Quotulatiousness

August 15, 2018

Maxime Bernier on sensible limits to “unlimited” diversity

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

Maxime Bernier responds to Prime Minister Trudeau’s apparently unlimited desire for more and more diversity in Canada:

The following tweets as a screencap, to avoid slowing down the whole page loading (as often happens with multiple tweet embeds):

August 14, 2018

Ontario embraces online sales for marijuana, with retail stores to follow in 2019

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley on the Ontario government’s surprisingly sensible approach to phasing in retail sales of cannabis over the next eight months:

Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government called a brief truce in its multi-front war with the federal Liberals on Monday to give one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s signature policies a major boost: as had been widely rumoured, the Tories will scrap the previous Liberal government’s tentative public marijuana retail scheme and instead hand out licenses to the private sector.

How many licenses and what kinds of stores are just two of many unresolved details. The government says it will consult widely to determine how best to proceed, with a target opening date for licensed brick-and-mortar stores of April 1, 2019 (with publicly run online sales to commence in October). But it seems safe to hope the cap, if any, will be significantly higher than the previous government’s laughably timid 150.

Thanks to Toronto’s reluctantly laissez-faire approach to illegal storefront (nudge-wink) “medical” marijuana “dispensaries,” we know 150 might not even satisfy a free market in the country’s largest city. Trudeau has always said the goal of legalization was to smash the illegal market and plunk down a legal one in its place. The Ontario Liberals’ plan seemed almost tailor-made to fail in that endeavour.

There remains ample room for the new government to screw this up. But if it gets pricing and regulation and enforcement halfway right, the country’s most populous province should now be well placed to give legalization a good shot at achieving what proponents have always said it should — which is, basically, to make it like booze. Of course kids still get their hands on booze, but at least it’s a bit of a chore. And at least when kids get drunk, they’re not drinking moonshine.

The need to claim the retail market from the existing extra-legal networks will hinge on quality, availability and (especially) the prices that the province sets. Price it too high (pun unintentional), and the legal market will not take over distribution and sales from the black market. Provide poor quality and get the same results. Restrict sales too stringently, and watch the profits go back to the current dealers … who are not noted for their sensibilities about selling drugs to the under-aged.

In the meantime, it’s interesting to ponder why they’re going in this direction. Fedeli and Attorney-General Caroline Mulroney were at great pains Monday to stress their primary concern was the children.

“First and foremost, we want to protect our kids,” said Mulroney. “There will be no compromise, no expense spared, to ensure that our kids will be protected following the legalization of the drug.”

“Under no circumstances — none — will we tolerate anybody sharing, selling or otherwise providing cannabis to anybody under the age of 19,” said Mulroney. Fedeli vowed that even a single sale to a minor would void a retailer’s license.

Yet, let’s be honest, kids well under the age of 19 can already get cannabis and other illicit drugs — more so in urban and suburban areas, but it’s hard to imagine that legalizing cannabis for 19-plus customers somehow magically renders the under-19s uninterested in getting access, too.

August 13, 2018

Publish, perish … or cheat

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

In the Vancouver Sun, Douglas Todd tells the story of a Canadian academic who’s risked his career to expose what most of us would consider widespread cheating in academic publications:

A determined B.C. economics professor has journeyed into the heart of a dark world where academics seeking to advance their careers have had hundreds of thousands of their articles published for a fee in journals that either deserve suspicion or are outright phoney.

In academia, where the admonition to “publish or perish” is not an empty threat, it is often difficult for scholars to have their research published in legitimate journals, let alone top ones. But it’s becoming increasingly common for academics to get articles produced in questionable journals, just by forking over $100 to $2,500 Cdn.

Derek Pyne, a Thompson Rivers University economist who was granted tenure in 2015, is among the global academics who are exposing the deceptive journals, sometimes at a risk to their careers. Experts say these journals are chipping away at scientific, medical and educational credibility — and wasting the money of the taxpayers who largely finance public colleges and universities.

Pyne’s pioneering research has been cited by The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. On June 23, The Economist, in a piece on blacklisted journals, praised the B.C. scholar, remarking: “This is an area in which data are hard to come by. But one academic has been prepared to stick his neck out and investigate his own institution.”

