Quotulatiousness

August 7, 2025

“The Beer Store seems to be going down faster than, well, a nice, cold beer”

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

In The Line Scott Stinson discusses the precipitous fall in the fortunes of Ontario’s former beer retail behemoth now that beer is available in — shock! horror! — grocery stores and even (gasp!) convenience stores:

“The Beer Store” by Like_the_Grand_Canyon is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

A major Ontario retailer announced last month that it would permanently close 20 locations in August. This follows the closure of 10 of its stores just over a week before that, and precedes the planned shuttering of 10 more locations in September.

What business could possibly be swooning this much? A general retailer pummelled by Amazon? An exporter battered by Trump’s tariffs?

Nope: Beer. Seriously. The Beer Store seems to be going down faster than, well, a nice, cold beer.

Welcome to the uniquely weird world of alcohol sales in the province of Ontario, where somehow selling beer has become a struggling business.

Some background is probably required, for those who, understandably, must think by this point that I am full of shit.

For ages the vast majority of Ontario’s beer sales ran through The Beer Store, a chain of 450-ish outlets that was co-owned by Canada’s largest brewers. You could also get beer at the provincially owned LCBO, but the largest size available there was a six-pack. That was it. This system was exceedingly unfriendly to consumers, but owing to our puritan roots and the fact that the brewers had excellent lobbyists at Queen’s Park, it remained that way through decades — and governments of all three major parties.

About a decade ago, the Toronto Star got its hands on one of the agreements between The Beer Store and the province, which revealed what a sweetheart deal it was getting. Among other things, the deal greatly restricted the degree to which the LCBO could compete in beer retail, which caused much frothing over the fact that The Beer Store, long since owned by multinational conglomerates, was getting preferential treatment over the province’s own booze outlet.

The Liberal government of the day responded by loosening The Beer Store’s stranglehold on beer retail, but just a little: allowing it to be sold at a limited number of grocery stores, a hilariously small step but one that in Ontario was nevertheless a great leap forward.

Doug Ford’s Conservative government had long wanted to expand alcohol sales much further, but always stumbled over the fact that The Beer Store had a deal that prohibited such expansion until 2026. But then Ford wanted to hold an election last spring and he convinced The Beer Store to let him break that deal a year early for $225 million, which always seemed like an awfully steep price to move up that expansion by what amounted to a number of months.

It’s only in recently, though, that it has become clear how spectacularly dumb that giant payment was in the first place.

The Arctic, strategically speaking

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

CDR Salamander suggests we tilt our globes (you have a globe on your desk, don’t you?) 90 degrees and consider the Arctic Ocean:

First things first, as it is the focus of the report, let’s go to the chart room and properly define the, “Central Arctic Ocean”.

There it is, the horizontally shaded bit outside everyone’s EEZ.

The chart comes from the report in question by RAND: The Future of Maritime Presence in the Central Arctic Ocean.

Before we dive in — and the Front Porch knows exactly where I am going here — I need to point out again what we see at the very top where all the red, green, and blue lines intersect. You can’t miss it, and it should have you screaming to whatever direction The Pentagon is from where you sit.

Yes kiddies, that is the Bering Strait, half of which is ours, and the other side is Russia. As you move from the Arctic into the greater Pacific or from the Pacific to the Arctic, you have to pass through that strait, and before it the American Aleutian Islands.

As we’ve covered here before, we have criminally avoided leveraging the blessings of the geography bequeathed to our nation, that of controlling both the inner and outer gates to the Arctic Ocean from the Pacific.

I should not have to explain to you the importance of the Arctic shores of Alaska to anyone. Challengers to the security of our resources in the north, both old and new, are back on the scene. We are a decade late in building a base at Nome and reactivating Adak. I covered that in a previous Substack linked in the prior sentence. Read it and come back if you need to catch up.

