Quotulatiousness

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.

January 11, 2019

Jagmeet Singh’s plight

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

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh will finally get his chance to win a seat in Parliament on February 25 in the Burnaby South byelection. Things have not been going well for Singh since he was elected leader in 2017. At that time, I thought he would be a serious threat to Justin Trudeau’s popularity with the media (Justin’s teeny-bopper fan club) and allow the NDP to be taken more seriously as a potential government. That hasn’t happened and Singh’s media coverage has been much more critical than any NDP leader might have expected. Andrew Coyne explains:

It is safe to say Singh has not proved quite the rock star New Democrats hoped when they elected him leader in October 2017. Undertaker would be closer to the mark. While the party trundles along at a little under 17 per cent in the polls, about its historic average, Singh himself is in single digits, slightly behind Elizabeth May as Canadians’ choice for prime minister.

Singh’s trajectory is a cautionary tale on the importance of experience in politics. With just six years in the Ontario legislature, Singh was barely ready for the job of provincial leader, still less the much sharper scrutiny to which federal leaders are subject. It has showed.

He appears frequently to be poorly briefed, on one memorable occasion having to ask a member of caucus, in full view of the cameras, what the party position was on a particular issue. He badly mishandled what should have been a softball question on where he stood on Sikh terrorism, and alienated many in the party with his knee-jerk expulsion of Saskatchewan MP Erin Weir for what appeared to be no worse a crime than standing too close to women at parties.

The decision not to seek a seat in the House until now has robbed him of what visibility the leader of a third party can expect, though his manifest weakness as a communicator makes it debatable whether this is a plus or a minus. Fundraising has dried up. Party morale is in freefall. Caucus members speak openly, if not on the record, of their desire to be rid of him.

For the Liberals, on the other hand, Singh is the answer to all their prayers. The prime minister’s own approval ratings may have dropped precipitously, but as long as the NDP vote can be kept to current levels of support or less the Liberals are unlikely to lose. (The NDP’s average share of the popular vote when the Conservatives win: 19.5 per cent. When the Liberals win: 14.8 per cent.) And nothing so guarantees a calamitous NDP showing as Singh’s continued leadership.

Hence the curious unspoken subtext of the Burnaby South race, with Liberals more or less openly rooting for him to win — and New Democrats hardly less publicly hoping he loses.

September 15, 2018

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh hits a rough patch

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

Colby Cosh on the federal NDP leader’s travails:

The thing about being a New Democratic Party leader is that there’s an oh-so-fine class line to walk, a line that is easier for the leaders of less socially concerned parties. No one really expects that the leader of the NDP will actually be a working-class person, and since Ed Broadbent’s time, even the expectation that the leader will have been raised working-class has diminished. Jack Layton and Thomas Mulcair have so many politicians brachiating in their family trees that if they lived in the U.K. they would probably have had peerages to renounce.

But until Jagmeet Singh came along, there was a still norm of personal austerity to be observed — a natural limit to how expensively one could dress, and how much conspicuous consumption one could indulge, while still serving up an NDP leader’s generous portion of lectures against selfishness and greed. Singh is the son of a psychiatrist: the tuition for the private American high school from which he graduated is, for the 2018-19 school year, US$31,260. He has been in GQ for his bespoke suits, and owns (according to Toronto Life) two Rolexes.

(I confess that the watches set me off. Rolexes aren’t arty like a Patek Philippe; they don’t do anything cool. They’re mostly kind of ugly. They are a pure, cold signifier of brute pride in wealth.)

Making Singh leader of the federal NDP was audacious. If ordinary New Democrats had a problem with his image and tastes, they probably felt that, with Justin Trudeau leading the Liberals, they had plenty of wiggle room on the left for a handsome leader with some celebrity dazzle. Trudeau had appetizing potential to make ghastly errors of Richie Rich cluelessness, and has delivered.

But it seems Singh will not entirely be able to avoid the day of reckoning, the day of exposure to a stricter New Democratic standard. The leader, as you probably know, has a problem in Saskatchewan, the party’s traditional heart. In May he threw MP Erin Weir out of the national NDP caucus after an independent investigation “upheld” complaints of harassment, sexual and otherwise, against Weir. Weir’s many friends in Saskatchewan are unhappy with how the case was handled.