His dedication to truth, however, has not gone well for Pyne, who might be turning into one of the most noted professors at Thompson Rivers University. He has been at the public Kamloops institution since 2010, specializing in economic and mathematical theory related to education, religion, trade and crime.

On July 17, however, Pyne was suspended without pay. That’s after being banned on May 17 from the picturesque campus on a Kamloops hillside.

H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.

August 12, 2018

Public statuary … can we just get rid of the politicians?

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

In the wake of Victoria’s city council deciding to remove a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Colby Cosh suggests that we apply a broader brush to what is acceptable for public display and get rid of the rest of the politicians, too:

The mayor of Victoria, Lisa Helps, emphasized that the removal of the statue is “temporary,” promising to “find a way to recontextualize Macdonald in an appropriate way.” This suggests that the statue will find a home somewhere, perhaps even in its accustomed place, but will have to be accompanied by a sanitizing “This was a bad, racist guy despite having led the creation of our federation” text inscribed nearby.

All of this gives me a chance to rehearse my inconveniently unclassifiable views on the subject of revisionist iconoclasm in public settings. Part of me is sympathetic to the anti-revisionist case. Even if Victoria took a year with this decision, a year is not a long time to reconsider an act of commemoration that was intended to be permanent in the first place. Any one generation, let alone a small group within it, ought to be hesitant in removing public statuary — doubly so, perhaps, if you are doing it “temporarily” but without a deadline for its return. Putting objects of built heritage in storage is the easiest way for a government to demolish them, through neglect, on the sly.

With that said, I could be convinced to pick up a hammer if there is to be a general smashing of statues of politicians. No city or country really has a shortage of people to honour whose contribution to humanity is unambiguously and uncontentiously positive. Those who exercise political power, even in a democracy, rarely fall into this category. If we were building a country from scratch, I would suggest we start building statues to those who excel in the realm of pure thought — physics, math, music, scholarship — and work “down” through artisans, philanthropists, innovators and entrepreneurs.

Once we’re past the tradesmen who did good work and mentored the young, and we have made modest busts or reliefs of everyone who just worked to make a neighbourhood nicer or cleaner or safer, and we have put a few people on postage stamps just for contributing their own earnings or effort to any of the Corporal Works of Mercy, we can start with politicians of an especially noble and humane character who executed great necessary enterprises by means of law.

Politicians get big-ass statues because it is politicians who build statues: that’s all. The problem is that this encourages the dangerous habit of reverence for politicians, who, despite endless complaining about the thanklessness of their vocation, hardly go without social privileges or deference or celebration within their own lifetimes. In the case of statues or images of Sir John A. Macdonald, the veneration is all but explicit. The Old Chieftain represents the juvenile desire to have a George Washington-like national paterfamilias, to have a single founder to serve as the incarnation of our glorious state.

I am not a politician and I endorse this message. I’d be even more on board if we also chiselled off the names of politicians from schools, community centres, streets, and any other edifice built with taxpayer money.

August 10, 2018

The tough part of selling a national carbon tax … is the “tax” part

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As Colby Cosh points out, you can find all sorts of economists to explain why a properly constructed and applied carbon tax is the least harmful way to reduce carbon output, but Canadians typically focus on the “tax” part and not the claimed environmental efficiency benefits:

In yesterday’s Financial Post, the Calgary economist Jack Mintz asked the question “Why are carbon taxes so unpopular?”, pointing out that plenty of countries and jurisdictions have commitments to climate progress and energy efficiency but that few use this particular policy instrument. I guess Jack wouldn’t have had much of a column if he had just adopted the spirit of an auto mechanic explaining a breakdown to a naive car owner and jabbed directly at the problem. “See that word ‘taxes’? There’s your problem right there.”

And, truly, it is not quite as simple as that. But, as Mintz suggests, it is a big part of the difficulty. As a means of helping reduce carbon output, carbon taxes are competing with subsidies and regulations. Pervasive carbon taxes are, as a general principle, a less costly way of eliminating freely exhaled carbon, pound for pound or ton for ton.

If the tax is well designed, you are slapping a uniform unit price directly onto the thing you are trying to prevent; and you are leaving people and businesses to make decentralized judgments, based on their knowledge of their own circumstances, about whether to avoid the tax, and when, and how to do it. Even though the initial level of the tax must be something of a guess, you can adjust it by arbitrarily small increments until you have eliminated just as much carbon output as you wish to.

