Quotulatiousness

June 20, 2023

“Mendicino is a dead minister walking, and we suspect he knows it”

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

Belated (from me, not from them) section from this weekend’s update from the editors at The Line:

Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka

Though you may find this hard to believe, based on what’s above, we were paying attention to some other things this week. The Ottawa vortex of ridiculousness continued at its usual clip. The government continues to try and find a defensible position on Paul Bernardo’s prison transfer to a medium-security prison. Alas for Mr. Trudeau, he’s been hit by a double-whammy of bad luck. Bernardo is an emotional trigger point with probably no rival across Canada. And the PM’s point man on this file is the hapless (!) Marco Mendicino, minister of Public Safety.

Let’s be clear: your Line editors are far too Vulcan-like to possess strong feelings about the transfer of Bernardo. We are of the right age to have grown up during the era of the Bernardo rapes, murders and eventual trial. He was the boogeyman of our youth. That being said, the important thing is that he dies miserable and alone behind bars. We aren’t particularly invested in which particular prison this happens. If there was a sensible reason for him to be moved to the Quebec facility, hey, whatever. He can rot in any suitable prison as far as we’re concerned.

The issue here, and it’s ridiculous that we have to spell this out, isn’t the transfer itself. Nor are we calling upon Trudeau or the federal government to become intimately involved in decision-making for prisoners, even high-profile ones. The only thing that turned this into a huge story was the latest peek it gave us into the Trudeau government. We have been confronted with — surprise! — more incompetence and dysfunction.

Mendicino’s staff had been repeatedly told about the pending transfer; no one told the boss. The PMO had been told, too. No one told that boss, either. Why tell the boss? So that they don’t get caught flatfooted by a scandal. This is basic issues management and internal communications, and we’re being shown, yet again, that the government is terrible at this. And, absurdly, Mendicino apparently has some of the best and brightest providing the adult supervision he so clearly needs: veteran political staffers were sent to his office after he beclowned himself during the gun-control fiasco a few months ago.

And this is the problem. We don’t care which cell holds Bernardo as he slides closer to hell. We do care about yet another data point in a pattern that has emerged with this government: they aren’t on top of their files, their offices aren’t well run, ministers aren’t properly briefed, and there seems to be zero accountability anywhere in this process. It was left to the Ottawa Parliamentary Press Gallery to hunt down Mendicino like ravenous cheetahs on a wayward gazelle after Mendicino had promised to brief them, and then no-showed. He also promised to brief them again later on Thursday, and failed to show up that time, too.

We know, we know. It’s hard to believe he’d lie. Marco Mendicino? An incompetent bullshitter? Say it ain’t so.

Mendicino is a dead minister walking, and we suspect he knows it. The government is obviously hell bent on getting to the summer break without sacking the minister, because to sack him, despite his manifest and repeated failings, would be to admit said failings, and this government will never do that. If they can get to the break, they can shuffle him off to the sweet oblivion of an obscure ministry, or even the back benches later on this summer. This is just the latest example of what Line editor Gerson has observed about these guys: tactically smart, but strategically dumb.

And, ahem, call us hopelessly naïve, but maybe the politics isn’t the point here? Canadians ought to have someone in the job of Public Safety minister — kind of an important role, you’ll agree — who is competent and well-supported by excellent staff. Instead we get this shitshow and frantic politicking to avoid handing the opposition a one-day media-cycle victory. It’s a bad look on the government. But it’s nothing we didn’t already know, we guess. They aren’t here to serve Canadians. They’re here to save themselves.

June 18, 2023

QotD: Good intentions do not automatically mean good results

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Health, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The United Nations Children’s Fund is probably the greatest mass-poisoner in human history — not deliberately, of course, but inadvertently. It encouraged and paid for the drilling of tube wells in Bangladesh without realizing that the groundwater was dangerously high in arsenic content. It promoted the wells to reduce the infant mortality rate from infectious gastroenteritis and in this it succeeded. Indeed, it trumpeted its success to such an extent that it found it hard to recognize that, in the process, it had exposed tens of millions of people to arsenic poisoning, and was very late in recognizing its responsibility in the matter.

Another United Nations agency, its peacekeeping force in Haiti, was responsible for the most serious epidemic of cholera of the twenty-first century so far. Before 2010, cholera had been unknown in Haiti despite the country’s poverty and lack of hygiene. Then, from 2010 to 2018, it suffered outbreaks of cholera that have affected perhaps a tenth of the population and caused between 10,000 and 80,000 deaths (the exact figure will never be known).

The evidence suggests that cholera was brought to Haiti by United Nations peace-keeping troops from Nepal. Whether Haiti needed peacekeeping troops at all may be doubted: at the time it suffered from civil unrest rather than from war. One suspects that the peacekeeping force was employed more to keep the Haitians from leaving Haiti than to keep the peace.

