Quotulatiousness

September 23, 2019

The “Global Climate Strike”

The big “let’s all play hooky from school” event’s Toronto organizers have been getting positive coverage from some of the local media, because of course they have. Here’s Tanya Mok for BlogTO, listing the totally reasonable and not in any way unrealistic “demands” of the movement:

FridaysForFuture Demonstration, 25 January 2018 in Berlin.
Photo by C. Suthorn via Wikimedia Commons.

The coalition has made a list of seven demands, which “reflect the rallying cries of the intersectional movements” they belong to. Some of those demands include:

  • Indigenous rights and sovereignty.
  • The protection of forests, land, and water sources.
  • A shift to publicly-owned renewable energy, and reducing national carbon emission by 65% by 203, reaching zero emissions by 2040.
  • A $15 minimum wage for all, and higher taxation on the rich.
  • Universal public services like health care and dental care, free university and college, housing as a human right, and free public transit.
  • Justice for migrants and refugees, allowing status for all. That includes putting an end to deportations and allowing for the full access to public services.

There will be a concert at Queen’s Park after the rally, as well as a follow-up benefit concert at the Tranzac Club in the evening. A giant street mural project run by Greenpeace will also be taking place prior to the rally, around 10 a.m., at the southern point of Queen’s Park.

September 22, 2019

Justin “Harvey Weinstein” Trudeau to give the NRA his full attention

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

Chris Selley on Prime Minister Blackface’s latest attempt to switch the voters’ attention away from his racist activities onto a more traditional target for Liberal vituperation … the NRA and scary black fully semi-automatic assault machinegun murder machines of death:

On Friday, amidst a force-nine crapstorm that (for now) makes SNC-Lavalin look like a spring shower, Justin Trudeau stood behind a podium in Toronto and announced his government would “ban all military-style assault rifles, including the AR-15.”

“You don’t need a military-grade assault weapon — one designed to take down the most amount of people in the shortest time — to take down a deer,” Trudeau intoned.

It was an utterly shameless, utterly formulaic attempt to change the narrative. Trudeau’s government spent much of its first term studying the need for new gun control measures and the result, Bill C-71, received royal assent exactly three short months ago. There was no ban on assault rifles or the AR-15. In fact, the government emphasized the importance of letting the RCMP’s gun boffins classify individual firearms. “It should not be politicized,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale told CBC last year.

Now, well, there’s an election on and the boss isn’t sure how many more photos might be out there of him in blackface. So to hell with all that. A lot of people in Toronto and other big cities will eat it up, after all.

This sort of approach long predated Trudeau, of course, and he has used it many times before. In so many ways, over the past four years, he has shown himself to be a conventional Liberal politician. But recent days have taken us miles past conventional.

If blacking up wasn’t spectacularly uncommon in the days of Trudeau’s youth, it must surely nevertheless be the case that the vast majority of Gen-Xers haven’t ever done it — if not because they thought it was racist or knew it could get them in trouble, then because who on earth has that much time to kill? Those costumes clearly took a ton of effort, and he made a habit of it!

Small Dead Animals has a video of Stefan Molyneux discussing PM Dressup’s latest set of embarrassing incidents.

September 21, 2019

Sexton Tank Chat | Operation Market Garden 75 | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Tank Museum
Published on 20 Sep 2019

Here we have a Tank Chat special from the commemorative XXX Corps convoy for Operation Market Garden 75. See David Willey discuss the a Sexton from the Historic Collection of the Royal Netherlands Army, on location in the Netherlands.

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Justin Trudeau will magnanimously forgive Canadians for their systemic racism

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

It’s mighty generous of him, after all, it was our racist country’s culture that forced him to wear “skin-darkening make-up” in a totally innocent moment of amusement (or was it three totally innocent moments of amusement?). Andrew Coyne says Justin is no racist … but he is a sanctimonious fraud:

Justin Trudeau with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook, via Time

If you thought this affair meant an end to the Trudeau brand of conspicuous moral preening — if you thought the rank hypocrisy of lecturing his opponents for their sins against tolerance, even as he was concealing much worse in his past, would deter or even shame him — think again. He seems merely to have exchanged one hypocrisy for another, asking meekly for the forgiveness he has been so unwilling to extend to others.

Which is really what all this is about. It isn’t the insensitivity, or the self-absorption, or the hypocrisy, that will leave the most lasting impression: it’s the calculation, the fakery, the synthetic emotion, the sly manipulation. The prime minister has proved adept at deploying the jargon and cliches of the identitarian left (“microaggressions,” “intersectionalities,” and “ally” all featured highly in the Winnipeg press conference) in moments of maximum political danger: recall his earlier non-denial of having groped a young female reporter, this time as a 28-year-old: “men and women often experience situations differently.”