August 17, 2018

“…when he asked her about [Jagmeet] Singh’s CBC appearance, ‘Notley laughed out loud'”

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

Colby Cosh is apparently fascinated by the internecine fight shaping up between the NDP Premier of Alberta, Rachel Notley, and the federal NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh:

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

If I am being honest, the thing about the Singh-Notley quarrel that interests me most is not the range of possible political consequences. Nor is it the brute economics of Canadian oil. No, I am most interested in the rhetorical style of it. Last week, on CBC’s Power and Politics, federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was discussing Saudi Arabia’s strange diplomatic meltdown and started speculating about Canada’s need to look for imported oil from other countries. Western viewers — no doubt the CBC technically has some — were well aware that Singh had opposed the controversial Energy East pipeline.

[…]

With Saudi Arabia acting like the cranky, unstable extended family it is, Energy East is looking a bit like a missed opportunity — not only for landlocked Alberta, which has a permanent stake in the multiplication of oil export options, but for the entire country. So it did not take long for people to start laughing at Singh’s musings about where, oh where on this great planet Earth, Canada might obtain some oil.

I am using the word “laughing” literally. On Friday, the Edmonton Journal’s politics columnist, Graham Thomson, had a sitdown with Alberta NDP Premier Notley, and when he asked her about Singh’s CBC appearance, “Notley laughed out loud … ‘It struck me that that was a thing that maybe he should have thought through before he said it.’ ”

The premier went on to add “What happened with Jagmeet is that he’s learning that things are not as simple as they sometimes seem” and insisted that “to throw (workers) under the bus as collateral damage in pursuit of some other high-level policy objective is a recipe for failure, and it’s also very elitist.” The e-word! For New Democrats, that’s rough talk.

[…]

Her rough treatment of Singh is unlikely to hurt his by-electoral cause in Burnaby, so the Notley-Singh fight can still be dismissed as mutually beneficial political theatre. Still, Singh tried to defend himself, sort of, in a Monday interview with our Maura Forrest. “I know that Premier Notley’s in a tough political fight,” he said, “but I’ve always felt, and I believe, that personal attacks are beneath her. That’s not my way and I think she’s better than that.”

I will never stop being confused and amused by the way politicians speak in these situations. Read for pure ostensive meaning, Singh is not accusing Notley of making a personal attack on him: in fact, he’s specifically saying that she is incapable of such a thing. But then why should she need the excuse of a tough political fight? Of course, we all know that saying someone is “better than that” is another way of calling them a jerk — perhaps the cruellest.

May 11, 2018

Imagine Ontario’s election

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

Andrew Coyne on the fantasy campaign that is just kicking off in Ontario:

The first NDP ad of the 2018 Ontario election campaign invites viewers to “imagine a place” where hydro is cheap, drugs are free, and dental care is on the house — all at no cost to anyone except the “very rich” who will be “asked” to “pay a little more,” which I gather is NDPese for “taxed within an inch of their lives.”

That word — “imagine” — might be the theme of the coming election. The three major parties appear to be living in a world of the imagination, with platforms full of imaginary promises paid for with imaginary dollars. The province is sinking ever deeper in debt, notwithstanding the Liberal government’s desperate efforts to conceal it, its debt-to-GDP ratio headed for 45 per cent even after a decade or more of uninterrupted economic growth. A recession of any length or severity would blow that number skyward.

Beyond that the picture only grows darker, with the first of the baby boomers just into their 70s and the costs of health care projected to rise, relentlessly, as they grow into their dotage. And yet all three parties are merrily racking up new spending promises — daycare, pharmacare, dentacare, the works — with money they wouldn’t have even if the official budget numbers were genuine, and not, as the province’s auditor general has lately warned, a swindle and a fraud (I paraphrase). It’s an election in la-la land.

Oddly, this does not seem to be the conventional view. The advance word on the election, rather, is that Ontario is facing a choice of unprecedented starkness, a polarizing election with no one seeming to occupy the middle ground.

“It’s hard to remember a provincial campaign that’s featured two leaders so diametrically opposed to each other,” broadcaster Steve Paikin wrote recently, of the Liberals’ Kathleen Wynne and the Conservatives’ Doug Ford. “The political centre,” agrees the Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee, “has vanished like a puddle in the sun.”

It’s true that the Liberals and the NDP are in something of a bidding war for the left-of-centre vote. If the March budget signalled a retreat from the Liberals’ not-overly-stringent devotion to fiscal restraint, the NDP platform goes further in every direction: about $4 billion a year further, in fact.