Economists will recognize that last paragraph as a grocery list of the relative advantages of carbon taxation. But voters are predisposed to hate taxes, and are very sensitive to their size and their side effects. They may not like government subsidies for windmills or carbon-capture schemes or certain species of light bulb either; but subsidies can usually be sold on the basis of local job creation or business incubation, and they can be — let’s face it, inevitably are — adjusted for maximum electoral benefit.

For my part, I don’t disbelieve the economists on the efficiency arguments … I just don’t trust the government to design and implement such a tax without rigging the system to benefit favoured corporations, regions, and donors.

August 8, 2018

Doing military intelligence … backwards

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

Ted Campbell on what he sees as a big problem with western military command structures and particularly the way military intelligence is being over-centralized away from the fighting troops and pushed high up the chain of command:

Intelligence is vital in modern combat operations … just as it was when Alexander set about conquering the known world. But, as Alexander knew, real intelligence is gathered by the troops in direct contact with the enemy and is augmented by e.g. spies who read the enemies mail (our modern, very effective SigInt services, for example, and drones and so on). There is a now well established ~ and I think wrong headed ~ system which aims to collect ALL intelligence at the highest possible level and then disseminate it down … that’s exactly backwards! Combat intelligence is gathered, in the main, by troops in contact with the enemy, by privates and troopers and corporals and then it is passed up the chain to be collated with reports from other troops in contact and then a refined picture is passed back down … where it is promptly corrected by the troops in contact. Intelligence staffs in HQs almost never know much of anything of real utility but they have convinced commanders that if there can only be more and more highly ranked intelligence officers with more clerks and more drones and more computers and so on, that they will, somehow, get ahead of the enemy. It’s a siren song that has, already, run more than one combat commander up on to the rocks of operational failure. The only people who have a good feel for what the enemy is up to are the people who have them in their sights. Don’t get me wrong: I am a HUGE fan of SigInt and drones and UWB radio devices that can see through walls and so on … I want the micro drones and the cyber bugs to be in the hands of the corporals in the rifle sections who are making their way house-to-house and floor-by-floor.

But the bigger threat, by far, is a brigade command post that looks like this …

… than like this:

April 18, 2003, Wainwright, Alberta
Captain Jeremy Small, the Signals Officer with the First Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment (1 RCR)(Petawawa, Ontario), works on the Athene Tactical System (ATS) in the Command Post (CP). The ATS is a new battlefield information system being tested by 2 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group (2CMBG) Headquarters and the 1 RCR. The digital information can be shared in a more timely fashion than the old method, which needed to be drawn by hand. The 1 RCR are part of the is part of the approximately 4,600 Canadian Forces members who are participating in the first major army training exercise of the 21st Century, from April 7 to May 2, 2003 in Wainwright, Alta. After two years of planning, co-operation, strategic resource management, and with assistance from the Air Force, the Army has created Exercise RESOLUTE WARRIOR. Fourteen combat and support units are training together in a multi-element combat environment in preparation for potential and upcoming high readiness tasks at home and abroad. This exercise is the confirmation of the skills and cohesion of the units involved and will be similar to an actual deployment.
Photo: MCpl Paul MacGregor, Canadian Forces Combat Camera

The urban battle of the future, like those of the past will be fought by rifle sections of eight to 12 soldiers, directed by platoon commanders (young, 20-something, lieutenants) overseen and supports by company and battalion commanders. The lessons that my Regiment learned at Ortona, during the Christmas season of 1943, (and which were drummed into my head by ‘old sweats‘ 20 years later) will still apply. Generals and brigadiers and colonels may plan and guide the battle but it will be fought by captains and corporals and privates … hand-to-hand, house-by-house, street-by-street … whether it is a small city or a giant metropolis. Yes, that young soldier would love to have a little drone to see around the corner before he throws the grenade and he might even be interested in knowing that SigInt says that enemy is running low on ammo and food, but at the moment he, like all combat soldiers, must trust, mainly, in his own judgment of the situation as he, and only he, can see it.

