Quotulatiousness

December 5, 2024

Mélanie Joly in Halifax, demonstrated her belief that “communication” is much more important than “action”

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney continues his report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum, where the Trudeau government’s representatives were Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and Bill Blair, the Minister of National Defence:

Whoo boy. Mélanie Joly has got to go. Now. Today, if possible. Because we’ve got problems enough without, uh, well … maybe I should just explain what happened.

Joly is, of course, our foreign affairs minister. She and Bill Blair, the national defence minister, constituted the “star power” the Trudeau government sent to the Halifax International Security Forum, which I attended late last month. Joly would have, no doubt, taken part in many direct meetings with allied counterparts and various stakeholders behind closed doors during the three-day event. I can’t tell you what happened there. I can tell you, though, what happened during her public, on the record appearances. One of them in particular. And I can tell you what happened after it.

It wasn’t good.

I covered a bit of the basics about the Forum itself — what it is, who funds it, who shows up — in my last column about this year’s event, so I’ll skip the recap this time. Except for this: the event schedule is divided up into on-the-record panel discussions, off-the-record sessions (generally, those are the more interesting ones), and just lots of slack time for networking and gabbing over coffee and routinely excellent food. Joly took part in two of the on-the-record sessions. In one, she gave introductory remarks. They were about what you’d expect. The other time, she was a panelist. And that’s the one where things went wrong for Joly.

Joly was on a panel titled “Era of Unity: Victory for Ukraine”, moderated by Russian political dissident and chess grandmaster (uh oh) Garry Kasparov. Kasparov can be an aggressive moderator, and he and Joly sparred about the value of the United Nations. (I’m more of Kasparov’s view on the value of the UN, to put it mildly, but Joly more or less held her own under his questioning.) Kasparov followed up with a question about tangible support by Canada for Ukraine. He set it up as a hypothetical — he alluded to the recent re-election of Donald Trump, and noted that there are many who’d be happy to sell out Ukraine to secure some kind of peace with Russia. “Will Canada step in … will Canada play a bigger role? Canada is an important country, as you said,” Kasparov put to Joly. “When you have free time from diplomatic victories at the United Nations,” he asked, a bit mockingly, “can you help Ukraine win?”

Oh dear, I thought. This could be bad.

And it was. And then it got worse.

To Kasparov’s specific question — would Canada help Ukraine win? Would Canada step up and do more? — Joly replied at length about how much she believes in defence. And collaboration. And working together with allies. And why we need an Arctic strategy. And the value of deterrence. And the need for a stronger security architecture in the Indo-Pacific. And then some stuff about North Korean missiles. And then a nice bit about Canada’s long friendship with Ukraine. And how Canada, even though we’re smaller than the U.S., will always advocate for Ukraine at the NATO table.

I haven’t quoted directly from what the minister said. I am conscious about not wanting this entire column to become long quotes. You can see the entire exchange between Kasparov and Joly here, starting at around the 37 minute mark. What I can tell you as someone who watched it in person was that there was a real vibe shift — see, I can talk about vibes, too! — in the room as Joly spoke. Kasparov had asked a straightforward question and he’d gotten an answer that seemed as if Joly was envisioning a globe in her head, and spinning it, and just commenting on everything that came to mind as a different region came into view. Oh! There’s the Indian Ocean! Say something about the Indo-Pacific!

It was bad. Everyone in the room knew it was bad, with the possible exception of Joly.

But Joly hadn’t hit bottom yet.

Ontario’s housing market squeezed by the 35.6% combined tax rate on new builds

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

The housing situation in Toronto and the rest of the province has been very tight for years. Lots of would-be buyers chasing the proportionally smaller number of new houses being built. This drives prices higher, but no matter how much of the final price is the builder’s profit margin, the government gets nearly four times as much on every new house sale:

The National Post previously reported that at least a third of a new home’s sticker price in Ontario was comprised of taxes, but an updated report, courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis (CANCEA), now puts the figure at 35.6 per cent.

(It gets even better when it comes to affordable housing — but more on that later.)

The Increasing Tax Burden on New Ontario Homes: 2024, which was commissioned by the Residential Construction Council of Ontario and released by CANCEA on Tuesday, is eye-opening for reasons beyond the fact that a compendium of largely superfluous taxes and production levies has reached 35.1 per cent of the final purchase price of a new home in the city of Toronto. It’s 35.5 per cent in the outlying 905 region, and 34.5 per cent in Ottawa.

The report needed only 16 pages to elucidate how bureaucratic machinations aren’t just gouging prospective homebuyers, but homeowners, too — especially the estimated 1.2 million whose mortgages, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, are due for renewal in 2025.

Read closely enough, CANCEA’s report makes a strong argument that, effectively, Canadians work for the government rather the other way around.