Is he a racist? No. He is a fraud. The racial masks he wore to conceal his identity 20 years ago are but one in a series: from blackface to feministface to sunnywaysface. If it were just a matter of comparing his youthful errors to his record on racial issues, his partisans might have a point. Certainly the Conservatives, with their record of having exploited fears of Muslims, or asylum-seekers, or God help us, the Global Migration Compact, are in no position to point fingers.

But the character and credibility of a leader is a much broader matter than one issue. It informs every part of his record, the whole of his platform. The leader we saw dissembling so skillfully this week in Winnipeg is the same one who lied to the public, repeatedly, about the SNC-Lavalin affair; who made solemn and explicit promises on electoral reform and balanced budgets he had no intention of keeping; who ran roughshod over Parliament in exactly the same ways he had most decried in his predecessor.

Oh, and: he is the same leader who boasted after the fact of having personally selected a “scrappy tough-guy senator from an Indigenous community” as his opponent for the charity boxing match that would launch his career because he would make “a good foil.” Even on race, that the current occupant of the Prime Minister’s Office is a sanctimonious fraud it is surely at least as significant as that his government sponsors anti-racism seminars.

September 20, 2019

Prime Minister Dressup and the make-up case

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

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s love of dramatic costume has been noted here before, but over the last couple of days it’s become evident that he’s also felt the attraction of stage make-up, even when most people would realize it’s no longer appropriate to wear blackface:

As Oscar Wilde almost said: “To be caught once wearing blackface may be regarded as a misfortune; to be caught doing so on three separate occasions in the run up to an election proves that there is a God, that he loathes liberal hypocrisy, and that he despises Justin Trudeau, especially.”

Here’s the first offending item:

Justin Trudeau with dark makeup on his face, neck and hands at a 2001 “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the West Point Grey Academy, the private school where he taught.
Photo from the West Point Grey Academy yearbook The View, via Time

[…]

Will Justin Trudeau — President Bieber, as I prefer to call him — finally get his comeuppance as a result?

I doubt it. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals tells us: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

This is what we on the non-woke political side of the argument are doing right now. But it’s not going to make much difference, is it?

The other two “make up” incidents are covered in Time:

Speaking to reporters Wednesday night, following Time‘s publication of the photo, Trudeau apologized: “I shouldn’t have done that. I should have known better and I didn’t. I’m really sorry.” When asked if he thought the photograph was racist, he said, “Yes it was. I didn’t consider it racist at the time, but now we know better.”

Trudeau said he wore blackface “makeup” in high school to sing “Day-O,” a Jamaican folk song famously performed by African-American singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte. Time has confirmed that a photo shows Trudeau at a school talent show wearing blackface and an afro wig.

[…]

A third instance emerged Thursday — this one a grainy video showing Trudeau in blackface, raising his hands in the air. On Thursday, Astravas confirmed that the video showed Trudeau from the early 1990s. It comes despite Trudeau being asked at his press conference whether there were any other incidents he wanted to own up to.

This is a critical moment for Trudeau, who began his re-election campaign on Sept. 11 under the cloud of a scandal over whether he pressured his then-attorney general to drop corruption charges against a large Canadian engineering firm [that’d be the SNC-Lavalin scandal, if you’re keeping track]. The Liberal Party leader has championed minority groups during his nearly four years as prime minister and made his embrace of Canada’s many cultures a major part of his leadership. At least seven of the 35 members of Trudeau’s cabinet are from ethnic minorities.

I doubt any of the remaining minority cabinet ministers will dare say much, as the Liberal Party has a long, long history of enforcing Omertà … or else. If they want to be back in cabinet on the lengthening odds that PM Dressup wins the October election, they’ll say little or nothing to the media.

The good news is that after careful consideration, the PM has found the guilty party … it’s the rest of Canada and its entrenched “systemic racism”:

Don’t you feel awful, fellow Canadians? That shame … that’s all yours, thanks to your shitty racist attitudes. Poor Justin is merely the victim.

The reason we don’t have – and will never have – an Economists Party

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

Andrew Coyne points out that the study of economics probably disqualifies you from being an effective politician, because achieving success in the sausage factory of politics requires you to ignore or even work against economic facts:

A Mises Institute graphic of some of the key economists in the Austrian tradition (Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
Mises Institute via Wikimedia Commons.

I believe I was the first to propose the creation of an Economists Party, a political movement that would advocate for the sorts of policies favoured by people who study economics for a living, based on the principles at its core.