But while the privates and corporals are fighting the battle and gathering the real intelligence about the enemy, the legal officer will be wanting to know exactly what (s)he (the rifle section commander) sees and (s)he, the legal officer, will want to advise the brigade commander (who commands 6,500 soldiers) to interfere directly with the the command decisions of the most junior leaders (section (10 soldiers) and platoon (35 soldiers) commanders) and with the control decisions being made by company (125 soldiers) and battalion (900 soldiers) commanders. Good brigade commanders will resist that pressure and they will, equally, close their ears to the urgent warnings of the Public Affairs officer who will say something like “if this goes wrong the Minister will be embarrassed and that will cost you your next star.”

August 7, 2018

“[Trudeau’s] ideology is jeopardizing 20% of the Canadian economy”

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

Brandon Kirby on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s failing efforts to negotiate with the United States on trade:

Trade with Canada constitutes 2% of America’s GDP and trade with America constitutes a whopping 20% of Canada’s GDP. My home province of New Brunswick finds 50% of its private sector exporting to the U.S. – NAFTA is of vital importance to our economy.

The dwindling efforts of Trudeau’s cabinet to negotiate a deal with the Americans could become his government’s greatest failure. With tariffs already being imposed on steel and aluminum, NAFTA is potentially unraveling before our eyes and along with it, the Canadian economy.

Trudeau’s American counterpart isn’t known for his vocal support of trade and yet he handed Canada everything on a silver platter at the recent G7 summit. He offered to remove all tariffs and subsidies on imports and exports, provided Canada did the same. This is about as fair an offer as one could expect. Trudeau retaliated by insisting Canada had been insulted.

The trouble with Trudeau is precisely that. He was given a talking point. He developed rhetoric rather than substance. Akin to Marco Rubio’s disaster of a debate performance, who refused to go off script even when he was being called out for scripted answers, Trudeau had a talking point. It was a good one, Canadians and Americans died together in the mountains of Afghanistan to bring justice for Americans who died on September 11th. Trump alluded to our tariffs on their dairy farmers as a national security threat. But when Trump acquiesced, Trudeau kept to his talking points and refused to go off script, even when his talking points no longer made sense.

The initial renegotiation began with Trudeau’s government attempting to include a chapter on gender. The Americans weren’t enthusiastic about devoting a significant portion of their time at the negotiations to discussing an unenforceable chapter of the deal, but Trudeau pressed on.

The liberal rationale in the briefing notes was leaked, “Think back 20 years and remember the early discussions of labour and environment in the context of trade agreements.”

Environmental and labour standards were included in the negotiations of decades past because a country that has humane labour standards is at a trade disadvantage to countries that neglect their workers and their environment. Gender doesn’t have any bearing on trade. His ideology is jeopardizing 20% of the Canadian economy.

August 1, 2018

Farewell to Canada’s best trio … and this time, they mean it

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

Colby Cosh, clearly a fellow long-time Rush fan, heaves a sigh and writes the musical epitaph:

Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons

All of this — even Neil Peart’s remorseless flintiness — reflects the distinctive, endearing characteristics of Rush: the band has now ceased to exist for some of the same reasons it attracted adoring generations of listeners. As a commercial proposition, Rush remains a potential superpower. Other groups of similar magnitude have always been able to find ways to push on when important members, or even every member that anyone might recognize, came to the end of the road. (In a rock group there is usually at least one person who could really use the cash from a tour.)

Could Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson find some young drummer with healthy wrists and ankles, take “Rush” to the casino circuit, and sell mountains of $75 tickets? They probably could, and they would probably put on a wonderful show. But it is unthinkable (he wrote, knocking on the wood of his desk) for them to do such a thing under the Rush name.

They could probably even devise a low-stress acoustic-heavy setlist, with slowed-down versions of the hits, that they could take to small venues with Peart in tow. Tempting as such schemes must be — Lee was publicly in denial about Peart’s second retirement for ages, and Lifeson says he would go on if it were entirely up to him — they do not suit the nature of Rush.

The group is a three-piece in which every piece counts more or less equally. And part of what their fans pay to see is physical effort of the highest intricacy. I hope it will not offend my fellow Rush fans if I compare it to juggling or acrobatics, or at least suggest that it has such an aspect. Rush songs are full of unpredictable, shifting time signatures and difficult cues. The band’s numerical paucity leaves nowhere to hide dropped chords or melodic clangers. Unlike most three- and four-piece groups, Rush has almost always refused to ever bring a hired sideman onto the live stage, even though this requires Lee to operate sequencers with foot pedals while playing what are often ludicrously difficult bass lines — AND singing like, well, like Geddy Lee.