A weakness of much of the RAND report is, it is mostly based on stale talking points about immediate climate change in the Arctic, and questionably alarmist assumptions about the Arctic climate for the rest of the century, which seem more suited to the first Obama Administration, but put this to the side.

Should the climate in the Arctic mid-century trend towards the more ice or less, the simple facts remain — the competition in the Arctic is only increasing and the time to act on this new reality is now.

August 6, 2025

Do journalists’ “unnamed sources” have to actually exist? Asking for an imaginary friend …

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

At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies discusses the growing trend of Canadian journalists depending on “unnamed sources” to fill in details in their political stories:

No name news image created by Grok, via The Rewrite

If I spun you a tale about my life as a mercenary in the 2012 Guinea-Bissau coup d’etat, I’d probably get your attention.

It would be a ripping good yarn, filled with evil masterminds, hints of Bond villains, precious relics, and blood diamonds. I might even sprinkle it with how I’d heard that the Ark of the Covenant is guarded quietly and stored in Nokolo-Koba National Park, not far from the Gambia River.

You might enjoy it. But I’m thinking you might ask for proof. Trust me, I would say, it’s not something I’m at liberty to discuss freely. Loose lips sink ships, these boys don’t like publicity, I’m not authorized, I wish to speak freely, etc. You’re going to have to put your faith in me.

Which, while I used hyperbole to make the point, is what the nation’s reporters are increasingly asking the public to do.

The once rare use of unnamed sources in the new “just trust me” world of Canadian journalism is getting out of control.

Exhibit A is a National Post story posted on May 23 in which readers learn of changes in the Prime Minister’s Office where staff are now expected to dress professionally and show up on time. In other words, a return to what most people would view as normal office decorum. Yes, you might wonder — as I did — why this constitutes news while the previous nine years’ shabbily-attired tardiness went unreported, but that would involve a significant digression. Another day, perhaps.

The sources were “half a dozen current and former PMO officials, senior bureaucrats and caucus members”, granted anonymity “to discuss internal workings of government openly”.

Two are “former” Liberal staffers, which makes one wonder if they might bear a grudge and what their motivations are. There is not a single named source in the story, nor is there any reference to the Post having asked the current management of the PMO for comment.

Exhibit B is the May 14 analysis on the pages of the Globe and Mail, which explains the thinking involved in selecting a finance minister. The thesis was based on “seven sources who have worked for Liberal and Conservative governments over the last two decades”, whose identities are being hidden “because they were not authorized by their parties to speak publicly about the federal finance minister”.

In Exhibit C, CBC/Radio Canada uses no fewer than 12 — count ’em — anonymous sources discussing whether party leader Pierre Poilievre should dismiss his chief of staff and recent campaign manager, Jenni Byrne. All were granted “confidentiality to discuss internal party matters”.

To his credit, the reporter selected sources offering a variety of perspectives on the issue. But still, other than reference to public statements by Poilievre, no one is on the record even for passive phrases such as “No one seems ready to make this their hill to die on”. Are there no political scientists left to comment on such topics?

August 3, 2025

“Even when accused men win, they lose”

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

Janice Fiamengo on the recent court decision that acquitted five former junior hockey players of sexual assault charges in a London, Ontario court:

The acquittal, last week, by Justice Maria Carroccia of five former members of the Canadian World Junior Hockey Team charged with sexual assault has provoked the usual exaggerations and question-begging from feminist advocates.

A common theme has been the alleged negative impact of the verdict on “survivors”. Canada’s state broadcaster, the CBC, titled an article “Hockey Canada trial outcome a ‘crushing day’ for sexual assault survivors, says prof“. The Globe and Mail had the same focus: “After the Hockey Canada verdict, advocates fear survivors will fall silent“. For CTV News, also, “Advocates worry about message to survivors following Hockey Canada sex assault trial“. It seems that any not-guilty finding — no matter the accuser’s proven lies and venality — is said to constitute an assault on rape victims everywhere.