Be that as it may, some Nepali troops arrived fresh from a cholera epidemic in Nepal, established a camp next to the Artibonite River from which many Haitians drew their water. The Nepalis emptied their sewage directly into the river, and some of them were infected with the cholera germ. There was soon an outbreak of cholera among the local population of extraordinary violence. The Haitians guessed at once that the Nepali troops had brought the cholera, but this was strongly denied.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Negligence and Unaccountability at the United Nations”, New English Review, 2019-07-09.

June 3, 2023

“Rather than having a culture of transparency, we have a culture of secrecy”

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

In The Line, Philippe Lagassé writes about Canada’s remarkably non-transparent approach to classified information and the very limited ability of our elected representatives to see anything the government chooses to deem “a secret”:

Institutions are tough to change, Canadian institutions especially. But change is possible. Gradual change can happen when we reinterpret existing rules or add new ones on top of old ones that are deeply entrenched. In other cases, a crisis happens that leads to rapid and significant change. These crises either destroy old ways of doing things, or they open a window of opportunity to shake things up. Revelations of Chinese interference in Canadian elections, and David Johnston’s first report on the matter, have opened one of these windows when it comes to Parliament and classified information.

Two sets of Canadian parliamentarians have access to classified information: Privy Councillors (though usually only those currently serving as ministers of the Crown), and those who sit on the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP). In both cases, they have access to classified information in an executive capacity, not their parliamentary capacity. Put differently, they have access to this information by virtue of an executive office they hold in addition to their parliamentary one. Parliament doesn’t have a body that has access to classified information, nor do parliamentarians have access to that information unless they hold an executive office.

Keeping classified information squarely within the executive, or in limited cases within the judiciary, reflects deep-seated Canadian pathologies. As our pathetic Access to Information system highlights, the Canadian government over-classifies things or deems too many of them subject to cabinet confidence. Rather than having a culture of transparency, we have a culture of secrecy. This secrecy culture exists for a number of reasons. Public servants don’t want their ministers to be embarrassed. Information is power within the bureaucracy and giving it out easily diminishes its value. Risk aversion is rewarded and admitting failure is frowned upon. We can’t disclose anything that might rub an ally the wrong way. The list goes on.

Above all, though, Canadian government encourages the strange notion that our secrets are super-super-secret. What do I mean by that? When you look at our allies, Canadian is an outlier in terms of what we disclose and to whom we disclose it. Canadian officials have convinced themselves that they are applying a well-established set of norms around classified and sensitive information, when in fact we’re an outlier. This is particularly notable with it comes to sharing national security information with Parliament.

In the United Kingdom, there’s a statutory committee of Parliament that has access to classified information, called the Intelligence and Security Committee. Since the United Kingdom’s Public Accounts Committee is also expected to oversee all the government’s spending, the chair of that committee has had access to classified information as well to review secret agency budgets. Australia has a similar committee, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Security and Intelligence. This is a very active and important body. It allows Australia to regularly update its national security legislation to meet new threats and to ensure that the powers conferred on the executive are not abused. New Zealand has a parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, too. The Kiwi committee is a bit of an odd duck, since it’s chaired by the prime minister and has the leader of the official opposition as a member. Given that New Zealand is probably one of the most zealous countries when it comes to government transparency, though, it isn’t too surprising. They release stuff that would lead the Privy Council Office to have a collective head explosion if we did the same.

May 25, 2023

Victoria’s housing market is Canada’s housing market in microcosm

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

Elizabeth Nickson explains some of the driving factors for ever-rising housing prices in Canada:

“Victoria, BC” by abdallahh is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

A friend of mine is building four high-rise condo and rental towers in Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia, where I live. It is a charming city, founded in the 1840s, its core an almost classic English village around which a modern city was slowly built. Not so slow now. It’s the warmest, prettiest city in Canada, surrounded on three sides by ocean, and retirees are flooding the place. Young families are choosing the city to raise their children because it is still small, relatively crime-free and filled with charming neighborhoods.

Here is a view from the marketplace by someone who borrowed $150 million to build housing for the newcomers:

    Green energy policies have added maybe $700 a month to the cost of a one bedroom rental unit. It takes over two years to get approval for a rental building in Victoria. Then, another year after initial approval to final approval. That adds another sum. Maybe $300? So rents in theory could be $1000 a month less. That is $1,000 that could go to piano lessons, hockey gear. Private school? And so on. Then Justin let in ONE MILLION people last year into Canada. All unvetted. Canada builds various amounts of housing each year. But 275,000 units is a reasonable average. One million people require 350,000 or so housing units. You want to see upward price pressure on rents? You have not seen anything yet

In fact, “we are two to three million houses short”, says Wendell Cox of Demographia, which has been tracking housing affordability for 25 years across the world. Canada’s two principal cities, Toronto and Vancouver, are among the top four most unaffordable cities in the world, Hong Kong and Sydney being the other two. In my region, everywhere you look, we have tent cities and trailers parked by the side of the road; our economy has been strangled by Covid, debt, inflation, and regulatory madness, so like nearly everywhere, we have a substantial complement of the desperate, despite living among a stunning abundance of resources and talent. Throw in the sharp rise in interest rates and the solution moves from difficult to impossible.