February 4, 2018

BC versus Alberta – the existential threat of “dilbit”

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

Colby Cosh on the warlike preparations taking place in Alberta in advance of the interprovincial war over “dilbit”:

The special concern with dilbit [diluted bitumen — the form in which hydrocarbons from the Alberta oilsands are shipped to refineries as a liquid] is a pseudoscientific contrivance designed to allow Horgan to meet, or at least take a step toward, his loud campaign promises to thwart Trans Mountain. Now, even if you don’t believe that, you can understand that Horgan is threatening to conjure an all-new improvised layer of environmental regulation here. Even if you are convinced that it was spilled dilbit that killed Tasha Yar in “Skin of Evil,” you can see the unfairness of Horgan imagineering an infinite regress of scientific panels — each one surely more scientific than the last! — to injure a neighbour’s economy for his own electoral welfare.

The truth, however, is that B.C.’s New Democratic premier knows the hand-wringing about dilbit is B.S. And so does Alberta’s New Democratic premier. And so does just about everybody in Alberta. Yes, we Albertans have been busy this week preparing for border war: there is so much to do, what with the need to make propaganda posters, train commandos for mountain-pass warfare, dig victory gardens, and re-label all the Nanaimo bars “Liberty squares.”

Sadly, it probably won’t come down to a shooting war, but will remain in the crystal blue elysium of political manoeuvring. If it did come to a fight, Alberta would have a pretty big fifth column operating on its behalf across the legal border. I have a running joke with friends that I have occasionally referred to in print: it’s the idea that there exists a “Greater Alberta” that includes sizable parts of Saskatchewan and, in particular, B.C.

The so-called Peace River block that spans the border is one economic unit, and people at its western end, jealous of having ended up on the wrong side of a discontinuity in taxation, have actually agitated in the past for secession from British Columbia. And, as many have pointed out in the feverish climate of interprovincial hostility, the jagged southeast corner of B.C. has significant transmontane cultural and economic ties, too. It looks, on a flat map, like it ought to “belong” to Alberta. (In real-world topography, on the other hand, the Continental Divide is definitely a thing that it is hard not to notice.)

In short, almost everybody is now making my “Greater Alberta” semi-sorta-kinda-joke. But this is not really a Greater Alberta thing. At almost every point of the compass, that B.C. map is full of resource employees who are watching with distaste as their NDP government acts like an NDP government. This is surely a real moral advantage for Alberta in the grand struggle — but, remember, there are genuine practical gains for Horgan from his theatrical eco-rectitude: right now the motivating passion of his life, from dawn to dusk, is to persuade Green voters to turn orange.

October 6, 2017

New NDP leader Jagmeet Singh even gets the thumbs up from crusty old conservative fogey

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

That is, Singh is seen as a much bigger threat to Justin Trudeau than to “stodgy” Andrew Scheer … which, in electoral terms, might leave the Liberals and NDP fighting it out for second place in the polls and the Conservatives up near majority territory. He’s certainly teh new hotness as far as the newspapers are concerned:

The media is buzzing about Jagmeet Singh being a game changer. Campbell Clark, writing in the Globe and Mail, says that “The NDP once picked stalwarts to fight the good fight as leader. Now, they have chosen someone who might disrupt Canadian politics. Don’t underestimate the potential for Jagmeet Singh to shake things up.” Chantal Hébert, writing in the Toronto Star, says “[Andrew] Scheer has to be hoping that Singh will give Trudeau more of a run for his money, for it usually takes a divided progressive vote for the Conservatives to win power.” And Lorne Gunter, writing in the Edmonton Sun, says that “Trudeau is a paper “progressive” – a poser – compared to Singh … [and] … unlike Thomas Mulcair, Singh’s predecessor as NDP leader, Singh won’t lose core social democrat voters by running to the right of the Liberals in the next federal election the way Mulcair did in 2015 … [thus, and] … In short, Singh is a headache the Liberals never imagined having. Compared to Trudeau, he is younger (38 rather than 45), smarter, at least as well-dressed and even more of a trendy, politically correct symbol.“

“But,” Mr Gunter says, while Jagmeet’s Singh’s selection is bad news for the Liberals, it “should be good for the Tories … [because] … It should revive vote-splitting on the left. And it should allow Tory Leader Andrew Scheer, while dull, to appear as the only clear alternative to the two Big Government leaders.”

Singh isn’t likely to draw a lot of votes from the Tories, but he’s a major threat to Trudeau in exactly those mediagenic qualities that Trudeau used to such great effect in the last federal election. Justin is in danger of being out-cooled by the new guy. A lot will depend on how long the media allows Singh’s political honeymoon to last, as they will be the primary channel for the “cool duel” to play out.