Our era’s motto: Better 100 innocent men go to prison than one potential accuser hesitate to come forward.

Many commentators also gushed about the courage of the woman, still identified only as E.M., who took the witness stand to proclaim her truth. E.M.’s lawyer, Karen Bellehumeur, called her “a remarkable person and truly a hero“. Professor Daphne Gilbert credited E.M. with provoking important public conversations at enormous personal cost. Supporters on the courthouse steps carried signs saying “We believe E.M.”

It’s hard to fathom that those declaring their anguish at the verdict and their admiration for E.M. have actually read Judge Carroccia’s 90-page judgement.

That judgement, far from revealing the judge’s failure to understand E.M.’s fear, as one feminist organization alleged, should cause any unbiased observer to question how the case was ever allowed to go to trial in the first place.

It had been found to be a loser when police first looked into it back in 2018. The story was that E.M. had met a hockey player, Michael McLeod, at Jake’s Bar in London, Ontario; McLeod was in town with his team to celebrate their World Junior Championship victory at a ring ceremony and gala dinner. E.M. agreed to go back to McLeod’s hotel room, but once there, he invited many other players to the room, where they took turns sexually assaulting her. She went home crying, and when her mother asked her what had happened, she told her. Her mother called the police.

The problem was that the complainant’s story was full of holes. Questioned by investigators in the days following, she couldn’t say she hadn’t consented, confessed that she may have enjoyed the sexual attention of the players, admitted she could have left the hotel room at any time, and never mentioned fear or intimidation as factors in her actions. London police closed the case in early 2019 without laying any charges. Over time, it seems, E.M. constructed a more compelling story to explain herself in a way that would be acceptable to her mother and to E.M.’s boyfriend.

In 2022, a police investigation was reopened after it was reported that Hockey Canada, the sport’s national governing body, had paid out millions in settlement money to women like E.M. who had alleged sexual misconduct on the part of players. E.M. herself received an undisclosed settlement amount in 2022 after suing for 3.5 million dollars.

Charges were ultimately laid, in early 2024, against five men, all of whom had by then launched careers in the National Hockey League: Dillon Dubé, Alex Formenton, Carter Hart, Callan Foote and Michael McLeod. Their NHL careers are now in tatters while their accuser has enriched herself with a false accusation.

August 2, 2025

Canada’s PM “… has a job which, like that of most politicians, requires low intelligence and moral vacuousness”

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

At Essays in Idleness, David Warren explains why Canadian political leadership is so desperately uninspiring … except to our enemies and ill-wishers:

The Canadian prime minister — currently Mr Mark Carney — has a job which, like that of most politicians, requires low intelligence and moral vacuousness. At his cleverest he may exhibit a species of rat cunning. His views on Israel and the Middle East are quite uninteresting, for no rat cunning is required. He simply observes that an anti-Semitic policy is necessary, now that Muslim immigration exceeds the Jewish vote.

Not one good thing has come out of the Liberal Party since Louis St-Laurent was defeated in 1957. He, at least, achieved mediocrity. But what can we do? Canada’s population is one with the Liberals.

What happened on October 7th, 2023 — the slaughter of huge numbers of mostly unarmed Jews when Palestinians got outside the Gaza perimeter — can happen again and again. It will happen as long as Palestinians are, from childhood, taught or brainwashed to kill Jews throughout their education and social systems. I also protest against the disproportionate Israeli response. I think the Israelis have been much too restrained.

My model for “Palestine” would be Germany, or Japan. These formerly vicious nations became harmlessly bourgeois after they unconditionally surrendered to the United States and allies. It is ludicrous to think we should have offered them a peace deal, instead.

Damian Penny points out the sad truth that we get more obstinate even in support of a terrible idea when someone tries to bully us out of it:

… I find myself torn between being frustrated with my own government and simultaneously outraged by another government trying to bully us out of a policy decision with which I disagree.