Despite the almost preposterous costs added by “green” energy, “green” land use is the greater reason housing is so constrained in every western democracy. Here’s the crux of the matter: construction costs are only 20 percent lower in a smaller city, but the land in a smaller city would run $90K, while in Toronto or Vancouver or San Francisco or Dublin, it would be upwards of one million dollars.

A green belt is wrapped around every major and minor city. They are called Urban Containment Zones. Much of that land is conserved, in principle to save agricultural land, but in Canada, as elsewhere, urban areas only use 2.5 percent of arable land. World Economic Forum/U.N. rules concerning land use have been adopted by every western democracy, and these rules are disseminated across the world through planning associations. The planner cult is messianic. It hates sprawl, suburbs and cars and while the obvious solution is to build on green belts, the PR unleashed against the idea is vituperative in the extreme. Ontario premier Rob Ford has managed to swap out some green belt land, and is building 50,000 new houses. The press’s reaction against the plan has been vicious, accusing Ford of bribery and paying off his funders.

Yet, there is a ten-year waiting list for public housing in Toronto. British Columbia, like all regions run by the Left, is committed to subsidized housing. But there is a five-year waitlist for any current family housing, and rents for a one bedroom, are almost exactly $1,000 less than in the private sector, meaning that without the green-energy rules, which are ridiculous in such a cold country, private-sector housing could accommodate the less privileged without any cost to the taxpayer, who as it is now pays twice.

Further, the buildings assigned to low-income housing are built to lower standards. There is a happy dancing peasant communitarian aspect to these complexes, but that can degrade very quickly, as Chicago, Detroit, London, have proved. Almost all such complexes end in drug trafficking, single motherhood and kids running wild. The most recent B.C. government failed its promise to build more by 75 percent and its administering agency was found to be corrupt.

May 13, 2023

QotD: The inherent absurdity of “Canadian content”

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

Lately some have reminded us of the inherent difficulties in defining Canadian content, especially where a work is the product of several collaborators. Is a movie Canadian by virtue of its actors? Director? Crew? Location? Theme? Even as applied to individuals: Should citizenship be the criterion? Birthplace? Residency? Subject matter?

But the real folly of CanCon is not that it is impractical, or prone to abuse, or even unnecessary, though it is all of those things. It is rather that it is nonsensical at its root, in its very purpose – again, so far as anyone can define it. Is the point, after all, artistic or political? But it cannot be artistic: there is no theory of aesthetics that prefers that Canadian artists should make Canadian art that teaches Canadians how Canadian they are.

It is, rather, a political project: the inculcation of national feeling in the public, for the purpose of creating a political community, separate and distinct from the colossus to the south. Without the Maginot Line of CanCon quotas, it is suggested, we would be overwhelmed: first the artists, then the country.

But note the assumptions built into this emotive appeal: that a separate nationality cannot be maintained without cultural difference; that our cultural differences with the Americans are both sufficient in themselves to justify our statehood and yet so fragile as to be washed away in an instant; that, left to their own choices, Canadians would unhesitatingly choose the products of an incomprehensibly alien culture over their own; and that, by virtue of this diet of foreignism, we would no longer be Who We Are as Canadians. Therefore we must not be left to our own choices.

Which is nonsense, because we would still be Who We Are, even in that hypothetical dystopian future: it might not be Who We Were, but so what? The Who We Are we are now at such pains to preserve is itself vastly different from Who We Were before.

And who, in the end are we? As the comedian Martin Short once put it: “we’re the people who watch a lot of American TV”. The wholesale ingestion of a foreign culture – albeit much of it made by expat Canadians – is an integral part of our distinct national identity, an irony that must forever elude our cultural nationalists.

Andrew Coyne, “The concept of CanCon is pure folly. That’s the problem at the heart of Bill C-11”, The Globe and Mail, 2023-02-08.

May 5, 2023

QotD: Professional development activities

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Education, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

All this para-work, this ceaseless diversionary activity, is designed, or at least destined, to prevent people from carrying on their real work. By doing so, of course, it creates employment, or at least the necessity to pay people salaries: for, overall, many man-days are lost to it. And it creates pseudo-entrepreneurial opportunities for so-called consultants (often ex-employees of the organisations whose staff they now offer to train in such skills as assertiveness). It is, in effect, an exercise in Keynesian demand-management, but unlike the kind of public works that Keynes envisaged as a stimulus to a flagging economy, it leaves the country with nothing of enduring value, unless a bureaucrat with a flat-screened television and a new conservatory be called something of enduring value.

Needless to add, ceaseless “personal and professional development” is perfectly compatible with the most abysmal incompetence. Indeed, such incompetence is welcome, for it creates ever more demand for the personal and professional development that is supposedly the means to overcome it. This is what I believe is known as a positive feedback loop.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Workshops and why you must avoid them”, The Social Affairs Unit, 2009-11-18.