October 3, 2017

Jagmeet Singh wins the federal NDP leadership race

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

The NDP have finally selected a leader who may be able to recapture some of the “lightning in a bottle” phenomenon of the late Jack Layton’s time as party leader (and bring back some former NDP voters who plumped for Justin last time around). Jay Currie is enthusiastic about the new guy:

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

… I was cheered to see the rollover victory of Jagmeet Singh for the NDP leadership. Singh seems to be from the pragmatic end of the NDP and will be relatively immune from identitarian and intersectional attack simply because he’s brown and wears brilliant turbans. He’s intelligent, well spoken and has a bit of charisma. And he is just going to kill Justin Trudeau in places Trudeau needs to win.

It is simplistic to say that the Sikh community in Canada will universally support one of its own, there will certainly be a temptation to defect from Trudeau to Singh. While that might have some effect in Tory ridings, it will be felt most strongly in seats which have traditionally swung from Liberal to New Democrat and back again.

I am not sure, however, that Singh’s ethnicity is his biggest threat to Trudeau. By 2019 the emptiness of much of the Liberal’s program will be apparent to all. The broken promises, the tepid policy initiatives and, above all, the fiscal incompetence on the revenue side and on expenditures will be pretty apparent. For small business owners and consumers with half a clue, the combination of the lunatic small business tax measures and the expensive, but pointless, carbon tax will pour votes into the Conservative column. But with Canada’s first past the post system, that may not be enough.

Singh’s real threat to Trudeau is in marginal seats where the Libs beat the Conservatives by a few thousand votes in the last election because a) people had had enough of Harper, b) Justin seemed bright and shiny. People who would have voted NDP in the past were so eager to get rid of Harper they voted for Trudeau. Mulclair simply lacked the appeal to keep the faithful in the pews. At a guess, the rank and file NDP voters, as well as the multi-culti virtue signallers, will be much more inclined to give Singh a go. Which means he has the capacity to bleed off Liberal voters in significant numbers.

August 27, 2017

NDP leadership hopeful says no government can tell a woman what to wear … except in Quebec

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

The federal NDP have gotten themselves knotted up over Quebec-specific conflicts between their rhetoric and political reality in La Belle Province:

One wonders what Jack Layton would make of his party nowadays — of the trajectory it has taken since his untimely passing and of the battle to replace his successor, who seemed like such a good idea at the time. The party’s new support in Quebec had been by design: the 2005 Sherbrooke Declaration essentially argued Quebecers should be free to secede from Canada with a simple 50 per cent-plus-one-vote, and in the meantime offered them a seat at the table in a social-democratic government in Ottawa.

Alas, hitching your wagon to Quebec nationalists only works so long as the horse doesn’t spook. In recent years, Quebec’s politics has become more and more seized with “religious accommodations” in general, with Islam specifically, and with niqabs very specifically indeed. Such is the state of play that the Liberal government’s Bill 62 is considered moderate: it would ban providing and receiving public services with one’s face covered. Justice Minister Stéphanie Vallée won’t even say whether women in niqabs would be allowed to ride the bus.

This is something you might expect the left-most candidate to lead the left-most party in the House of Commons to oppose unambiguously. Niki Ashton’s campaign promises to end “the oppression of racialized communities,” tackle “Islamophobia, anti-black racism, and violence towards Indigenous peoples” and address “intersecting oppressions” as well.

But no. In a statement to Huffington Post this week, Ashton said “there is no justification where (sic) a government should tell a woman, or anyone, what they should wear and what they shouldn’t wear.”

“That being said…”

Those three words lit a match, and the tire fire is still burning. (Ashton was not available for an interview on Friday, according to her campaign.)

“There is a consensus in (sic) Quebec’s political leaders emerging on secularism,” the statement continued, “and the Canadian government should respect the will of Quebecers on this matter.” It must also “respect” the “widely different … place” religion has “held in Quebec since the Quiet Revolution.”

May 10, 2017

BC Greens the biggest winners in provincial election

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Jay Currie explains why, even though they didn’t “win” the election, the BC Green Party is the biggest winner from yesterday’s general election in the province:

There are two losers tonight: the Liberals and the NDP. And there is one winner: the Greens. They managed to split the NDP vote and likely cost the NDP a majority government.

However, where the NDP and the Liberals have no obvious room to grow their electorate, the Greens have a very good shot at expanding theirs. The fact is that the people who shop at Whole Foods, send their kids to “French Immersion” if they can’t afford private (not for racist reasons of course) and think recycling is an act of benediction are legion. They used to vote NDP, now they have an alternative.