I don’t expect most other Canadians to feel so conflicted, however. Trump may not realize it (nor care one bit even if he does understand it) but he just made it more likely that Canadian voters will rally around the flag.

This flag, specifically.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, has the motivational power of your opponent pushing back against you. That social media has given us a new and effective way to yell at and insult each other across partisan lines is part of the reason partisanship has become so much more entrenched in recent years.

And that includes me. During the last election campaign it was when I argued with Liberals on Facebook that I found myself feeling less like a Conservative voter and more like a Conservative militant, and my sparring partners likely felt the same way, only in the opposite direction.

Now, replace political partisanship with nationalism, and the effect becomes that much stronger.

Of course, hardcore supporters of either side won’t be moved. (That Carney is placing any conditions at all on Palestinian statehood, and saying a two-state solution remains the ultimate goal, makes him a filthy Zionist genocidaire as far as that crowd is concerned.) But sometimes it’s easy to forget that most people simply don’t pay as much attention to, and aren’t nearly as emotionally invested in, this conflict as much as we very online types are.

August 1, 2025

The sad saga of the CH-148 Cyclone helicopters in Canadian service

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

In the National Post, Tom Lawson and Gaëlle Rivard Piché argue for the Canadian government to learn from long and bitter past experiences while they “reconsider” the F-35 purchase for the RCAF … specifically the mind-numbing and depressing saga of obtaining helicopters for the Canadian Armed Forces. First, a quick recap of the helicopter story from a post back in 2012:

Pre-delivery Sikorsky CH-148 Cyclone helicopter, 4 April, 2012.
Photo by Gerry Metzler via Wikimedia Commons.

  • In 1963, the CH-124 Sea King helicopter (a variant of the US Navy S-61 model) entered service with the Royal Canadian Navy.
  • In 1983, the [Pierre] Trudeau government started a process to replace the Sea Kings. That process never got far enough for a replacement helicopter to be ordered.
  • In 1985, the Mulroney government started a new process to find a replacement for the Sea Kings.
  • In 1992, the Mulroney government placed an order for 50 EH-101 Cormorant helicopters (for both naval and search-and-rescue operations).
  • In 1993, the Campbell government reduced the order from 50 to 43, theoretically saving $1.4B.
  • In 1993, the new Chrétien government cancelled the “Cadillac” helicopters as being far too expensive and started a new process to identify the right helicopters to buy. The government had to pay nearly $500 million in cancellation penalties.
  • In 1998, having split the plan into separate orders for naval and SAR helicopters, the government ended up buying 15 Cormorant SAR helicopters anyway — and the per-unit prices had risen in the intervening time.
  • In 2004, the Martin government placed an order with Sikorsky for 28 CH-148 Cyclone helicopters to be delivered starting in 2008 (after very carefully arranging the specifications to exclude the Cormorant from the competition).
  • Now, in 2012, we may still have another five years to wait for the delivery of the Cyclones.

A few data points in addition to that list:

  • In 2009, the government granted Sikorsky two more years to begin deliveries … and waived the penalty fees for late delivery.
  • In 2011, the government announced it would impose late delivery fines on Sikorsky.
  • In 2012, Sikorsky announced the delay of the first batch of “interim” helicopters until 2013.
  • In 2015, the first six helicopters were delivered so RCAF crews could begin training, with two more later in the year.
  • In 2018, the first operational deployment of a Cyclone had the helicopter embarked on HMCS Ville de Quebec as part of Operation Reassurance.
  • In 2021, 19 of the 23 helicopters delivered were taken out of service for cracks in the tail assemblies.
  • In January 2025, the 27th helicopter was delivered to the RCAF.

Based on this lengthy and expensive process, Lawson and Piché write:

In 1992, the Progressive Conservative government signed a $4.8-billion contract with a European consortium to replace the aging Sea King helicopters deployed aboard Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) ships. For purely political reasons, when the Liberals came to power the following year, they cancelled the deal — incurring $500 million in termination penalties — and set out to find a more politically acceptable solution. That search dragged on for over a decade, culminating in a 2004 contract with Sikorsky to procure 28 CH-148 Cyclone helicopters.