This, I say as someone who loves Geddy like a family member, is truculence bordering on absurdity. If Rush could approach fans individually and talk it out with them, they could probably persuade them that it made sense to bring a keyboardist, or even a rhythm guitarist, along on the road. (Some groups even sneak in a second percussionist!) It may even be a bit sad that we were denied a more collegial Rush, one that participated in the life of its musical generation, strayed occasionally from its triune purity, and did fun crossovers with other groups (such as 1980’s “Battle Scar”, recorded with fellow Torontonians Max Webster for the Universal Juveniles LP).

July 30, 2018

Auditor General to look at the RCAF’s “capability gap” claim

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

Ted Campbell reports on the news that the Auditor General will investigate the Trudeau government’s claim that the RCAF would be unable to meet its obligations due to a newly discovered lack of airframes:

I see in a Canadian Press report published in the Globe and Mail that “Canada’s auditor general has started to dig into one of the Trudeau government’s most contentious claims, upon which rests the fate of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars: that the country is facing an urgent shortage of fighter jets … [and] … The claim was first made in November, 2016, when the Liberals announced that Canada didn’t have enough fighter jets to defend North America and simultaneously meet the country’s NATO commitments, and that a stopgap was urgently needed until the entire CF-18 fleet could be replaced.“

You’ll remember, I hope, that back in 1997 Canada’s government (Jean Chrétien was our Liberal prime minister) decided to join the US (but soon multi-national) F-35 Lightening II programme with the implicit intention of buying the aircraft and the explicit goal of sharing in the work, profits and jobs that the project might create. In 2010 the Government of Canada (Stephen Harper was the Conservative prime minister) committed to buying the aircraft for the Royal Canadian Air Force. There ensued an almighty public row over costs ~ partially because some generals and some DND officials tried to ‘low ball‘ the actual costs, partially because almost no one in government can agree on how to define ‘life cycle costs,‘ partially because most Canadian journalists are nearly innumerate and partially because the Liberal ‘war room‘ launched a disinformation campaign ~ and that rocked the Harper government back on its heels and made it a campaign issue. In 2015 the Liberal Party promised that Canada would not buy the F-35 but would, instead, hold “an open and transparent competition to replace the CF-18 fighter aircraft.”

Then, when in power the Liberal “government originally planned to buy 18 interim Super Hornets from Boeing for $6.4-billion before the deal was scuttled late last year in favour of buying 25 used jets from Australia for $500-million … [but] … critics, including opposition parties and former air force commanders, accuse the government of fabricating an urgent “capability gap” – as the shortfall is known – by changing the military’s requirements to avoid having to buy the F-35 stealth fighter.” The rumour ~ and that’s all it ever amounted to, as far as i know ~ floating around Ottawa was that the Liberals saw the Boeing Super Hornet fighter as a “cheap and dirty,” readily available solution and they felt confident that they could, easily back away from the promise to hold a competition, thus avoiding the dilemma of having an “open and transparent competition” while already having decided that the F-35 could not win.

July 27, 2018

“Tariffs are the classic example of government interventions with concentrated benefits and dispersed costs”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Europe, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Robert Higgs on what he describes its supporters as “waging the trade war to end all trade wars”:

… even as Trump spouts venerable fallacies to justify and seek support for his destructive trade policies and related ad hoc actions, he and his supporters have sometimes offered a strange defense of their tactics: they purport to be seeking, at the end of the game, universal free trade, a world in which all countries have abandoned tariffs, quotas, subsidies, and other government intrusions in international exchange. In Wilsonian terms, they claim to be waging the trade war to end all trade wars. The idea is that by raising U.S. tariffs, they will induce other governments to lower and ultimately eliminate their own.

Of course, this rationale may be nothing more than wily claptrap, tossed out as a rhetorical bone to Republicans who favor freer trade. The administration’s actions to date certainly give no indication that it is aiming at global free trade. On the contrary. So the Wilsonian gambit may consist of nothing but hot air.

But if Trump and his trade advisers actually take this tactic seriously, they are deluding themselves.