May 4, 2023

British civil servants apparently need to have training on BDSM theory and practice

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

In Spiked, Malcolm Clark outlines the proposal to be discussed at a civil service union conference next month:

“Cologne BDSM 07” by CSD2006 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .

For years, the LGBT lobby has wreaked havoc across the UK’s civil service. It has helped to turn the machinery of government into a crèche for the kind of people who can’t remember what pronouns they’re using that day. But this may have just been a taster of what’s to come. Kink, it seems, is the new frontier in identity politics. Get ready to meet the “BDSM” lobby.

Next month, at its annual conference, the biggest civil-service union, PCS, will discuss a motion calling on Whitehall to set up a network for staff who are into bondage, domination and sado-masochism (BDSM). I suppose there’s one thing to be said for this daft idea. The more time these jobsworths spend slapping each other around, the less time they’ll have to humiliate and torment members of the taxpaying public.

There are a few obvious problems with this proposed BDSM staff network. For one, its advocates have called for workplace training courses about BDSM. No, I’m not making this up. The suggested courses would explain that “mutual informed consent … is needed before erotic activity is carried out”. This is a statement of the obvious to most of us. Who says entry standards for the civil service are slipping?

You may have assumed that the priority of our civil service should be carrying out the business of government, rather than BDSM advocacy. Perhaps it should be getting on top of the fact that only three per cent of hospital trusts in England hit cancer waiting-time targets in 2022? Or the fact that 360,000 people had to wait more than 10 weeks for their passport last year?

One strange thing about this demand for training courses for kink-meisters is that it flies in the face of other recent staff demands. Across Whitehall, as in private industry, advocacy groups have long insisted that Britain’s workplaces have developed a toxic culture that does not respect sexual boundaries. Reams of new guidelines have been drawn up in response. Many of these guidelines consider asking questions about someone’s sex life to be, in itself, a form of sexual harassment. Yet now we could soon have staff networks based solely around people’s private sex lives. And what would a meeting of sexual fetishists discuss if not their sex lives? The weather?

Even twenty years ago, it was a common witticism to refer to workplace meetings as “beatings”, but this is a long way past a casual joke (that yes, is probably risky to make in most modern workplaces, as someone is bound to find offence).

While looking for an appropriate image to accompany this post, I was quickly reminded why most search engines now offer varying levels of “safe” viewing.

May 3, 2023

The virtue-signallers work hard to keep Canada’s First Nations people in poverty

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

Elizabeth Nickson touches one of the real third rails of Canadian politics — the plight of far too many Canadians who happen to be trapped in a historical bind that immiserates and impoverishes them yet somehow provides a lucrative and comfortable living for their self-appointed political advocates and the bureaucrats who work hard to keep them “on the rez”:

Today, if you protest the current catastrophic regime and have anything that can be taken away, it is taken away, and your family are labelled racists. Tenured professors who raise any objection are disgraced. Any journalist who asserts inconvenient facts is slimed. Any public intellectual who attempts to turn the tide is sent to the margins and silenced.

Many of the current activists for native rights are relatively new to the country, and have little grasp of history other than the straight-up Marxism taught in schools. Because Canada is so thoroughly anti-business, agitating for government money is pretty much the only growth industry, and Canada’s natives are a rich fat pie that seems unending in its ability to feed the bureaucracy and the advocacy outfits – there are hundreds – that seek more and more and more guilt money from the Canadian people.

Not one of them seemingly ventures into a native reserve to experience the results of fifty years of Trudeau Sr’s native policy and talks to the people there. Of the 700 or so Indian “nations” — this moniker a laughably Marxist ploy in itself — few of them even have vegetables. I have spent nights on a reserve up in the north where stodge is the only food. Potatoes fired in oil that has been in use for weeks. Gristly meat. Stale Wonderbread. Recently $8 billion was given to natives because despite the budgeted $200 Billion over five years given to Indian Affairs, in a country with more water than any other country on earth times ten, Indian reserves have no clean water.

Stories are told in my family, of Mohawk camping on the kitchen floor, leaving in full dress and full war cry in order to thrill the children. We have lost this connection to a great and fascinating people, marooned on rotting reserves, a crime caused by a vicious socialist government using vulnerable people to steal the nation’s wealth.

I have been on a reserve where the houses are rotting from the inside. Everyone is sick with mold illnesses. Because Canada’s socialists have deemed that natives have no property rights and are therefore not, in fact, fully people, they can’t even legally fix their own houses, not that they have any money but from whoring and working as check-out clerks. You cannot start a business. You have no equity to borrow even $1,000 to start a business. Canada’s socialists have decided that Canada’s natives are the ideal citizenry, passive, dependent, degraded.

Other reserves I’ve visited abut enormous wealth, from which Indians are constrained. Every activity they undertake requires a permission slip and money from whatever sleazy bureaucrat supervises them, owns them, farms them. Their reserves run to brush and fire fodder, while across the road, fields and forests produce incredible riches.

