Quotulatiousness

November 4, 2022

Ontario parents brace for yet more school disruption as CUPE threatens a Friday walkout

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

Matt Gurney, writing in Toronto Life, recounts a fairly typical Ontario parent’s concerns at the latest stand-off between the Ontario government and the non-teaching educational workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE):

It’s one thing to watch the news as a journalist and wonder how to cover it. Over the last week or so, though, I’ve just been another parent wondering if my young kids are going to be out of school for an extended period. Again.

It’s all very familiar by now, of course. Can I shuffle my deadlines? Should we get rotating playdates going with neighbours so we can have some quiet in the house when we have an important Zoom call? Do we still have the number of that tutor we used during Covid, and should we call her again if this drags on? Anyway, there’s always the grandparents, right?

This is stress we don’t need — a kick in an already tender spot. I remind myself that, all things considered, others have it way worse: people on shift work, single parents, parents of kids with special needs, those for whom a missed shift means a missed rent payment or a skipped meal. But, even among the affluent and privileged, the frustration, the sense of weariness at more of this, is strong.

[…]

Let me repeat that: my son, now in the third grade, has never had a normal year of school. Preschool and JK? Sure. But then Covid struck mid-senior-kindergarten, in a year already disrupted by job actions from teachers during contract negotiations with the province. (Once the pandemic began, deals were quickly reached.) Schools closed and didn’t reopen. The next year, his first grade, was a complete fiasco, with schools opening and closing as the virus surged and waned. The second grade was better but still had a lot of shifting rules and a relatively brief shutdown after Christmas. This year was the first shot for my son to know a normal school year.

And there are thousands of other kids like him out there, each with a parent (or two) who worries that their child has already lost too much.

Don’t discount the guilt parents feel. We spent years telling our kids, “No, you can’t do this.” Denying them birthday parties, family trips, sports and activities, even just playdates. If you aren’t a parent and don’t understand why people might get so passionate about whether their kids stay in a classroom, don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s all about the lesson plan or just a desire to ship them off so that the house is quiet for a few hours. Those both matter, but the bigger concern for many is that we’re tired of saying no to our kids. We’re tired of telling them that they can’t do things. We’re tired of having things taken away from them.

We knew that measures to limit the spread of Covid were important. We went along, for the most part. We waited. We got our jabs. Many of us got our kids jabbed. In exchange, we want normalcy back. Not for us but for them.

The Ford government’s treatment of CUPE is undeniably heavy handed — probably on purpose, to send a signal to other unions. It’s also unnecessarily nasty. Ford could have struck a better deal with education workers, like imposing a short-term contract with a higher wage boost to help them ride out inflation, as I proposed weeks ago. That might have eased the concerns of parents out there who, though worried about their kids, don’t like Ford or what he’s doing.

I think Jen Gerson has it right here:

September 27, 2022

Is Kayla Lemieux the leading edge of LGBT tolerance or a “dude gaming the system”?

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

Back on September 16, I posted a link to the then-breaking story of the teacher in Halton whose prosthetic breasts had poked into news headlines everywhere: “This is either the teacher of the year (come on, you know that’s inevitable because reasons) or someone doing an epic physical and psychological parody of our culture right now.” It’s nearly two weeks later, and we’re still not really clear on which of those two possibilities is closest to the truth. At PJ Media, Athena Thorne is making a case for the epic prank case:

There is the most titillating rumor being bandied about the interwebs right now. And while it may or may not be true, it’s certainly food for thought. It concerns “Kayla Lemieux”, the infamous trans-woman shop teacher at Oakville Trafalgar High School (OTHS) in Ontario, Canada.

An anonymous poster on an online forum recently made a claim about Lemieux’s shop class back when “Kayla” was still Mr. Kerry Luc Lemieux. The post reads:

    This dude is gaming the system. An anon here yesterday was in this dude’s class. This teacher was almost fired for ‘toxic masculinity’ last year, as well as not embracing woke culture. He’d drop redpills to his class, such as how silly gender neutral bathrooms are. The school board hates him.

    He’s now upping the ante to exploit the very clown world the school and society itself created. His long game is most likely to get fired, and then sue for discrimination. There is no other explanation… No better way to troll clown world than to become an over-the-top caricature of a woman.

File this allegation under “Huge if True” (lol). Imagine for a moment that the anonymous person is telling the truth. If that is the case, then this teacher is the greatest hero the sane world has fronted yet.