First, and surely obviously, U.S. tariff increases will not induce other governments to lower their own, but to raise them, as the EU, China, Mexico, Canada, and other trading partners have already demonstrated. That’s why it’s called a trade war — because the “enemy” shoots back. History has shown repeatedly, most notably in the early 1930s, in the wake of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, that such trade wars only spiral downward, choking off more and more trade, despoiling the international division of labor in accordance with comparative advantage, and thereby diminishing real income in all the trading countries.

Second, the prospect of the U.S. government’s ever abandoning tariffs is slim to none. Tariffs are the classic example of government interventions with concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. This character makes them attract great support from protected special interests and little opposition from the general public — including other producers — when they are enacted or extended. They are easy for politicians to put in place and diabolically difficult for anyone to eliminate. Although the costs are great — much greater than the benefits for the economy as a whole — hardly anyone’s costs are great enough to justify mounting a potent political attack on the tariffs.

People who get tariffs put in place to protect them in the first place are well positioned to marshal strong opposition to any political attempt to eliminate these taxes on consumers who buy from competing, foreign suppliers. Consumers rarely know anything about why foreign goods are priced as they are, and producers, in general, are usually not affected enough by tariffs on imported raw materials and components to justify well-funded politicking against them.

Toronto’s proposed handgun ban is a feelgood/do nothing distraction

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

Every time there’s a tragedy, there are calls from the local media for politicians to “do something”. Politicians are hard-wired to want to “do something” even without prompting. They want (and need, for electoral purposes) to be seen to be “doing something”, if only to divert any blamecasting away from themselves. The most recent tragedy was a senseless shooting on Toronto’s Danforth in the Greektown district. The shooter, who was either killed by police or committed suicide shortly after the attack, was apparently not a legal gun owner, and under current gun laws would not have been able to obtain a handgun. So, in the wake of the tragic deaths and injuries, Toronto city council jumped into action to be seen “doing something”. Chris Selley explains why the proposed ban of handgun and ammunition sales in the city will not make a difference, except to punish non-criminals:

The whiz-bang solution on everyone’s lips — from Mayor Tory to city councillors to the Toronto Star’s and Globe and Mail’s editorial boards and the usual activists — is to ban handguns. Tory admits there is no “magic wand” that will solve Toronto’s gun problem. But still he asks: “Why does anyone in this city need to have a gun at all?”

The idea has a very superficial appeal. We all wish the Danforth shooter hadn’t managed to get a hold of a gun. Toronto is having a bad year for shootings — not much worse than last year, but at the wrong end of a distinct and steady five-year-trend. (At this point in 2014 there had been 101 shootings and 127 fatalities; so far in 2018 there have been 228 shootings and 308 fatalities.) It is understandable (if not entirely creditable) that the Danforth shooting would have rapidly intensified demands for something to be done: the victim count was high, and it happened in a wealthy part of town where it would have been easy to pretend there wasn’t a problem at all.

Still, the limitations of a “handgun ban” are both many and obvious. When Canadian police forces occasionally report on the sources of crime guns, they often find the vast majority have been smuggled across the border. In Toronto nowadays, the number is reportedly more like 50 per cent; the rest of the supply comes from licensed handgun owners who sell them on illegally — a spectacularly risky thing to do, as any used in crimes would be instantly traced back to the registered owner, but apparently worth it to some.

But we all know how permeable the Canada-U.S. border is. If we made it impossible to own a handgun legally in Canada, is there any reason to suspect the cross-border flow couldn’t regain its market share? Furthermore, CTV reported Wednesday that the Danforth shooter’s handgun was prohibited — i.e., it could never have been licensed in Canada — and that he had obtained it from some gang associates. If true, his carnage illustrates the limitations of handgun bans better than it does their efficacy.

July 20, 2018

No end in sight for our national fake poutine crisis

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Food, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

A few key posts from the Twitters to illustrate the problem:







“Trudeau becomes the first prime minister I’ve ever covered who has demoted himself”

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

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells analyzes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent federal cabinet shuffle:

So much has changed, culminating — for now — with the burial of Ontario provincial Liberalism at the hands of Doug Ford. Alberta and Quebec could next fall to Jason Kenney and François Legault. Certainly that’s the way to bet it. Even normally sunshiny New Brunswick, Newfoundland and PEI are refusing to file carbon reduction plans in line with what Catherine McKenna expects.