It is de rigueur for any visiting dignitary, like the current Marxist pope, to apologize for the legacy of the residential schools. Two summers ago a graduate student found what she claimed was evidence of 200 buried bodies near a decommissioned school and the news rocketed around the world. Her science was called into question. The native tribe near the school refused to exhume the “bodies”, largely because if the bodies did not exist, and finding nothing would stop the current shake-down. The actual legacy of the schools was mixed, but entire generations were educated, and there are many successful graduates, who attempt to moderate the madness. They are silenced.

Crime, alcoholism, prostitution, murders, child deaths abound on the reserves. Activists have seeded so much anger and hatred that virtually no clear path out of endemic poverty exists. An ersatz democracy means there are elections, but they are clan based, which means the biggest clan always wins and then it seeks to disempower its rivals. On reserves you can tell who the Chief is: he has the big house, the $100,000 truck. His people? Rotting shacks and bangers. If you aren’t in the right clan, you have to hitchhike to the city for cancer treatments, as the uncle of a Salish friend of mine did until he died.

There is, of course, a solution. I have spoken to native chiefs in the Oil Sands and in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, where the tribe or band has been woven into the oil extraction process. Success is immediate, and ongoing. These men are so enthusiastic, they are giddy, which, if you know a native, is … unusual. They crow about the young people on their reserves that go on to serious graduate degrees, to hope, to family formation, to their own houses. There are such success stories across the continent, depending on an enlightened chief, a non-vulture enlightened capitalist enterprise. And courage to face down the blight of government.

May 1, 2023

“And I, for one, welcome our new CRTC internet overlords”

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

In this week’s Dispatch from The Line, among other maple-flavoured items is the discussion of how the newly passed Bill C-11 will impact Canadians’ everyday online experience:

We at The Line have spent a lot more time trashing Bill C-18 than its cousin, C-11; the reason for that is fairly simple, if unflattering. Both bills are unwieldy little monsters, rife with competing agendas and we only have so much time and energy to spare. Of the two, though, C-18 affects us and our business more directly as it attempts to force Big Tech companies into secret negotiations to prop up dying legacy media outlets.

C-11, which passed this week, is the Liberals’ attempt to overhaul the Broadcasting Act to bring major streaming services like YouTube and Netflix under the heel of the CRTC. This is generally a pretty bad idea — and we’ll get into that in a second. But the passing of the first major overhaul of the act since the ’90s will, we expect, be heralded by the usual suspects of CanCon leeches who see in the legislation an opportunity to siphon evil Big Tech profit while forcing major platforms to force-feed Canadians into consuming more home-grown shite.

Anyway, part of the bill, it is hoped, will force online streamers to feature more Canadian content for Canadian users, particularly content that highlights the usual progressive checkboxes. And while this does make us roll our eyes a bit — just make good stuff and let people choose what they want for themselves! — we admit that this provision is the less objectionable aspect of C-11.

After this, matters get much more dicey. The attempts to force tech companies to pay for more CanCon will almost certainly backfire in the long run: companies like YouTube have already promised that they will comply with legislation by creating pass-through fees for their creators. In other words, if the government forces YouTube to pay a percentage of its profits into a CanCon fund, YouTube will generate that revenue the only way it can — by skimming more cash from its content creators and re-directing some to the creation of Canadian shows that are then commercialized by major broadcasting networks like Rogers. Seems fair!

Where the bill goes off the rails is over years-long battle over user-generated content protections. Upon hitting the upper chamber, the senate actually advocated for amendments that would ensure that Joe Blow YouTuber wasn’t going to fall under the auspices of CRTC regulation — changes that were rejected by the House. How the CRTC defines a content generator worthy of its regulation, or uses any of its new powers, is now up for consideration by the CRTC itself.

Obviously, we at The Line are concerned about how a regulator is going to employ poorly defined and vaguely stipulated legislative powers to control how Canadians are presented which content, and by whom. We are open to the hopeful possibility that the CRTC is so completely in over their heads that all of the concerns about the bill prove fruitless and overblown. But as a rule, we don’t like to rely on the incompetence of our betters to assure our protections and freedoms.

And that brings us to the major philosophical problems with C-11; the first is that legislation should generally not generate more confusion and uncertainty. As a rule, we think that our laws should be written in such a way that an ordinarily intelligent person with a standard education should be able to understand the laws that govern them. By this measure, the Broadcasting Act — like many others — fail a very basic test. C-11 is written so poorly that even experts seem to disagree about the scope of the bill and how our media landscape will be affected by it in the years to come.

[…]

There is, arguably, no reason for the CRTC, nor for the Broadcasting Act in its current form, to exist anymore. Digital space isn’t finite. Canadians can easily find news and entertainment that is relevant to them. We don’t need the government to ensure that Canadian content is produced and funded. Or, if some government intervention is deemed necessary, it need not amount to anything more complicated than a simple tax, with revenues diverted to one of this country’s myriad granting agencies to aid production. Instead, we have a government that seems hellbent on extending the power of a regulator at the very moment in history that this regulator is most redundant.