What the government failed to realize — or chose to overlook — was that Sikorsky was not offering a ready-made military platform. Instead, it proposed to adapt its civilian S-92 model into a maritime helicopter fit for military use, with the hope of replicating the global success of its venerable Sea King.

But developmental issues plagued the project from the outset. The original delivery schedule of 2009 slipped repeatedly, prompting then-minister of national defence Peter MacKay to call the procurement “the worst in the history of Canada”. By 2014, the program was on the brink of cancellation. Only a tense meeting between senior ministers and Sikorsky’s president salvaged the deal, leading to a revised agreement that saw the Cyclone finally enter operational service in 2018.

Yet the challenges did not end there. The Cyclone has consistently posted poor serviceability rates. A crash that cost the lives of six Canadian Armed Forces members in early 2020 was linked to inadequate documentation and flawed software. More recently, the fleet has again been largely grounded — this time due to a shortage of spare parts. The Commander of the RCN has voiced public frustration over the shortage of deployable helicopters, even threatening to replace them with drones if necessary.

To be fair, Sikorsky is not solely to blame. It offered an attractive idea: a modern fly-by-wire maritime helicopter based on a successful civilian platform. The government accepted, underestimating the complexity of the transformation. The key lesson here — one that directly applies to the current fighter jet debate — is that there is enormous risk in buying aircraft, like the Cyclone, that exist in limited numbers worldwide.

The best path forward with the Cyclone may now be to phase out the fleet and absorb the sunk costs. A more reliable option could be the MH-60 Seahawk, also made by Sikorsky. Unlike the Cyclone, the Seahawk is a proven design, with nearly 1,000 units in active service with the U.S., Australian and some NATO navies. While it would be politically awkward to cancel a Sikorsky platform only to purchase another from the same manufacturer, pragmatism must prevail. Perhaps a deal could be struck to return the Cyclones for parts, recouping some value through the civilian S-92 supply chain.

July 31, 2025

“You can see what a monster this very dangerous person is”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray looks north to the Dysfunctional Dominion and our governments’ inability to deal with the narrative of the Residential Schools and the lack of actual evidence to support that narrative:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

Frances Widdowson is a cantankerous career academic, an evidence-first Canadian scholar who doesn’t suffer fools. Her personal disregard for sanctimonious performativity has gotten her in some trouble, and now she’s a former professor, though her termination was found to be improper. A few months ago, the CBC interviewed her for a story about how mean she is, because Widdowson has questioned the much-chanted sacred story about the dead children at Kamloops.

If you don’t know the Kamloops story, an anthropologist used ground-penetrating radar to supposedly identify the location of a secret burial ground for 215 dead children near the site of the long-defunct Kamloops Indian Residential School, uncovering evidence of what has been constantly called a hidden genocide. But no human remains have ever been recovered at the site, and the radar evidence of disturbed earth aligns well with the path of an old septic trench. More detailed background here.

Widdowson recorded the entire interview, so we can hear the inner workings of the sausage factory.

Throughout the discussion, CBC reporter Jordan Tucker, speaking with the obligatory vocal fry and upspeak, keeps warning Widdowson to stop shouting at her, which Widdowson obviously isn’t doing, and to watch her tone. She’s presumptively pre-outraged by the existence of a Very Bad Person, conducting an outrage-performance in the form of asking questions.

But then Widdowson flips the script. You can hear this excerpted two-minute high point here. Tucker argues that government officials say there are bodies buried in the apple orchard at Kamloops, so is Widdowson somehow making the outrageous claim that government officials might be wrong? “Are all those different governments lying? Are all those different people just not telling the truth, or they’re going along with these stories imagined by people, by indigenous people?”