For example, CANCEA’s report demonstrates that 70 per cent of aforesaid taxes on new homes “consist of direct fees on the home, such as DC (development charges) and other fees”.

“For homes priced at $450,000,” which aligns with median income, “… the tax burden rises sharply to 45.2 per cent,” says the report, which also notes that economics often force developers to build smaller units that are insufficient for families.

We must always trust the experts, say the experts and their journalistic fart-catchers

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Glenn Reynolds (aka the “Instapundit”) welcomes Nate Silver to the expert-doubting party:

Well. I was writing about this stuff long before Nate got hip. Back in 2017, just as Donald Trump began his first term, I wrote “The Suicide of Expertise”, by way of responding to Tom Nichols’ book, The Death of Expertise. Nichols’ thesis was that the experts were expert, but that ignorant, superstitious Americans rejected their advice out of insecurity and an unwillingness to be proven wrong. My response was that the experts’ actual track record wasn’t looking so good:

    Well, it’s certainly true that the “experts” don’t have the kind of authority that they possessed in the decade or two following World War II. Back then, the experts had given us vaccines, antibiotics, jet airplanes, nuclear power and space flight. The idea that they might really know best seemed pretty plausible.

    But it also seems pretty plausible that Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, “What have experts done for us lately?” Not only have the experts failed to deliver on the moon bases and flying cars they promised back in the day, but their track record in general is looking a lot spottier than it was in, say, 1965.

    It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.

    And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty …

    On Syria, experts in Barack Obama’s administration produced a policy that led to countless deaths, millions of refugees flooding Europe, a new haven for Islamic terrorists, and the upending of established power relations in the mideast. In Libya, the experts urged a war, waged without the approval of Congress, to topple strongman Moammar Gadhafi, only to see — again — countless deaths, huge numbers of refugees and another haven for Islamist terror.

    It was experts who brought us the housing bubble and the subprime crisis. It was experts who botched the Obamacare rollout. And, of course, the experts didn’t see Brexit coming, and seem to have responded mostly with injured pride and assaults on the intelligence of the electorate, rather than with constructive solutions.

And this was long before the experts’ ne plus ultra of failure, the bungled, dishonest, and downright self-serving response to the Covid pandemic. The pandemic stemmed from experts’ arrogance, in the form of illegal “gain of function” research funded by the U.S. and laundered through Chinese labs, was met with ass-covering “wet market” lies to try to conceal that origin, and then with public health measures, such as lockdowns and social distancing and masking rules, that were backed by no actual science at all, and that were cheerfully flouted by those propounding them whenever it suited their purposes. The final nail in the experts’ authority-coffin, though, was when, after all the lockdown hysteria, they approved massive public marches by Black Lives Matter because, we were told, racism was a public health problem.

Well, so are STDs, but they weren’t encouraging anyone to march against gonorrhea.

Rather they were (ab)using their position to promote the leftist cause du jour. Everyone saw through it, and their stock collapsed.

So. Welcome to the party, pal. Nate’s noticing just how far things have gone downhill.

Look at Life – The City’s for Living In (1968)

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Classic Vehicle Channel
Published Apr 19, 2020

Traffic was still an issue in the 60’s. Residents discuss how they can divert to traffic from the city. This film features great archive of city traffic in the late 60s

QotD: Oscar Wilde

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That story, I need scarcely say, is anything but edifying. One rises from it, indeed with the impression that the misdemeanor which caused Wilde’s actual downfall was quite the least of his onslaughts upon the decencies — that he was of vastly more ardor and fluency as a cad and poltroon than ever he became as an immoralist. No offense against what the average civilized man regards as proper and seemly conduct is missing from the chronicle. Wilde was a fop and a snob, a toady and a social pusher, a coward and an ingrate, a glutton and a grafter, a plagiarist and a mountebank; he was jealous alike of his superiors and of his inferiors; he was so spineless that he fell an instant victim to every new flatterer; he had no sense whatever of monetary obligation or even of the commonest duties of friendship; he lied incessantly to those who showed him most kindness, and tried to rob some of them; he seems never to have forgotten a slight or remembered a favour; he was as devoid of any notion of honour as a candidate for office; the moving spring of his whole life was a silly and obnoxious vanity. It is almost impossible to imagine a fellow of less ingratiating character, and to these endless defects he added a physical body that was gross and repugnant, but through it all ran an incomparable charm of personality, and supporting and increasing that charm was his undoubted genius. Harris pauses more than once to hymn his capacity for engaging the fancy. He was a veritable specialist in the amenities, a dinner companion sans pair, the greatest of English wits since Congreve, the most delightful of talkers, an artist to his finger-tips, the prophet of a new and lordlier aesthetic, the complete antithesis of English stodginess and stupidity.

H.L. Mencken, “Portrait of a Tragic Comedian”, The Smart Set, 1916-09.

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