If Lemieux is indeed pranking the school board, then he is a genius. When images of the trans-busty high school shop teacher began spreading like wildfire online, the outrage was swift and formidable. OTHS and the Halton District School Board (HDSB) went on the defensive — and it quickly became evident that they had painted themselves into a corner with their mindless commitment to “inclusion”.

“We are aware of discussion on social media and in the media regarding Oakville Trafalgar High School. We would like to take this opportunity to reiterate to our community that we are committed to establishing and maintaining a safe, caring, inclusive, equitable and welcoming learning and working environment for all students and staff”, said OTHS in an email sent to parents and obtained by feminist news site Reduxx.

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.

May 22, 2022

QotD: Surveying Upper Canada

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

Gentle reader is invited to draw a square on a piece of paper. Let each side be about ten miles. Eight miles will do, or nine; eleven or fourteen would also be acceptable. It could be more of a rectangle than a square, but try to make the corners sharp. Or even a triangle, if the paper runs out.

You have just drawn an Ontario Township.

Now, make your grid. The line roads, north and south, should be 100 chains apart (one-and-a-quarter miles), and the east-west sideroads either the same, or different. They needn’t come out evenly; you may leave a fraction on whichever side you didn’t start from. The whole board may have to be tilted at the “front” (baseline) to parallel a lakeshore, or accommodate the “back” of the next Township down. If you’re in the mood, you might want to draw a diagonal road, right through everything.

Congratulations. You may now have a job as one of His Majesty’s surveyors in pioneer Ontario. It’s a much better job than down south of British North America, where the land is somewhat populated already, and everyone seems to have an opinion. Up here, not yet any people in the way. But there is still the difficulty of slashing through the bush. You only draw “concessions” — future roads defining blocks, to be further subdivided into future farmlots. When the people granted land move in, they will be compelled by the guvmint to actually dig those endless, straight, access roads.

This will make the roads more interesting. Where the lines meet an obstacle, you get a little run around it. Or a big one, if the obstacle continues. Intersections don’t quite meet, so you get a jog. Or, you decide to put the jog in the middle of nowhere, instead. There were at least five major surveying systems in Upper Canada (later “Ontario”), and dozens of variations on each one. The line and side roads might be 66 chains apart, or more than twice that, depending on some local magnate’s whim. Or the surveyor may have been drunk that day.

David Warren, “Esquesan”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-04-10.

January 20, 2022

Discovery ’70 — “A Tale of Two Forts” — Fort Niagara & Fort George, War of 1812

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

PeriscopeFilm
Published 19 Oct 2021

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This episode of the television show Discovery ’70 is hosted by Virginia Gibson. “A Tale of Two Forts” focuses on two important historic forts from the War of 1812, Fort Niagara and Fort George, which are located between the United States and Canada on the Niagara River. The episode contains re-enactments of the activities at the forts, a bitter battle for control of the Niagara River valley, and the Battle of Queenston Heights — the first major battle of the war. Fort Niagara was an important American post near the outlet of the Niagara River into Lake Ontario. During the early days of the war, it launched artillery fire against the British at Fort George on the other side of the river. On 27 May 1813, the Americans won the Battle of Fort George, and held the enemy fortification. Later that same year, after the burning of Newark and with American forces in disarray, the British advanced on Fort George, forcing the American garrison to abandon it. The artillery could not be withdrawn from Fort George and was thrown into the ditch surrounding the fort. The American garrison at Fort Niagara was then taken by surprise in a night assault by a select force of British regular infantry. Fort Niagara remained in British possession until the end of the war, until they relinquished it under the terms of the Treaty of Ghent. The War of 1812 was won by the British, and was the last military conflict between the two countries.