Government says, but still Widdowson doesn’t concede. You can see what a monster this very dangerous person is. “How is it that all these government officials have been so connived?” Tucker asks, obviously flabbergasted.

Widdowson responds with an argument about evidence, and about the standards of evidence for the claim. What do we know? What have we seen? What would we need to see to prove a claim of this type? Who has the burden of proof?

And then: “As a journalist, are you satisfied with the evidence?”

The response to this question — just past the 1:30 mark in the excerpted video linked above — is remarkably telling. It produces, first, a short silence, and then a long burst of stammering and high-pitched incredulity: “I am. Of course I am.”

Widdowson, sharpening the direct question: “You think there’s 215 children buried in the apple orchard at Kamloops?”

Listen to Tucker’s shaking voice. This question is a threat. It makes her extremely nervous. “I think that, at this point, there has been enough documentation, there have been enough — there’s enough social and archaeological consensus to say that, to say that, we can just believe indigenous people, and move on with trying to do our best by them as a society.”

So two people are arguing about truth. What is true? How can we know what is true? One person keeps asking what is the evidence. The other person keeps deflecting to identity, authority, and social status. The government says so, there is social consensus, “believe indigenous people”. No human remains have been found, but there are human remains, because government officials and indigenous people say so, and other people with the status to matter say that they agree. Truth is consensus. Defaulting to evidence is cruel. Why would you do such a horrible thing?

  • What’s the evidence?
  • Are you refusing to submit to the narrative consensus?
  • Yes, what’s the evidence?
  • (shocked gasping and trembling voice)

This is the mechanism of woke narrative control: It has been said that this is true. The people who say it possess authority — they are officials — or they possess privileged identities. It is now disinformation to say that government plus indigenous people might not be correct, and an act of dangerous extremism to mention questions of evidence.

July 29, 2025

Crimes less serious than “Mischief” according to Canadian courts

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper notes that the sentences being sought for Freedom Convoy 2022 organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber are more severe than prosecutors have asked for what appear to be far more serious crimes:

Chris Barber and Tamara Lich

Last week, Crown prosecutors announced they were seeking jail sentences of up to eight years for Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, two organizers of the Freedom Convoy protest.

Both were convicted of mischief, but the Crown is seeking a minimum sentence of seven years in jail for Lich, and eight for Barber, who was also found guilty of counselling others to disobey a court order.

The Crown has argued that the disruptiveness of the Freedom Convoy blockades warrants the harsh sentence, but in a statement this week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said courts are throwing the book at Barber and Lich while simultaneously giving free reign to “rampant violent offenders” and “antisemitic rioters”.

It’s certainly the case that you can do an awful lot of heinous things in Canada before a prosecutor would ever think of asking for seven years. Below, a not-at-all comprehensive list of things you can do in Canada, and have the Crown seek a lighter sentence than the one they’re seeking for the organizers of the Freedom Convoy.

  • Sexually assaulting a baby [5 to 6 years]
  • Using a car filled with guns to ram into Justin Trudeau’s house [6 years]
  • Killing multiple innocent people via drunk driving [5 years]
  • Stabbing a man to death because he told you to stop abusing your girlfriend [5 years]
  • Being a police officer who stalks and sexually harasses crime victims [6 months]
  • Amassing enough child pornography to fill a video store [3 and a half years]
  • Torturing a toddler to death [7 to 8 years]
  • Intentionally ramming a car loaded with children and pregnant women [8 years]
  • Beating a fellow homeless shelter resident to death [5 and a half years]
  • Raping a minor and bragging about it online [4 to 5 years]

July 28, 2025

Ontario Premier Doug Ford – threat or menace?

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

In many ways, Ontario’s Doug Ford is a 21st century version of former Ontario Premier Bill Davis … a virtuoso performer of the “talk Conservative, govern Liberal” style that urban Ontario voters really seem to love. It works well for the Laurentian Elite to have a Liberal government in Ottawa and a “Conservative” government in Toronto, as they can argue in public about all sorts of marginal issues, but when it comes down to legislation and regulation, they’re almost indistinguishable from one another aside from party colours.