Given that we’re being led by an increasingly insular government that equates all criticism to disingenuous misinformation, and seems to want to stamp out the evils of wrong opinions on the Internet in the coming Online Harms bill, well, let’s just say we’re increasingly concerned and perturbed.

April 29, 2023

Justin can’t let Joe steal his thunder on this critical issue!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Justin Trudeau’s love of the vastly expensive and utterly useless virtue signal is almost unmatched among western leaders, but as Bruce Gudmundsson relates here, some of Joe Biden’s lower-echelon cronies in the Pentagram Pentagon have put up a virtue signal that will be very hard for Justin to top:

In the United States, the president enjoys the privilege of appointing 4,000 of his supporters to positions within the Executive Branch. When the president is a Democrat, the best connected of these invariably prefer perches in the vast social service bureaucracy, there to reign (but rarely rule) over like-minded civil servants.* Those with the fewest friends, alas, end up in the Pentagon.

I’m honestly surprised that the number of direct appointees is so low … I’d have guessed at least ten times that number. I was vaguely aware that the formal “spoils” system was broken up late in the 19th century, but the US federal government and its various arms-length agencies are several orders of magnitude larger than they were back then.

The appointees who suffer the latter fate know nothing of the work they supposedly supervise. Indeed, having been raised in homes in which there were “no war toys for Christmas”, they cannot distinguish a sailor from an airman, let alone explain the difference between a soldier and a Marine. What is worse, like impoverished Regency belles, obliged to spend the Season wearing last year’s frocks, Defense Department Democrats live in constant fear of losing caste.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that the aforementioned appointees embrace, with great enthusiasm, projects of the sort they can discuss at Georgetown cocktail parties. During the Obama years (2009-2017), many of these bore the brand of “green energy”. (No doubt, the appointees in question made much of the double entendre.) As might be expected, many of these programs went into hibernation during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017-2021), only to spring back to life after the inauguration (in 2021) of Joseph Biden.

In a recent post on his Substack, the indispensable Igor Chudov lays bare the folly of one of these initiatives. Part of the Climate Strategy unveiled by the US Army in 2022, this plan calls for the progressive replacement, over the course of twenty-eight years, of petroleum dependent cars, trucks, and tanks with their battery-powered counterparts.

I mean, on the plus side, it would mean that wars could only take place on sunny days (for solar-powered tanks) or windy days (for wind-powered tanks). The sheer stupidity of the notion would be laughable, except they really seem to be serious about military combat vehicles running on batteries recharged with solar cells, windmills, or unicorn farts. I’d call it peak Clown World, but it’s a safe bet that they can get even crazier without working up a sweat.

Searching for an appropriate graphic to go with this article, I found this gem at Iowa Climate Change from back in 2021:

    * Lest you think, Gentle Reader, that this post serves a partisan political purpose, I will mention that am convinced that the one Republican political appointee with whom I am well-acquainted is a knucklehead of the first order. Indeed, if I ever manage to locate the proper forms, I intend to nominate him for a place of particular honor in the Knucklehead Hall of Fame.

April 27, 2023

Spending more on defence requires more than just turning on the financial taps

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

In The Line, Philippe Lagassé explains why just pouring more money into the Department of National Defence won’t automatically improve our defence capabilities:

Canadian defence spending is back in the news, thanks to an open letter urging the government to spend two per cent of GDP on the military and a leaked document suggesting Canada won’t hit that NATO target. Like ending the monarchy, defence spending is one of those issues that gets lots of attention once or twice a year, only to fade away before any serious discussion takes place. It’s unlikely that this time will be any different.

[…]

Even if the government wanted to greatly increase defence spending, though, it would have trouble spending that money effectively in the short term. While more money is needed over the long term, the Department of National Defence (DND) and Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) have to first build up their capacity to spend a much larger budget. As they do so, however, our historical tendency to reduce defence expenditures after pivotal moments should always be kept in mind.

The DND and CAF are already straining to implement the capital equipment and infrastructure programs that were announced in the 2017 defence policy, Strong, Secure, Engaged. This reflects the fact that department’s capacity to manage procurements has to be built back up after decades of anemic capital spending. There aren’t enough people to move the programs that are currently planned, let alone new ones that could be added. Additional money could be funneled to existing projects, but that wouldn’t be enough to cause an increase to two per cent of GDP in the coming years. The capabilities Canada is currently buying will probably be far more expensive to maintain in the future than the government realizes, which strongly suggests that we do need to gradually get to that number, but this reinforces the need for caution and for managing expectations. If ministers insist that new money be attached to still more new capabilities, DND/CAF will not only have trouble acquiring them, but will be unable to afford them.