In 1812, the U.S. Army’s Fort Niagara stood near the British Army’s Fort George in Canada. The introduction of the film begins with a re-enactment of U.S. soldiers in Revolutionary era dress advancing by canoe on the river at :12. British Redcoat soldiers and cannons at Fort George. Main title. At 1:16 the film shows small vessels near Lake Ontario, which was Indian land in 1812. At 1:27 a cannon. At 1:43 the American Fort Niagara, made of stone and brick. At 2:17 the French “stone house” is shown. This was actually a disguised fort with cannon positions. Defenses and the outside of the fort at 2:52. At 4:08, to show the seizure of the fort by the British, a Redcoat is shown triumphantly walking past the fort. The fort served as a refuge for English loyalists at 4:55. At 5:57 an American drummer, and Continental type soldiers. At 6:59 a woman and her daughter go to the well to fetch water. A type of oven is shown that heated cannonballs, so that they could not be re-used by the enemy. At 8:07 an overhead view of Fort George. Houses, log stockades, ladders, saws. British soldiers on parade and marching. At 11:20 British soldiers firing, and the Union Jack being raised. At 12:20 English and American officers dine together. The generals of both Fort George and Fort Niagara are shown in the re-enactment — Major-General Sir Isaac Brock for the British and American General Stephen Van Rensselaer. A Redcoat rides a horse toward the house where the dinner takes place, bearing news that the U.S. has declared war on the British. U.S. soldiers canoe past the island at 14:34, attempting to establish a foothold on the Canadian side of the Niagara River. The American assault on October 13, known as the Battle of Queenston Heights — the first major battle in the War of 1812 — takes place. American soldiers attempting plant “Old Glory” at 15:58. At 16:48 at Fort George, General Brock writes dispatches requesting reinforcements, then leads his men into battle as part of the counter attack. General Brock is fatally hit by sniper fire 17:51. The forts firing cannons at each other 18:13. At 19:17 British soldiers firing at American soldiers, the British prevail. At 19:49 the Americans retreating in defeat. At 20:07 The British salute their fallen general. The Americans salute Brock as well. The film ends at 21:04.

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November 30, 2021

Dynamite Luke Dillon and the Welland Canal

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 29 Nov 2021

Around 7 in the evening on April 21, 1900 two large explosions rocked the hamlet of Thorold, Ontario. It was an act of terrorism, an attempt to breach the locks of the Welland canal — a ship canal connecting Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, allowing ships to bypass Niagara Falls. Three men were arrested, but who were these “dynamitards”? It would be two years before the identity of their notorious leader would be revealed.

This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

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October 17, 2021

Just about the least likely 2021 issue … protesting a school principal for her musical taste

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

In Friday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh reports on some St. Catharines, Ontario parents who apparently just woke up from a 40-year long stasis pod:

Adrian Humphreys has a short item in today’s Post about an attempt to petition against a St. Catharines, Ont., public school principal because of her off-hours fondness for Britain’s ancient heavy-metal act Iron Maiden. NP Platformed can only applaud the success of what is clearly a disguised ploy for global publicity: Maiden, now 46 years into a busy life of recording and touring, released its first new studio LP in six years last month.

Then again, it is vaguely possible that the petition was started out of genuine concern by the “parents”, who claimed to have authored it, none of whom have stepped forward to own their objections to principal Sharon Burns. (She is, perhaps wisely, not giving interviews herself.)

If you’re about Burns’s age, you can only marvel at the operations of Father Time. When we and Burns and Iron Maiden’s (mostly intact) classic lineup were all still young, the band was one whose symbols you might draw on a Duo-Tang to annoy and disquiet a prissy teacher. How the tables have turned, as tables will.

Burns’s Instagram account contained photos of her going to concerts and wearing Iron Maiden merchandise of the sort that has made the group incalculable fortunes. Her gear included some references to 1982’s The Number of the Beast, which critical consensus considers to still be the finest of the group’s studio albums.

This was seen by the anonymous petitioners as signalling an allegiance to Satanism, and perhaps it’s natural for a very sheltered parent to have become upset. (The school, as Humphreys explains, has a distant background as a Mennonite Bible school.) But getting angry at Iron Maiden in 2021 feels a little like getting angry at McDonald’s. Even on a surface level, Maiden, a “new wave” metal group that did its most innovative work in the 1970s and ’80s, has been succeeded by several generations of metal groups and entire subcultures that take the violence, noise, crudity and obscenity into realms we old farts never dreamt of.

September 5, 2021

The official science advisors themselves are making it much harder to “trust the science”

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

In the very last “Weekly Dispatch” from The Line that I’ll be able to read and share (because those posts are going behind the paywall from next week onward), the difficulty in “trusting the science” is made very clear indeed:

A friend of The Line who lives in Ontario sent us a delightfully snippy little text this week attached to the Ontario Science Table’s latest COVID-19 modelling efforts.

“Do you have any idea what would happen if I walked into a meeting with a range from 500-9000, and expected people to take me seriously?” she wrote. “I want to believe you scientists, but you are making it impossible to have any faith in your work.”