It could not happen, of course, any more than the existing parties are likely to suddenly embrace the teachings of economists they have so cheerfully ignored until now, and for the same reason: because politics is, at its core, the opposite of economics.

The basic principle of economics is that everything is scarce. The basic principle of politics is that nothing is scarce. Economics teaches that more of one thing can only be had at the expense of less of another. Politics teaches that we can have more of both things, and of everything else besides.

Since more of one thing means less of another, economics tells us there is no point in favouring one part of the economy over another: the resources diverted to one firm, industry or region are simply resources denied to all the rest. Whereas politics is all about such transfers: a perpetual merry-go-round of redistribution, not from rich to poor, which is appropriate, but from everybody to everybody, which is impossible.

And if, for some reason, a politician were to resist this impulse, he would shortly find himself out of work. For whereas the benefits of a given intervention are typically concentrated on this or that group, the costs are spread widely; its beneficiaries, accordingly, have every incentive to organize and agitate on its behalf, while those footing the bill — consumers, taxpayers, or both — have comparatively little at stake as individuals. They may not even know who they are.

Thus it is that politics inclines, more or less inevitably, to prefer the narrow interest over the broad; producers over consumers; the present over the future. The only difference between the parties is whether this bias to the expedient is dressed up as a philosophy and celebrated as a positive good, or merely yielded to.

Huot: Canada’s Ross-based Prototype Automatic Rifle from WW1

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Bloke on the Range
Published on 18 Jul 2019

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/BlokeOnTheRange

Due to a shortage of Lewis guns and a glut of withdrawn Ross Mk.III rifles once the Canadian Expeditionary Force had been completely re-equipped with Lee-Enfield SMLE rifles, Monsieur Huot proposed to modify Ross rifles into an automatic rifle / light machine gun (LMG) configuration.

5 of these are known to exist, this is number 2, and is in the Seaforth Highlanders of Canada museum in Vancouver: https://www.seaforthhighlanders.ca/ho…

Many thanks to them for the opportunity to handle and film this exceptionally rare piece! Please give them a visit!

September 19, 2019

“[T]he Indian Act is a benign form of apartheid”

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

In the National Post, Barbara Kay discusses a recent book on the key legislation that regulates relations between the Canadian federal government and the various First Nations groups:

Few and far between are disinterested scholars of Canada’s Aboriginal history who have the tough hide and principled will to publicly depart from the approved Indigenous “nation-to-nation” narrative that keeps the guilt and money flowing, but perpetuates a dysfunctional status quo on many reserves. Most of the dissenters are university academics. But Best is simply an intelligent man with a passion for his subject, a deep impatience with political correctness, and unremitting determination to weather whatever storms afflict him as he shepherds his views to a public market.

I’ve written before in the National Post and elsewhere about Best’s lonely battles with our society’s forces of repression. There Is No Difference began its public life as a post on a dedicated online site in 2014, copied to his legal firm’s. Shortly afterward, complaints were filed against him with the Law Society of Upper Canada (now the Law Society of Ontario), asking that Best be “disbarred or suspended” and that he be forced to apologize for using his law practice “to disseminate racist materials.”

After two years of stressful limbo, the Law Society graciously allowed that the excerpts submitted by the (unnamed) complainant were “not enough to merit a finding of any form of professional misconduct on their face.” (The last three words telegraph the ardent wish that they had been; apart from a dissenting group of new benchers, the Law Society’s board has increasingly demonstrated worrying Thought Police tendencies.)

Best believes the Indian Act is a benign form of apartheid, and advocates for the integration model of equal citizenship for all, a model promoted, for example, by Pierre Elliott Trudeau (who called the system “apartheid”), and the late Aboriginal lawyer William Wuttunee, author of Ruffled Feathers, who was marginalized and discredited as an “apple,” red on the outside, white on the inside.

Best believes the federal government must be the ultimate master in its own house for Canada to function as a healthy nation. He is fiercely critical of the Supreme Court’s 2004 emphasis on the “honour of the Crown” concept in its Haida Nation vs. British Columbia ruling, with key words “to consult and where appropriate, accommodate the Aboriginal interest” virtually decreeing a devolution of Crown sovereignty to Aboriginals, and effectively turning Indigenous bands into a third order of government with the power arbitrarily to advance or restrict Canada’s economic fortunes.

It’s easy for Indigenous activists to bash a white historian, or even an Aboriginal dissident without special standing like Wuttunee. But it will be more difficult to dismiss the opinion of a former Supreme Court justice. Best just came in for an unexpected stroke of luck. Former Supreme Court justice Jack Major (1992-2005) has given the book his endorsement in a letter discussed in an article by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (FCPP).