One could argue that DND/CAF could get around its capacity challenges by simply buying more equipment “off the shelf”. Instead of getting more people to tackle complex procurements and infrastructure projects, the defence department should focus on simpler acquisitions that require less management. It is important to note, though, that “off the shelf” procurements aren’t an obvious solution either — DND and the CAF don’t specify requirements for the hell of it. Many project requirements reflect the need to integrate new capabilities into the existing force, which is no small feat when mixing new and old technologies and operating from installations across a massive country. Projects that gravitate toward “off the shelf” solutions, moreover, can be challenged by competitors who contend that they can develop a new capability that better meets Canada’s needs. Bombardier‘s response to the government’s plan to buy Boeing’s P-8 Poseidon aircraft to fulfil the Canadian Multi-mission Aircraft (CMMA) project is a recent example.

Canada also tends to favour platforms that can perform various missions, which further complicates “off the shelf” procurements, since the equipment sitting on the shelf may not do everything the CAF needs it to do. Unless we want the CAF to be less capable, the way to address this issue is to acquire more platforms that do specific things. The problem is that the CAF would need more people to acquire, operate, and maintain these additional fleets, still more money to sustain this extra equipment, and yet more infrastructure to store it. This approach promises to exacerbate the very problems it’s supposed to solve.

April 23, 2023

QotD: Developing “multi-disciplinary teams”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I will mention just one of the courses on offer, the “building” of multi-disciplinary teams, so called. I have some experience of multi-disciplinary teams once they have been “built”, or should I say “assembled”, “agglomerated” or “accumulated”. More often than not, in my experience, they are not so much multi-disciplinary as undisciplined. Lacking a clear structure of overall authority, and therefore of responsibility, they lead to endless disputes as to who is to do what, as well as the grossest neglect of the ostensible aims of the “team”.

The power struggles are interminable and insoluble, for no one is truly in charge and any instructions are regarded as an infringement of or attack upon the idea of equality of disciplines and equality within disciplines. The pretence that the most junior is equal to the most senior means that supervision scarcely happens, or only retrospectively, after a disaster, when the most junior person who can plausibly be blamed is singled out.

The inevitable squabbles that result lead to accusations of bullying, usually defined in purely subjective terms: you are bullied if you feel you are (in the absence of a requirement of objective correlates of feeling, thought is, of course, quite unnecessary and probably best avoided). Such accusations can result in a Kafka-esque procedure lasting months and occupying days, weeks and months of labour-time.

Meanwhile, neglect of the real work is ascribed to a shortage of “resources” and the object of the team’s attentions, that is to say members of the public, are offered perfunctory services, for example never seeing the same member of the team twice. Between holidays, team meetings and courses on how to make the team function better, there is no time left for the elementary compassion of consistency.

Every public enquiry into every disaster that comes within the remit of the services set up to ameliorate the social pathology brought about by years of social engineering finds the same thing: lack of communication between the various parts of the multi-disciplinary teams. Time, surely, for a course on Communication Skills.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Workshops and why you must avoid them”, The Social Affairs Unit, 2009-11-18.

April 21, 2023

The bigger the government, the worse it does everything

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Sarah Hoyt wants you to see the illusions that the government and the legacy media have invested so much time and effort to make you believe:

The last century hasn’t actually brought about great “scientific” improvements in governance or the condition of man. It has brought about better production and better commerce, which was enough to stop the periodic famines which plagued our ancestors.

Famines and scarcity subsist only where pernicious central governments stomp on human liberty and individual freedom. And they need to stomp pretty hard. We haven’t managed it. But there are rumors out of China and Venezuela. And of course Russia managed it, just as they did the near-starvation of “never quite enough.”
However, all those advances in material culture didn’t bring about similar advances in centralizing government and “sculpting” the new man.

Humans remain human. And the more centralized, over a larger area, that government is, the more inefficient it is. Even — fortunately — at creating misery. Government that requires certain results gets certain results reported. Even if they have nothing to do with reality.

Sure, the Soviets didn’t have nearly our nuclear arsenal. But the people at the top there MIGHT very well have thought they did, at least after a while. Because the underlings had to report it was done. or else.
All of you repeating the nonsense about boiled frogs, and how their sloooooowwww plan has worked perfectly are just buying into the same juvenile, retarded lie. NONE of their plans ever worked perfectly. Their history is littered with five year plans that worked only in someone’s imagination.

So why would their plans work better in a far away place they never fully understood? With a people who are notoriously averse to obeying?

Of course they didn’t. They don’t. You can convince yourself they have, particularly if you listen to the left and ignore all the times they got stomped on, got smacked, got their cookies taken away.

Look, their plans at changing THE PEOPLE and the people’s beliefs worked so well that despite their total control of federal democracy, two presidents that broke the script, almost 40 years apart, were enough to wreck all their illusions and control. Reagan and Trump, amid a train of uniparty parrots were enough to destroy the left’s certainties and “control”.

This is because their control was always — and still is — largely not real. It’s an illusion created by the mass-industrial communications complex. Here as in Russia, they don’t control ANYTHING but the narrative. The narrative is how they keep telling you to give it all up, because, look, their plan worked perfectly, and now your children are theirs and mwahahahaha.