She’s right. A range this wide is both useless and unfalsifiable. No government can look at this graph and decide what the best course of action ought to be, and no individual can look at this data and make reasonable decisions about how to go about his or her life. If you want to see catastrophic health-care collapse, it’s there at the top end, and if you want to see “pandemic is over” signal, it’s there near the bottom.

The Science Table might as well just put a giant ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ on the x/y axis and call it in. These guys have no goddamn clue what is going to happen, and they’d be better off just admitting as much.

The Public Health Agency of Canada’s modelling was equally pointless. It’s predicting another literal off-the-chart case spike by October; 15,000 cases per day, which is almost a third higher than the peak daily case rate of the second wave. Somehow, this will happen despite the fact that more than 70 per cent of the eligible population is now fully vaccinated.

We at The Line are looking forward to October. The fall will bring with crunchy leaves, warm lattes, and the ability to compare these models to reality; but in the meantime, we have to ask, what the hell is the purpose of these things?

If public-health types are trying to scare people into getting vaccinated and maintaining distance, we’re sorry to break this to you, but that’s not going to work anymore. Those who can be scared into changing their behaviour have done so already. And those who refuse to be scared are going to look at another set of unfalsifiable modelling predictions and roll their eyes.

We cannot say this enough: COVID-19 is now an endemic disease. We’re stuck with it. It’s not going away. We are going to experience another wave of cases. Hospitalizations and ICU admissions will rise. Our mortality rate will also increase — although these latter metrics will rise at nowhere near the rate as previous waves thanks to vaccines. Delta will pass. Then another variant will pop up. And another after that. We can’t let ourselves be trapped on a Ferris wheel of restrictions and easing every time case numbers go up and down for a disease that may be with us for years. Eventually, we have to make our peace with the suck, return to some semblance of normal, and figure out how to live our lives in a sustainable and healthy way — albeit with this new way to get sick and die in them.

We have an 83 per cent first-dose vaccination rate among those who are eligible; vaccine mandates, passports, $100 gift cards, may, at best, add a few points to that total. We have reached the point where we are grasping at increasingly divisive policies to make ever more incremental gains — in short, the law of diminishing returns is beginning to kick in, as it always does. If our current vaccination, mortality, and hospitalization rates are is not good enough to call time on this pandemic then what, exactly, is the exit strategy? And just from a pure communications perspective, how does releasing another round of bonkers off-the-charts modelling serve that end?

November 27, 2020

Is clean water too much to ask for in a first world nation?

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

Ted Campbell explains how he would resolve the TWENTY-FIVE YEAR OLD PROBLEM in the Neskantaga First Nation in northern Ontario, which is one of the many First Nation public health issues the federal government has been promising to address for years:

A few weeks ago I was horrified to read about the 25 year long water problems that continue to plague the Neskantaga First Nation in North-Western Ontario ~ yes you read that right: it’s been 25 years since these Canadians have had clean, potable water! I begged the government to Do Something! and I offered one concrete idea based upon by near certain knowledge of what the Canadian Armed Forces can and have done for people overseas. One of my readers, a retired colonel in our Military Engineering branch confirmed that what I suggested was doable.

Now I read, in a report by Campbell Clark in the Globe and Mail, that the main problems are a combination of political over-promising and bureaucratic ineptitude. I am going to blame Justin Trudeau for pretty much all of the political over-promising: he made it a centrepiece of his 2015 election campaign and then totally failed to follow through. He has to wear at least a large part of the bureaucratic ineptitude, too, because he’s been prime minister of Canada for over five years. He’s failed, again.
OK, I can hear you saying: if you’re so smart how would you fix things?

For a start I would stick with the outlines of my earlier proposal: I would ask the Army to help, right now, using existing technology. We would declare this a disaster ~ and if Canadians going without clean water for 25 years doesn’t qualify as a disaster then I don’t know what does ~ and send the Canadian Armed Forces’ Disaster Assistance Response Team (the DART) to the Neskantaga First Nation and tell them to fix whatever needs fixing ~ using the Indigenous Services department’s budget. When they finished there we would buy them a new water purification system and send them the next First Nation that has a water disaster on its hands. People overseas will have to wait or we’ll have to build a second DART.

Next I would ask the Army and the Canadian manufacturers of water purification systems to work together with First Nations corporations, like Matawa First Nations Management, to develop (at the Indigenous Services department’s expense) concrete, workable plans to install, operate and maintain, over their complete life-cycle, water purification and waste disposal systems and the electrical power and the power and water distribution systems necessary to support them.