Andrew Weaver may be a lousy climate scientist but he is not an unintelligent man. He can count (so long as it does not involve climate change time series) and there are six ridings where the Greens came second. A rational, non-coalition, support of the Liberals would let him pass legislation of greater consequence than a ban on mandatory high heels for women in serving jobs. The Liberals, who will likely be reduced to a rural rump despite having likely won the most seats, are basically being elected by BC’s version of “deplorables”. Nice people think they are a bit, well, common.

Dr. Weaver, well educated, Oak Bay resident and articulate guy that he is should be able to target those nice, white, very liberal people and peel them away from both the Liberals and the NDP. Plus, Weaver has the children who have grown up on Green ideology masquerading as education.

One winner tonight: the Greens.

April 14, 2017

Alberta’s new problem of “rising income support caseloads”

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

Colby Cosh sounds a warning note for Alberta’s NDP government:

… there is a danger — I say this with glum certainty that this centuries-old accepted truth will incite tantrums — in permitting the dole to grow too large. One need only look at the United States’s current addiction to federal and other disability programs. The U.S. reformed welfare as Alberta (and eventually Ontario) did, but disability schemes involving armies of doctors, lawyers and administrative judges became an equally huge species of para-welfare.

The result is a national orgy of prescription opioids and suicide, as policy inertia encourages millions to make a bad back or a trick knee the centre of an unproductive, isolated life. The bottle of OxyContin absolves and soothes; Donald Trump wins a presidential election.

I want no part of anything like this for Alberta. During my lifetime the province has been an economic colony, obsessed with competitiveness and quite short on the state’s version of “compassion.” We all knew we would get NDP economic policy when we voted NDP. They have un-flattened taxes, revived groovy ’70s industrial planning, taxed carbon, regulated farms, run planet-sized deficits, and sheltered the bureaucracy while businesses choked and private-sector workers struggled.

Only the very inattentive could have been unprepared for most of this, as a price to be paid for hosing out the Conservative stable, or even as a desirable correction. Welfare numbers signify a more fundamental, threatening change. It is one that the New Democrats may find more dangerous to its electoral future than all the rest put together, if Ontario history is any guide.

The growth in welfare rolls that can take place in a year may take 10 to reverse. And, of course, such growth suggests that other NDP nostrums, like hiking the minimum wage, aren’t working out. Why would anyone at all require state income support in labour’s paradise? Do NDPers need to look far to find a stalking, wrathful, hyperconservative Mike Harris figure in Alberta?

March 23, 2017

The rent is too damned high? I know – let’s kill the rental market!

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

Toronto’s real estate market has been insane for years, with prices for utter wrecks still approaching a million dollars. This has a knock-on effect for rental housing, with insufficient supply guaranteeing that rents will also go higher and higher. The Ontario NDP thinks they’ve got a silver bullet to fix the rental market: rent control! Chris Selley explains why this won’t work out the way eager would-be renters in Toronto might hope:

The NDP’s solution: rent control. MPP Peter Tabuns tabled a private member’s bill Monday that would extend limits on annual rent increases to units built after 1991 — thus closing a so-called “loophole” the Mike Harris Tories introduced in hopes people would build more new units. The Liberals followed quickly behind, with Housing Minister Chris Ballard promising “substantive rent control reform” — details to come.

You can see the attraction, politically. Robber baron landlords swoop in, cackling, forcing families onto the streets and auctioning off their homes, literally, to the highest bidder. The government can stop it. Why won’t the government stop it?

No doubt there are some very sympathetic stories out there. But we in the media tend to be very good at finding those, and it’s hard not to notice the preponderance of “victims” who could afford very high rent in the first place, and didn’t do their homework with respect to rent control or the lack thereof. A typical example: CBC introduced us to a 32-year-old who was paying $1,650 a month for a tiny one-bedroom condo, only to be sent couchsurfing by a whopping $950 increase.

[…]

The fact is, rent control would largely help high-end renters in a high-end market. The vast majority of units that aren’t rent controlled are condos. In October, CMHC pegged the condo-over-apartment rental premium in the GTA at 46 per cent for one-bedrooms, 54 per cent for two-bedrooms and 65 per cent for three-bedrooms.

The real challenge these days is finding an apartment, period: the vacancy rate in October was 1.3 per cent. Critics say the “loophole” didn’t actually incentivize building rental apartments, but closing the “loophole” certainly won’t. Indeed, it’s tough to see how it would accomplish much except transferring money from unit owners to their tenants. Many will like that idea on principle — but if owners can’t rent to the highest bidder, they are unlikely to suddenly rent for less to the youngest, most disadvantaged and most vulnerable people rent control ostensibly helps.