September 18, 2019

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms* (*not all sections apply in Quebec)

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

Andrew Coyne on the disgraceful habit of the federal government (and nine provincial governments) to look the other way when Quebec decides that some of the guarantees in the Charter don’t apply in La Belle Province:

For many observant persons, particularly Muslims, Sikhs and orthodox Jews, this amounts to a religious hiring bar: the wearing of the hijab, the turban and the kippa are key requirements of their faith, and as such core elements of their identity. To demand that they work uncovered is, in effect, to post a sign saying Muslims, Sikhs and Jews need not apply.

We should be clear on this. It’s not just a dress code, or an infringement of religious freedom, or religious discrimination, or those other abstract phrases you hear tossed about. We are talking about a law barring employment in much of the public sector — not just police and judges, but government lawyers and teachers — to certain religious minorities.

Existing workers may have been grandfathered, but only so long as they remain in their current jobs. Should they ever move, or seek a promotion, they will face the same restrictions. The signal to the province’s religious and, let’s say it, racial minorities, vulnerable as they will be feeling already after the mounting public vitriol to which they have been exposed in the name of the endless “reasonable accommodation” debate, is unmistakable: you are not wanted here. Not surprisingly, many are getting out — out of the public service, out of Quebec.

That this is actually happening, in 2019, in a province of Canada — members of religious minorities being driven from their jobs, and for no reason other than their religion — is sickening, and shameful. That shame is not reserved to Premier Francois Legault or his CAQ government, the people responsible for designing and implementing this disgraceful exercise in segregation, this manifestly cruel attempt to cleanse the province’s schools and courts of religious minorities. It is no less shaming to the rest of us, everywhere across Canada, so long as we permit it to continue.

That is, so far as we are capable of feeling it. But experience has taught us to look the other way when it comes to Quebec, to tell ourselves that it is none of our affair, that we must not raise a fuss when the province explicitly elevates the interests of its ethnic and linguistic majority over those of its minorities, or threatens the country’s life for long years at a time — the beloved “knife at the throat” strategy — to back its escalating fiscal and constitutional demands. We dare not. We cannot. For then Quebec would leave.

September 16, 2019

Election 2019 – “Going negative this early strongly suggests that the Lib’s internal polling is suggesting a fair bit of weakness”

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

Jay Currie’s take on the first week of the Canadian federal election campaign:

Dock Currie (not related) apparently posted something to the internet several years ago which was offensive. So he felt he had to resign as an NDP candidate. [Anyone who sees Dock on Twitter has to wonder if he has ever posted something which is not offensive, but there is is.] Several conservatives have, at various times been in the same crowd of several hundred or thousand people as Canada’s answer to Tokyo Rose, Faith Goldy. The shock, the horror.

I realize that a race between Trudeau, Scheer, Singh and May is not very inspiring. (It would have been so much more interesting had the Conservatives actually run a conservative like Max Bernier rather than whatever the hell Scheer is, but them’s the breaks.) But piling on to candidates for ancient statements or mau-mauing them for distant association with a cartoon fascist simply sets the bar even lower.

Having accomplished nothing of substance in their years in government – they even screwed up the pot file which took real ingenuity – the Libs are reduced to going negative from the outset. Their war room knows that Canadians are unimpressed with “climate change needs higher taxes” as a campaign theme. They also know that Trudeau’s legal and ethics problems offset what charisma he has as a campaigner.

So now it is time for “Project Fear”. Scheer = Harper = Trump. Scheer is going to take away abortion rights, Scheer is not an ally of the gay community because he does not jet all over the country to march in pride parades. The Conservatives hate immigrants, and so on.

Going negative this early strongly suggests that the Lib’s internal polling is suggesting a fair bit of weakness. Conventionally, a party will save the negative stuff for the last couple of weeks of the campaign when it is the most damaging and the hardest to refute. I suspect the Libs have realized that with their own leader either under RCMP investigation or credibly accused of impeding that investigation, they need to distract and terrify the under 30’s, newer immigrants and the ladies if they are going to win.

September 15, 2019

Why the national polls are, at best, only a rough guide to voters’ intentions

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

Canadian elections have their own quirks — historical, geographical, linguistic — that cannot be accurately captured in national opinion polls:

Conservative support is heavily concentrated in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Tens of thousands of its votes are therefore likely to be wasted racking up massive majorities in a relatively small number of seats.

The Liberal vote, by contrast, is more efficiently distributed, notably in Quebec, with its tight three- and four-way races, where a winning candidate might slip through with 30 per cent of the vote or less. So even though the Liberals are projected to win fewer votes than the Conservatives, they are also projected to win a solid plurality of the seats — perhaps even a majority.