After this long, it may not be that the government can’t deliver these services, it might be that the government has deliberately chosen not to deliver.

October 21, 2020

“Canadian conservatism often suffers from a unique form of self-loathing”

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

In his latest essay for The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden reviews an old book by Peter Brimelow and how it influenced the Canadian conservative scene at the time and why the book’s insights mattered so much to Stephen Harper:

Published in 1986, The Patriot Game captures the ideas and sentiment of an entire generation of Canadian conservatism. One quick note on Brimelow. He’s a controversial figure and has been called a “leader within the alt-right.” He’s also the founder of VDARE, an American anti-immigration website. I’m not getting into a back and forth with anyone about how best to describe his views, I’ll just say that none of this means his older work like The Patriot Game should be discounted or ignored, especially given the influence it’s had.

The game Brimelow is describing is the manufacturing of a new national identity that was undertaken by what he terms “Canada’s New Class.” This is a term he borrows from Irving Kristol. It refers to Canada’s politicians, civil servants, academics, business elites, writers, and journalists, who have a disproportionate influence shaping public discourse and national consciousness.

The manufacturing of a new national identity by this class, centred on the Liberal Party, was one that both rejected our heritage and replaced it with a self-serving and contradictory ideology that serves the interests of this New Class. The strategy of the Canadian New Class throughout Canada’s history has been “to concentrate rents from a resource-based economy in Central Canadian hands.”

The nationalism they manufactured to do this was an entirely artificial one, built around multiculturalism, bilingualism, anti-Americanism and heavy federal government involvement in the economy. At its core Brimelow’s argument is that 20th-century Canada is the creation of the Liberal party, but ultimately that it is fake and built to serve the interests of the New Class. This was done especially by placating Quebec at the expense of the West, and attempting to construct a new national identity that could unite English and French Canada.

This game played by Canada’s elite to enrich them and their bases of support in places like Quebec not only took money from the West and transferred it elsewhere, it dragged down the Canadian economy by crippling it in overbearing and burdensome regulation and the heavy hand of government involvement.

The most interesting, and clarifying part of the book to me is Brimelow’s description of the identity and nationalism that he thinks the Liberals consciously destroyed and then replaced with their own. Brimelow thinks that the New Class are consciously and actively anti-British, not just anti-American, and that this new identity was built as both a rejection of British heritage and the cultural affinities English Canada has with “North American identity.”

According to Brimelow “All of Anglophone Canada is essentially part of a greater English-speaking North American nation … Canada is a sectional variation within this super nation.” Our British heritage is at the core of who we are along with our common Anglo affinities with Americans, and this new national project is doomed to failure. Brimelow suggests that “Canada’s fundamental contradictions cannot be resolved in the present Confederation” and while English Canada is currently in a strange period of identity agnosticism, it will eventually recover and “assert its North American identity.” This process will only be accelerated by regional tensions within Canada that expose the futility of this new Liberal national identity. Modern Canada, in short, is a fraud and doomed to failure.

September 16, 2020

Lockdown justification theories

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

In the most recent Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb reports on a demonstration last month in London organized by Piers Corbyn which resulted in Corbyn being almost instantly fined £10,000 despite other, larger and more violent demonstrations not drawing any kind of judicial sanctions:

David Icke about to speak at Piers Corbyn’s 20 August anti-masking demonstration in Trafalgar Square.
Screencap from YouTube video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOZQ58uTWdw

The consensus at the demonstration appears to have been that the Coronavirus is some kind of fraud, and that the laws to stop its spread are really intended to carry us into a nightmarish New World Order tyranny. I disagree with this view. I believe instead that, looking back from one or two years, the Coronavirus Panic will be seen as a disaster for at least the British ruling class, and as somewhere between a blessing and nothing very bad for the majority of everyone else.

For the avoidance of doubt, I have no belief in the goodness of our ruling class. The Labour Party represents a new and hegemonic Establishment. The project of this Establishment is to bring about changes that are meant to be fatal to the traditional peoples of my country, and that will not be to the advantage of the groups they are supposed to raise up. Whether this project is evil or deluded is beside my present point, though it is probably something of both. There are two possible views of the Conservative Party. It may be worth supporting because, though willing to see it roll forward of its own momentum, the leaders do not want to hurry the project forward, but are mainly interested in personal enrichment. Or it may be a Potemkin opposition — gathering votes from the discontented, while self-consciously making sure those votes are wasted. Again, the exact truth is beside my present point. What does matter is that we go into every election less free and less at home in our country than at the previous election.

