fuel to feedstock for the petrochemical industry.” This adds up to an awful lot of subsidized high-tech construction — executed at the same time as a total retrofit of the national housing stock! — that has nothing much to do with reducing emissions per se. Although it sounds as though the Greens are, if nothing else, definitely much bigger fans of plastic than the New Democrats.

May 14, 2019

Is Canada ready for a New Green Democratic Party?

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

Ali Taghva explores the notion of the federal NDP and Green parties joining together:

With fundraising and polling numbers in sharp decline at the same time that experienced MPs and staff leave the party, it is evident, even the base of the NDP is beginning to lose faith in the current direction led by Jagmeet Singh.

Worryingly for every single NDP member in the country, this is occurring even when Justin Trudeau’s post-election honeymoon has long ended.

As a result, it appears that the Green Party has become the progressive vehicle gaining the most federal momentum. Their fundraising numbers are on the upswing, and if the trend in the latest by-election in B.C. holds up, they may be the preferred refuge for disenfranchised Liberal voters.

While the Green Party does have momentum, it will not be able to push forward as Canada’s progressive alternative, at least not alone.

The party is still astronomically behind the Conservatives and Liberals when it comes to fundraising, quality of candidates, and polling support.

Even in comparison to the NDP, the Greens are still behind in fundraising and polling, although the distance between the two parties is far more negligible.

With both parties too far back to do anything other than reducing the Liberal vote, ensuring a Conservative majority, it may be time for Canadian progressives to seriously consider a merger between the Green party and the New Democrats.

Okay, but why now? What would be the big draw … oh:

Perhaps most interestingly though, a united alternative progressive party could easily bring on-board the two highest-profile individuals who still have no declared party for the federal election, Jane Philpott and Jody Wilson-Raybould.

With most Canadians believing Jody Wilson-Raybould’s account over that of the Prime Minister’s, her entrance into the race along with Jane Philpott’s could be the final piece which catapults the party into contention for the role of governing party.

Of course, of course … the old celebrity candidates trick. That always works. Well, in urban downtown ridings, anyway.

January 17, 2019

Jagmeet Singh and the federal NDP

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

Chris Selley on the political issues afflicting federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh as he tries to win a byelection in British Columbia:

More and more New Democrats seem concerned that Jagmeet Singh mightn’t have been the best choice for leader, let alone deserving of a whopping 54 per cent first ballot victory. His various alleged crimes include rendering himself invisible for months, imposing draconian punishments on popular MPs, and going on TV to suggest we stop importing Saudi oil and get it from other countries instead — at a time when Alberta’s NDP government is fighting both for pipelines and for its continued existence.

[…]

Tom Mulcair was a pro. Dumping him appears to be the dumbest thing the NDP ever did. Still, if Singh wins his seat, there is reason to hope he might grow into the job. To skeptics he evinces a distinctly Trudeauvian brand of superficiality, and a similar gift for quotes that land well but fall to pieces if you actually read them back. That hasn’t hurt Trudeau, though — not much and not yet. Singh, a criminal lawyer, certainly boasts a more impressive resumé outside of politics. And goodness knows there are more than enough avenues for any NDP leader to attack a Liberal government that promised us the moon but left us conspicuously earthbound.

If Singh is an anchor on NDP fortunes, it doesn’t seem to be massively heavy one. Nanos Research has them at 15.4 per cent, as of last week — not good at all, but well within recovery distance of their 19.7 per cent performance in the 2015 election. Pre-campaign polls are generally held to be meaningless. Again assuming Singh wins his seat, he has plenty of time to introduce himself and his vision for the NDP.

It’s also possible, though, that the federal NDP in 2019 is a busted flush no matter who’s leading it. The combination of personal charisma and political circumstance that propelled it to Official Opposition status in 2011 might just be throttling back down toward cruising speed.

We shouldn’t overestimate just how improbable Jack Layton’s achievements were. He dragged the NDP to the political centre, where the votes are, marginalizing various breeds of crackpots along the way, while keeping the famously restive portside of the party relatively content. Then he stole a huge chunk of the Quebec nationalist vote in the dead of night.

When Jagmeet Singh was elected NDP leader, I really did think he’d be a significant challenge to Justin Trudeau due to the media’s apparent fascination with Singh (a love affair that appeared to be as deep and lasting as that of Justin’s teeny-bopper fan club for their darling), but it faded very quickly indeed. I guess as far as the Canadian media is concerned, there can only be one…

The byelection is looking pretty safe for Singh, as his Tory opponent beclowned himself quickly, and news broke on Wednesday that the Liberal candidate has withdrawn, after similarly beclowning herself:

January 15, 2019

Jagmeet Singh’s conservative opponent in Burnaby South

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

Normally, the byelection campaign by a major party leader to gain a seat in the House of Commons doesn’t get quite this … snippy:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia.

Maybe someone should put in a kind word for Jagmeet Singh on the rare opportunities when an occasion presents itself. The federal NDP leader found himself on the right side of a ridiculous argument over the weekend as his byelection in the riding of Burnaby South got officially underway. Singh’s Conservative opponent for the open seat, commercial lawyer Jay Shin, promptly issued a press release suggesting that Singh was … apparently the wrong species of lawyer?

“While Jagmeet Singh has spent his pre-political career as a criminal defence lawyer keeping criminals out of jail, I have spent my legal career building Canadian businesses that create jobs and promote international trade,” Shin’s statement read.

When challenged by the Burnaby Now newspaper on his apparent suggestion that, as a former university instructor in International Mining Transactions, he was somehow ethically superior to the underpaid schmucks who provide criminal defence, Shin disavowed any such meaning.

Criminal lawyers “play an important role; everybody has a right to defence,” the Conservative candidate insisted. (Whew!) “What I’m saying is, he played that role. As a criminal lawyer, he defended criminals. That’s all I’m saying.”

One notices that even this characterization may leave a civil libertarian uneasy, since criminals aren’t criminals until the Crown successfully convicts them. A defence lawyer doesn’t “defend criminals”: he defends the accused. But maybe that is the sort of distinction you forget when you are busy building Canadian businesses, or trying to become a Conservative MP.

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