Then again, the polls are misleading in another way. A poll can project, with some uncertainty, the level of support for the various parties among the voting-age population. It is a more difficult matter to predict what proportion of each party’s supporters will actually turn out to vote. The Liberals benefited in 2015 from a surge in turnout, especially among younger voters, on the strength of Justin Trudeau’s sunny idealism. No such enthusiasm, or idealism, is detectable this time around.

It all makes for a close, unpredictable race. The Liberal challenge is the usual one: to round up the vote on the left without giving too much ground on the centre, appealing to those tempted to vote NDP or Green not to split the progressive vote lest the Tories get in.

The Conservatives, for their part, will also be fighting a two-front war, with the emergence of the People’s Party to their right imposing some constraint on their ability to reach across the centre. To date the PPC has not posed much of a threat — its support has stalled at around 3.0 per cent — but it is not impossible that it could break out of that range now that voters are paying more attention.

Of course, Maxime Bernier being actively excluded from the debates, and the pollsters often not including a choice for the PPC will also limit the PPC’s visibility to ordinary Canadian voters. Oddly, this may benefit the Milk Dud and his “Conservatives”, as the media tries to ignore Bernier’s party but gives disproportional coverage to the Green and NDP campaigns, which potentially weakens support for Trudeau and the Liberals.

Update, 16 September: I guess the media finally noticed that excluding Maxime Bernier from the debates was a sub-optimal idea for their preferred winner (Justin Dressup).

September 14, 2019

Apocrypha: WW1 Tour Sneak Peek

Filed under: Cancon, France, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Forgotten Weapons

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I partnered up with Military Historical Tours to guide a World War One battlefield tour this week, and I figured I’d give you a bit of a peek into it. We are looking at the war chronologically, starting with a day in Belgium to look at the German attack in 1914, visiting the remains of Fort de Loncin in Liege and the Mons cemetery. Next was a day in Ypres for the stagnation into trench warfare in 1915, seeing the Dodengang up on the Yser and then the Bayernwald trenches, Passchendaele Museum, and Kitchener’s Wood. The year of 1916 marks two of the huge Western Front offensives, and we took one day on the Somme (Beaumont-Hamel and Lochnagar Crater) and a day at Verdun (Driant’s command post and tomb, Fort Vaux, Fleury Village, and the Douaumont Ossuary). Today we move to the Chemin des Dames to look at the disastrous French Nivelle Offensives at the Plateau de Californie and the Caverne du Dragons, and tomorrow we will see the arrival of significant American forces and the Hundred Days Offensive the ended the war, through the sites of Les Mares Farm, Belleau Wood, and Blanc Mont. We have a great group of people along, and it’s been a lot of fun, if quite sobering at times. I hope to see you on a future tour!

https://www.miltours.com

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Good and bad news on the RCMP

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

The good news: someone in the RCMP was actively working on foreign intelligence.

The bad news: that someone was allegedly working for foreign intelligence:

According to sources, RCMP HQ Director General of the intelligence unit, Cameron Ortis was arrested in Ottawa under the secrets act for alleged espionage by foreign powers.

The arrest occurred on September 12 in Ottawa after an extensive national security investigation.

One insider called the allegations “serious spy s**t.”

The RCMP allege that Ortis allegedly had stolen “large quantities of information, which could compromise an untold number of investigations.”

September 13, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 12, 2019

Book Review: The Ross Rifle Story

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 8 Sep 2019

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The Ross Rifle Story is the Bible of Ross rifle collecting — it is the only substantial reference work on the subject and it has a tremendous amount of information about the development of the Ross. However, it is also one of the worst-edited firearms reference books I am aware of. It has a second Table of Contents on page 85 — need I say more than that?

Well, I will. The photographs are black and white and often too dark or too light. Beyond it really being two separate manuscripts printed back to back, the organization is really lacking. Finding information in the book is sometimes very difficult, as the subject matter jumps around a lot. The story of the Ross — especially separating the civilian and military development — is a pretty complicated one, and even a well-edited book on the subject might be a bit difficult to parse. This book is really bad at times.

But for all that, it does have the information (with only a few errors), and it’s the only book that does. If you are interested in the Ross, this is a must-have book despite its problems.

A second printing was run in 2002, and not much effort was put into marketing it. Despite the online prices all being $300+, the seller still has a couple dozen copies remaining as of this writing. To order one (for $100 plus shipping, via PayPal) email him at ross.rifle.story@sympatico.ca .

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85704

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