So the cabinet Trudeau shuffled on Wednesday isn’t a pre-election cabinet, in the sense of one that’s sweet and shiny to attract distracted voters, so much as it’s a survive-until-the-election cabinet. If this cabinet were a movie, it’d be Walter Hill’s 1979 classic The Warriors. A bunch of street fighters, just trying to make it from the Bronx to Brooklyn in one piece. Doug Ford calling to them from an abandoned car, clinking empty bottles together. Or to use another, perhaps less obscure, movie analogy, it’s farewell to Hope and Hard Work, hello to Horse’s Head/ In Your Bed.

The stars of this partially-refurbished cabinet are two bad cops, in one case quite literally: Bill Blair and Dominic LeBlanc. Blair’s job on the border-crossing file isn’t only to get up Doug Ford’s nose, though that’s a handy bonus. It’s to do more or less what he did as the Liberals’ back-bench pilot of cannabis legalization: to steward a controversial file as humourlessly as humanly possible, to convey with every flinty word and steely grimace that the government is not even remotely interested in messing around.

It’s interesting that Ahmed Hussen, a personable and diligent minister who was also obviously appointed so he could incarnate Liberal branding of openness and diversity, keeps every part of the immigration file except those elements that scare some voters: the people walking across the border. Those parts have been assigned to Sgt. Rock over here.

LeBlanc, an irrepressible rogue whose dad was Pierre Trudeau’s fisheries minister and who has known Justin Trudeau all his life, is not by nature a political bone-crusher, although that’s certainly within his vocabulary. He doesn’t even like when people like me emphasize that part of his personality. He will prefer to get along. But he has the job Trudeau had because Trudeau noticed that, even though his intergovernmental minister was Justin Trudeau, the intergovernmental mood out there was getting noticeably chippy. So Trudeau stripped Trudeau of that portfolio and handed it to someone who could concentrate on it. It’s traditional to view a smaller ministerial portfolio as evidence of a demotion. Trudeau becomes the first prime minister I’ve ever covered who has demoted himself.

July 10, 2018

Operation Husky with the “D-Day Dodgers”

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Germany, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On this day in 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily as their first step toward knocking Italy out of the war. It was the first major allied operation (other than the abortive Operation Jubilee in 1942) in which a major formation of the Canadian Army took part. The 1st Canadian Infantry Division under the command of Major General Guy Simonds was part of General Montgomery‘s Eighth Army, which landed on the southeast coast of the island.

The Canada History Project describes the Canadian participation in Operation Husky:

The men were young, of course, many just 18 to 24 years old. The roads were narrow dirt tracks switchbacking over steep, volcanic mountains. Temperatures hovered around 37 degrees, turning water bottles into hot water bottles, as one soldier put it. Three dry and dusty weeks into the campaign, there was a five-hour downpour, and all the troops relished the chance to shower off the dirt caked to their skin. By this time they were well into the middle of the island where their enemy was the fierce Hermann Goering division of the German army.

For six weeks, from July 10th to August 17th 1943, the Canadians, fighting as an independent unit for the first time, slogged through the interior of Sicily as part of Operation Husky, the first stage of taking back Europe from the Nazis after four years of war. Meanwhile, the Americans skirted the more level western coastline of the island and the British came up the east side, each competing with the other for glory.

American General Patton wrote in a letter, “This is a horse race in which the prestige of the US Army is at stake…we must take Messina before the British.”

That may be the way the generals saw it. For the soldiers, pushing through, village by village, mountaintop by mountaintop, it was no game.

Sicily, a rural mountainous island known for its orange groves and almond orchards, olives and the Mafia, sits strategically in the Mediterranean off the foot of Italy. The Canadian contingent was 25,000 strong. All men and materials were brought in by sea, making it the largest amphibious operation yet, though D-Day, a year later, would be bigger still.

In the first few days the Canadians passed through an area that is now a Unesco World Heritage site. Today tourists come to this southeast corner of Sicily to see the restored baroque architecture. But the young Canadian lads were eyeing the pillboxes, watching for snipers and lookouts. In the early days many Italian soldiers surrendered without too much resistance and the local people gave them grapes and oranges to quench their thirst in the scorching heat.