This being admitted, there is a loose connection between me and the speakers and attendees at Mr Corbyn’s demonstration. At the same time, there is a difference between cynicism and paranoia. As a cynic, I do not believe that everything untoward that happens is there to hurry the project of change. I do not believe that our ruling class is in charge of everything. I do not believe that it understands everything. Whatever its origin, the Coronavirus appears to have driven our various rulers into a genuine panic. Yes, Boris Johnson is a fool, and there is an army of the powerful who wanted an excuse to stop our final departure from the European Union. Yes, the Democrats were looking to upstage Donald Trump in time for the next American election. But this has not been a panic in just two countries. The Japanese cancelled their Olympic Games — losing them for the second time in eighty years. The Chinese brought four decades of economic growth to an end. The Indians and South Africans panicked. So did most of the Europeans. The panic was joined by ruling classes with no visible interest in putting the dreams of the Frankfurt School into practice.

Focussing on my own country, what ruling class institution has benefitted from the Coronavirus Panic? Look beyond the propaganda, and it is plain that the response of the National Health Service was a disgrace. Myriads of diagnoses and treatments were cancelled without good reason. We still have no dentistry. The public sector as a whole went on paid leave for six months. The schools closed and the teachers vanished — no great loss there, of course. Even if none goes bankrupt, dozens of universities will need to downsize — no loss there either. The police behaved throughout like fascist goons. Every institution set up or adapted to advance the project of change has emerged from the past six months revealed as broken and covered in ridicule. What sort of a planned crisis is it that ends in magnified cynicism and in paranoia that can fill Trafalgar Square on a Bank Holiday weekend? The general mood in this country is approaching what you see at the end of a lost war.

Or what associated commercial interests have benefitted? The politicised entertainment media is flat on its back. The commercial property sector is entering a melt-down. House prices in all the nice parts of London are going into a downward spiral. Public finances will be squeezed for years to come; and, given a choice between projects of change and a liveable dole, the electors are likely to make their wishes undeniable. Globalised patterns of trade have been disrupted, raising question marks over all the presiding global institutions. The last thing financial services needed was another big shock. As for the commercial beneficiaries, these are libertarian by default. For all that can be said against them, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have opened the media to anyone who knows how to use a computer keyboard. Their turn to corporate censorship has, at every step, been a response to outside pressure. Every one of these turns has been half-hearted and driven by a natural, if not always creditable, desire to continue growing richer. There is no particular benefit for the American and British ruling classes if Mr Bezos becomes a trillionaire and Richard Branson ceases to be a billionaire.

On a related note, Jay Currie points out that the media’s current laser-intense focus on reporting Wuhan Coronavirus cases allows the narrative to continue relatively undisturbed and which might be totally overthrown if they reported instead on deaths from the Chinese Batflu (H/T to David Warren for that useful epithet):

In the UK, France, Ontario and various other jurisdictions COVID case counts have risen at an alarming rate in the past few weeks. Unfortunately, mandatory masking and strict lockdowns seem to be the only tools governments feel they have in the face of case count surges.

It can be argued that the increasing case counts may be an artifact of more testing. Or a product of the sensitivity of the tests themselves; but the actual case numbers keep going up.

Our media, God bless them, at a national level seem to be entirely focused on case counts to the point where, in this CBC story on Ontario’s numbers, there is simply no mention of the “death count”.

Why could this be? Well, take a look at these two graphs from Ontario:

If you look at the top graph the sky is falling and masks, social distance, lockdowns, school closures and “stay at home” all make a lot of sense. If you look at the bottom graph, COVID is over.

In Montreal over this last weekend up to 100,000 people marched against mandatory masks. The mainstream media downplayed the turnout and suggested that there were all sorts of conspiracy theorists, Qanon believers, far right and Trump supporters marching. There probably were. But I suspect the vast majority of the marchers were responding to the disproportionate response of the Quebec government to graphs which look very much like Ontario’s.

People are more than willing to go along with governmental measures they can see the point of. “14 days to flatten the curve and prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed” made sense back in April. And the measures taken then may well have worked. But it is mid-September and the hospitals and their ICUs are not even slightly overtaxed.