In true fact, they’ve broken their teeth on America. They’ve managed — with propaganda — to take over the sectors that are less in contact with reality: academia, the arts, the rarefied heights of corporations. (Those aren’t really business. They’re to business what MBAs are to running a lemonade stand. Having worked for corporations, the large ones have more in common with massive, inefficient states than with commerce of any kind.)

The rest of us? We have not surrendered our guns or our minds. Yes, the propaganda machine keeps pushing those who have, but that’s the only thing the centralized state was ever good at: propaganda.

But if their plans were working perfectly, “Let’s go Brandon” would not have gone viral. That one proved not only that the majority of people aren’t with the left, but also that the majority of people see the media manipulation. More importantly, do you remember what the “Let’s go Brandon” was all about? Right. There were spontaneous flash mobs forming everywhere screaming “F*ck Joe Biden.” I’d known about them for months. They were forming everywhere, including in New York City. That one was just one that was caught on camera. (Because of course, the media never showed those.)

The Neo-Prohibitionists have taken over the World Health Organization

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Media, Politics, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Christopher Snowden illustrates some of the deliberate lies promulgated by the World Health Organization’s anti-alcohol activists:

The incompetent and corrupt World Health Organisation has produced a “guide for journalists” to help hacks report on issues related to alcohol accurately. Not entirely unpredictably, it is a catalogue of anti-drinking tropes, half-truths and brazen lies. The very first words are “No amount of alcohol is safe to drink” and it doesn’t get any better thereafter.

The health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption really stick in the craw of the neo-temperance lobby and so that is where the WHO starts:

    Isn’t drinking some alcohol good for your health?

    No, there is no evidence for the common belief that drinking alcohol in moderate amounts can help people live longer by decreasing their risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke or other conditions.

No evidence?! Even a casual follower of the science knows that there is at least some evidence. Those who are more familiar with the literature know that there is a huge amount of evidence built up over decades, tested and re-examined from every angle precisely because so many people in ‘public health’ don’t want to believe it.

    It is inaccurate to say that “experts are divided” on whether there is no amount of healthy alcohol drinking. The scientific consensus is that any level of alcohol consumption, regardless of the amount, increases risks to health.

This is just a lie. That is not the consensus, and the only reason there isn’t unanimous agreement that moderate drinking is beneficial to health is that anti-alcohol academics such as Tim Stockwell have made it their life’s work to cast doubt on the evidence.

    While several past studies did suggest that moderate consumption could, on average, promote health benefits …

Note that this immediately contradicts the claim that there is no evidence.

    … newer research (1) shows that those studies used limited methodologies and that many of them were funded by the alcohol industry (2).

The first reference is a short commentary by some WHO staffers which doesn’t discuss methodologies at all. The second reference is a study which found that only 5.4 per cent of research papers in this area were funded by the alcohol industry and concluded that “the association between moderate alcohol consumption and different health outcomes does not seem to be related to funding source.”

The WHO must hold journalists in low esteem if it thinks they won’t check up the citations like this.

    The dicussion [sic] about possible so-called protective effects of alcohol diverts attention from the bigger picture of alcohol harm; for example, even though it is well established that alcohol can cause cancer, this fact is still not widely known to the public in most countries (3).

The “bigger picture” is overall mortality. When all the risks are taken into account, including the small risks from a few rare cancers, do moderate drinkers live longer than teetotallers? Yes. Yes, they do.

April 13, 2023

QotD: The real purpose of modern-day official commissions

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

After the riots were over, the government appointed a commission to enquire into their causes. The members of this commission were appointed by all three major political parties, and it required no great powers of prediction to know what they would find: lack of opportunity, dissatisfaction with the police, bla-bla-bla.

Official enquiries these days do not impress me, certainly not by comparison with those of our Victorian forefathers. No one who reads the Blue Books of Victorian Britain, for example, can fail to be impressed by the sheer intellectual honesty of them, their complete absence of any attempt to disguise an often appalling reality by means of euphemistic language, and their diligence in collecting the most disturbing information. (Marx himself paid tribute to the compilers of these reports.)

I was once asked to join an enquiry myself. It was into an unusual spate of disasters in a hospital. It was clear to me that, although they had all been caused differently, there was an underlying unity to them: they were all caused by the laziness or stupidity of the staff, or both. By the time the report was written, however (and not by me), my findings were so wrapped in opaque verbiage that they were quite invisible. You could have read the report without realising that the staff of the hospital had been lazy and stupid; in fact, the report would have left you none the wiser as to what had actually happened, and therefore what to do to ensure that it never happened again. The purpose of the report was not, as I had naively supposed, to find the truth and express it clearly, but to deflect curiosity and incisive criticism in which it might have resulted if translated into plain language.

Theodore Dalrymple, “It’s a riot”, New English Review, 2012-04.

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