[…]

Operation Husky did succeed in gaining back the first European soil for the Allies. In the midst of it, Mussolini resigned and soon after Italy surrendered, another goal of the campaign. It started a second front forcing Hitler to back off his aggressive attack on our ally, Russia. And it provided a rehearsal for the larger amphibious landing on the beaches of Normandy, France in June of 1944. As well, it was the first time Canadians had fought as an independent unit. Their young commander was Guy Simonds. 1200 Canadians were wounded in Sicily and 562 died there. 490 of them are buried in the Canadian cemetery at Agira.

For their efforts, the soldiers fighting in Sicily and Italy became known as the “D-Day Dodgers”, a careless epithet supposedly delivered by Lady Astor, but embraced by the soldiers themselves who, with some sarcastic humour, turned it into the song, “We are the D-Day Dodgers, in sunny Italy…”

The Canadian part of the campaign from canadiansoldiers.com:

Sailing secretly at the end of June, the Division took its place on the left flank of General Bernard Montgomery’s famed Eighth Army for the Sicilian landings. The amphibious attack against Pachino peninsula was an unqualified success. The defenders were surprised and overrun with very few Allied casualties, and so began a controversial 38-day campaign. General Simonds’ troops advanced inland under difficulties:

    The weather was extremely hot, the roads extremely dusty, and there was little transport; the troops were fresh from a temperate climate and a long voyage in crowded ships; and even though for a time there was scarcely any opposition, mere marching was a very exhausting experience under these conditions.

Continuing over the rocky terrain, they had their first fight with the Germans at Grammichele on 15 July. Three days later they captured Valguarnera. Both were rear-guard actions by a withdrawing enemy, and the first real tests came on the July 20 at Assoro and Leonforte. At the former, the 1st Brigade launched a surprise attack at night against an ancient Norman stronghold on the summit of a lofty peak. They seized and held their place in the face of fierce counter attacks, the records for the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division afterwards revealing generous tributes to the fieldcraft (Indianerkrieg) of the Canadians. Leonforte, an equally difficult situation, was captured by the 2nd Brigade after a bitter fight. These three days cost the Division about 275 casualties.

The advance then turned the east towards Adrano, at the base of Mount Etna. In their path stood Agira, “one of the most imposing of Sicily’s innumerable hill-towns,” and in the neighbouring hills the enemy put up a stubborn resistance. Both the 1st and 2nd Brigades were heavily engaged during the last week of July. The operations were, however, effectively supported by Canadian tanks and by the divisional artillery, reinforced by units of the Royal Artillery. General Simonds also had temporarily under his command the 231st British Infantry Brigade (the Malta Brigade), which threatened German communications from the south. After a bitter struggle Agira was captured on the 28th. Between Agira and Adrano the Hermann Goering Division made a stand at Regalbuto, using tanks as pillboxes in the debris of the town. While part of the 1st Division loosened the enemy’s grip on this town, the 3rd Brigade, temporarily under the command of the British 78th Infantry Division, assisted that formation in the Dittaino Valley.

American encircling operations in the western and northern districts of the island, combined with steady British pressure north of the Catania Plain, forced the enemy out of the defences based on Etna, and the campaign ended when the Allies entered Messina on 16-17 Aug. The 1st Division had performed all of its allotted tasks and had acquired valuable battle experience at a total cost of 2,155 casualties. The measure of the achievement was contained in General Montgomery’s statement: “I now consider you one of my veteran Divisions.”

The Division passed from XXX Corps to XIII Corps on 10 Aug, and moved to a concentration area in the rear on 11-13 Aug, relieved of operational responsibilities. Divisional headquarters moved to Francofonte. During the battle of Sicily they had travelled 120 miles, over largely rough and mountainous terrain.

July 9, 2018

1918 Flu Pandemic – Emergence – Extra History – #1

Filed under: Cancon, China, Health, History, USA, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 7 Jul 2018

Between 3 and 6 percent of the world’s population died in 18 months when the flu first tried to take over the world. In today’s episode we explore the flu outbreak’s origins from military camps across the United States and Canada.

The flu was the first modern plague — turning our interconnected world against us by spreading through shipping lanes, rail lines and the arteries of industrialized war. Yet it was also the first pandemic of the scientific age, where doctors could to some extent understand what was happening and stand against the infection, though they lacked the tools to stop it. Also, say hello to the voice of “professor” Matt!

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