September 7, 2020

Public compliance with masking rules

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

David Warren on the temptation for public health officials to treat the citizenry as slightly dim children who need direct supervision by enlightened public health officials:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The present danger — the Red Chinese Wuhan Laboratory Batflu — is visible everywhere thanks to state-mandated muzzles or batmasks. We are now in the sixth month of “fifteen days to flatten the curve,” and I’ve noticed that these filthy mouth-pieces have become another urban environmental blight, on a scale even worse than the sidewalk basketball bouncers I recently decried. I spotted four discarded Batflu-spreaders on the sidewalk during a walk of less than one city block yesterday, to a deadbeat “supermarket” to fetch milk for my tea.

I’m sure these cloth garottes are choking our Blanding’s Turtles — already considered endangered by our provincial bureaucracy because less than one in a thousand of their eggs ever hatch, and then the adults try to cross country roads. Call up a picture of one on the Internet, and gentle reader will see that they are all apparently wearing yellow batmasks on their chins, in compliance with guvmint regulations. For if they took them off, they would risk being confused with another turtle species that might not be Protected.

But while my affection for Blanding’s Turtles, and empathy in light of their persecution by Ontario motorists, is of long standing — a friend proposes that we found a Blanding Lives Movement — I am even more concerned about the fate of our children. The Batflu has been discouragement enough, to those who may never reach maturity, but the spectacular success of the Nanny State effort to keep them socially atomized and in muzzles, portends innumerable (fake) “pandemics” to come. For what faceless time-server, “dressed in a little authority,” can resist an opportunity to treat the general population as if they were retarded children? Especially now, that the general population has shown it will comply?

According to an item that somehow slipped into the New York Times, only a tiny fraction of the much-publicized Batflu deaths were attributed to the Batflu alone, on death certificates sampled from across the Natted States. By this focus, the “pandemic” toll is reduced from the official number of 187,777 (I just checked this morning), to about 9,200. Of course, the commie and never-Trumper meejah have gone splenetic to “cancel” this interesting fact. It is as bad as the French study which showed that your one-in-ten-thousand chance of dying with the Batflu in that country is cut a further five times if you happen to smoke. Or the Hydroxychloroquine scandal, in which Mister Trump suggested (correctly) that a simple anti-malaria drug, already mass-produced and dirt cheap because long out of patent, can cut it by a few times more.

May 28, 2020

Wuhan Coronavirus versus Canadian government planning and implementation

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

As Chris Selley illustrates, this was a clear failure for the various levels of government:

When Ontarians look back on the COVID-19 pandemic as the moment when their government finally ponied up the big bucks and fixed the province’s long-term care system, they will likely also wonder what the hell took so long. As appalled as everyone quite rightly is by the Canadian Forces’ report into the state of five long-term care homes that were in dire enough shape to require military intervention, we really shouldn’t be shocked. As the Ottawa Citizen in particular has reported in recent years, the system’s staffing levels were designed for a much less old, much less sick and much less Alzheimer’s-afflicted population than lives in them today — and it led to some terrible outcomes in normal times.

Perhaps it was easy to blame such incidents on individual villains: Ottawa support worker Jie Xiao, who was caught on video punching 89-year-old Georges Karam 11 times in the face; or Elizabeth Wettlaufer, one of Canada’s most prolific and yet somehow least-famous serial killers, who murdered at least eight senior citizens in long-term care homes during her red flag-festooned nursing career. Perhaps tales of society’s most vulnerable being forced to wallow in their own filth, or even just left alone in confusion and misery, are too much for the human mind to contemplate at length.

In any event, it only stood to reason that a virus as potent as the one that causes COVID-19 would exploit weak points in a long-term care system. Between wandering patients, fans circulating air throughout facilities and a lack of basic sterilization control, you would almost think these five facilities wanted the virus to spread. It’s a wretched understatement to say we can do better.

We shouldn’t fool ourselves, though: Long-term care homes will always be uniquely vulnerable. And as the economy reopens, it’s essential we keep focusing on them. It’s essential that we focus, period.

There is a tendency among media in Central Canada to treat “Canada’s COVID-19” outbreak as a single thing affecting all of society. It clearly isn’t. The numbers are all over the map. Quebec has reported by far the most cases and deaths: 5,655 and 480 per million population, respectively. Ontario is at roughly one-third of that: 1,778 cases per million and 144 deaths per million. At 1,569 cases per million, Alberta has a comparable number of cases to Ontario — but far fewer deaths, at just 31 per million. British Columbia has the same death rate as Alberta, but with only one-third as many cases. Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland and New Brunswick have reported just 18 deaths between them. Quebec has nearly 30,000 active cases; Ontario has just over 6,000; Manitoba has 16.