If you want central Toronto to be a more affordable place to live, you need to figure out how to boost supply. There are lots of different ideas out there. It’s a topic of constant discussion at City Hall and Queen’s Park alike. Rent control is nothing but a political distraction.

February 4, 2017

Trudeau’s promise to reform the election system: “It had ‘face-melting political blowback’ written all over it”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

My headline distorts Chris Selley‘s message a bit, but he does correctly point out that Justin Trudeau’s promise was a cynical ploy to attact NDP votes to Liberal candidates, not a genuine commitment to move away from FPTP in our federal election system:

So far as I can tell, the publicly stated evidence that senior members of the Liberal party had any interest in changing the electoral system amounted to Justin Trudeau’s single expression of interest in ranked ballots. There was no evidence at all to suggest any senior party members thought FPTP was the worst electoral system imaginable for Canada — the only interpretation of the platform promise. That being the case, the promise was far too conveniently enticing to New Democrat voters to take at face value.

As to referendums: ample Canadian precedent holds that electoral reform is contingent upon them. And a cursory glance at public opinion made plain that nothing justified breaking that precedent. An Abacus Data poll for the Broadbent Institute, published shortly after the 2015 election, asked respondents to rank their preferences among the current system, mixed-member PR (MMP), pure PR and ranked ballots. The most popular first choice by far, at 43 per cent, was the current system; it was also the second-most popular second choice. The most popular alternative, MMP, was the first choice of only 27 per cent.

No consultative process could fashion a referendum-free consensus from that. It had “face-melting political blowback” written all over it.

May 25, 2016

Kathy Shaidle on Justin’s “two minutes for elbowing” penalty

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

In her latest column for Taki’s Magazine, Kathy Shaidle looks at the #elbowgate scandal in parliament:

No, Trudeau’s hissy fit was profoundly unparliamentary, even for him. He’s previously stuck out his tongue at opposition members. This isn’t even the first time he’s cursed in the House. Again: Like father, like son…

And — in any workplace beyond the Hill, perpetrated by any man with a poles-apart pedigree — it would be a fireable (and possibly criminal) offense.

Most readers likely share my dismay that human resources has siphoned so much power from other corporate departments like accounting or sales, as our society’s slow-motion sex change continues. But that’s the world liberals have created, so one might reasonably suspect that — ha! Had you going, didn’t I?

You see, Trudeau calls himself a feminist. All. The. Time. And for those few who haven’t sussed this out by now, that doesn’t mean he treats women equally and respectfully. That would be cwazy tawk! No, it means that, when he elbows one in the boobs, it’s no big deal. Because his feminism “shots” are up to date. He’s immune. See: “Clinton, Bill” and “Kennedy, Ted” for homegrown examples.

Oh, and “Ghomeshi, Jian” for one northern varietal.

I’ve written about Ghomeshi before: the women’s-studies major–turned–minor musician–turned–major Canadian broadcasting “star” and progressive pinup — until he was accused of slapping around his girlfriends. That case went very badly for the girlfriends, but accusations nevertheless persist that Ghomeshi and his fart catchers created a “toxic work environment” at the CBC. One I was forced to subsidize via government extortion, and where his “inappropriate” “sexist” behavior was tolerated and “enabled” zzzzzzz so sleepy…

Alas for, well, this column, “three’s a trend,” not two. But having no such professional scruples, amateur journalists from Victoria to St. John’s gleefully reposted this photo of Ghomeshi and Trudeau looking chummy as shit, along with an #Elbowgate hashtag and cheeky “We’re feminists!” captions.

March 9, 2016

QotD: The role of luck

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

I try to avoid saying nice things about an NDPer as a matter of principle. I’ll make an exception in the case of Ms [Ruth Ellen] Brosseau. Having been handed a very lucky break she made the most of it. The story is a fascinating example of how many talented and intelligent people live in obscurity until a twist of fate pushes them onto another path. Brousseau was in her mid-twenties at the time of her election, working as a bar manager and struggling to survive as a single mother. There are many educated and accomplished people who spend the whole of their adults lives striving for political office, only to fail miserably upon attaining their goal. They have been bested by a woman who had none of their advantages. Luck plays a greater role in success than many people care to imagine.

Richard Anderson, “A Twist of Fate”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2016-02-22.

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