May 27, 2020

Comprehensive planning and communication failures are the hallmark of Canada’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus epidemic

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

Chris Selley understands why the internet shaming community is dunking on the apparently large number of people who crowded into Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods park over the weekend but doesn’t feel the need to join them:

Screencap from a CBC report on unorganized social distancing civil disobedience at Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods Park on Saturday.

Human beings need to get outside and socialize. They have breaking points, and many are very understandably at them. (An aside: I can’t help noticing how many people venting fury on social media have also treated their followers to images of their back-patio office setups, or updates on their new vegetable gardens.) There is also no surplus of parkland in downtown Toronto. Photographic evidence suggests other neighbourhood greenspaces were very busy as well, though not to the same extent.

In other words, this was always going to happen. So the time is long past when politicians like Ontario Premier Doug Ford or Toronto Mayor John Tory should be able to cluck their tongues or stamp their feet at such people and expect their constituents to nod along in solidarity.

Jurisdictions facing significant COVID-19 outbreaks had one finite period of time in which to try to knock this bastard virus down. After that period of time, the socioeconomic costs of the shutdown would become unsustainable and the economy would have to reopen. We’re seeing that happen all over the world right now: in essence, countries are rolling the dice. If they did well in the allotted time, fewer people will have to die in the name of getting back to normal.

The federal, Ontario and Toronto governments have not done well — certainly not to any extent that justifies their leaders’ soaring approval ratings.

The feds have been abysmal since even before Day One, with Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam actively downplaying the threat. We shipped 16 tonnes of personal protective equipment to China with no viable plan to replace it. Whatever you think of travel bans as an anti-pandemic measure, the government undermined its own credibility by insisting they don’t work, then changing course 180 degrees over the course of a weekend. Most astonishingly, the feds at first utterly failed to communicate the most basic advice to returning travellers — advice such as “don’t stop for groceries or at the pharmacy on your way home.”

And Tam’s initial ludicrous “masks don’t work” narrative has grudgingly evolved to support the use of non-medical masks “where social distancing is not possible.” But the federal government’s official advice on “safe shopping” — indeed the entire web page titled “COVID-19 and food safety” — still doesn’t mention masks, even as the berth shoppers give each other seems to narrow by the day. This anti-mask stance seems to be ideological, bred in the bone.

May 23, 2020

“If you want to advance your cause, make friends with the Ontario Mohawks. They pretty much run the country.”

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

Chris Selley on the utter, abject defeat of the Canadian and British Columbian governments in their “negotiations” with the hereditary leadership of the Wet’suwet’en:

“Vancouver Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en” by jencastrotakespictures is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

“We’re not understanding what is the rush here,” elected chief Maureen Luggi told CBC — a sentiment Naziel echoed. “We sat here for 30 years already, waiting and talking about it,” Naziel said. “We can wait another year or two. It’s not going to hurt anything.”

Indeed, from the average Wet’suwet’en member’s point of view, there is no hurry at all. The logical thing would be to fix the governance structure, heal the wounds that need healing, and then undertake these monumental negotiations.

But for the governments involved, this wasn’t about offering the Wet’suwet’en a better future. It was about putting out a fire: A group of Mohawks thousands of kilometres away in eastern Ontario had blockaded CN’s main line in solidarity with the hereditary chiefs; and the Ontario Provincial Police, armed with an injunction demanding the blockade end, refused to lift a finger.

Something had to give. Somebody had to get screwed, and it was the rank-and-file Wet’suwet’en. For no good reason whatsoever, the hereditary chiefs now hold all the keys to their future. It’s an appalling and appallingly predictable result.

“I don’t see why the government gave them this, because this has got nothing to do with what the protests across Canada started from,” chief Dan George of Ts’il Kaz Koh First Nation told CBC. “Those issues are not resolved. They can set up roadblocks again and do it again, and that’s what I’m worried about.”

If negotiations don’t go well, that might well prove to be a prescient remark. But for now, the hereditary chiefs’ victory is total: They have every reason to stay the course. The message to other groups, however, is clear: If you want to advance your cause, make friends with the Ontario Mohawks. They pretty much run the country.

Screencap from a TV report on Mohawk Warriors attempting to set a freight car on fire along the Canadian National mainline through Tyendinaga near Belleville, Ontario in February, 2020.

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