Last week, Ford announced a plan to hand out provincial work permits to a huge number of “asylum seekers” as the feds seem to be making motions to reduce their support of such irregular immigrants:

One step forward, two steps back? As a card-carrying, self-appointed board member of Team “Please stop making everything worse on purpose,” there are some hard-earned wins and faint movements back towards normal, and then there’s the ongoing screw-jobs that threaten any/all progress.

As we have bemoaned time, and time, and time again around these parts, Ontario has a premier problem. But now, all of Canada has a Doug Ford problem.

I’ve been part of an effort to drag urgent immigration reform into the spotlight, and even into a feature position in the waning days of that ‘first ministers’ meeting in Muskoka, but a certain conservative-in-name-only threatens to make historic problems of immigration and unemployment worse, rather than better.

Conservatives in Canada are about to find themselves in a tricky position with Ford, who has the unique potential to remain one of the last vestiges of the failed Trudeau years — even more so than Carney. And the latter may need defending.

Ford and his deeply conflicted and unethical inner circle may wish to grant provincial work permits to a supply of fake students turned fake asylum claimants, but ordinary folk, concerned parents, our proud immigrant communities who made the grade and never cut corners, and our abandoned workers have other ideas.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @HOCStaffer tries to provide some context:

Asylum seekers, refugees, illegals, whatever you want to call them.

They are filling up hotels, getting money, & doing basically nothing, all the while waiting upwards of 2 years for their application to be approved/denied.

I mean, it’s better than where they came from, which is why they are here.

There’s a massive financial burden to the govt & a huge pool of labour doing nothing which could be serving you your coffee instead of a Temp Foreign Worker.

So Ford’s argument — which I have had made to me in person by hotel, tourism, & restaurant lobbyists — is that why don’t we use these people to do the shit jobs?

***** Especially if we are reducing TFWs.

There is a pretty good logic to it.

“May as well have them do something while they are here waiting.” Right?

But I still disagree with the idea.

Most of these people aren’t refugees. They are economic migrants from terrible places. They came here illegally, often under false pretences, & most should be deported.

The longer they stay the more likely they are to have kids here, to potentially marry a Canadian, and to establish links to the country.

Giving them a job furthers that connection.

The last thing we need is the local Tims owner arguing to keep Abdul in the country because he is the only one who will sling shit coffee on the night shift for shit wages.

Giving illegals jobs just rewards the business owners who take advantage of TFWs with a new pool of labour to exploit.

I get that these are businesses and real people have money and time invested in them.

But if you cannot operate without indentured servants then perhaps we don’t really need your business?

A bunch of Tims will close. McD’s too. Maybe some hotels & other businesses too. It’s sad. No one wants to see that.

But we also can’t keep importing people — and thereby affecting much of the rest of society — in order to keep these businesses open.

So yeah, there’s a sound argument to what Ford is saying.

But what he should be saying is that we need a stronger border, faster processing, less appeals and quicker deportations.

That would save his govt real money.

July 27, 2025

“[T]he wonderful warm kind progressives, the Maple Leaf edition of “‘hate has no home here'”

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

Chris Bray looks at the kind of people who supported the lockdowns during the pandemic and heartily condemned those lesser folks whose careers and livelihoods were threatened and how they hope for examples to be made of the “leaders” of the Freedom Convoy back in 2022:

Let’s start with a comparison to the good people in Canada, the wonderful warm kind progressives, the Maple Leaf edition of “hate has no home here”. Cheri DiNovo is, let me put this very gently, an instantly recognizable social type, “one of Canada’s best-known and most ardent queer ministers and an Ontario politician who would help pass some of the province’s most integral LGBTQ2S+ policy”. You already know her by her facial expression:

slay, girlboss

As the leaders of the Freedom Convoy face sentencing in court, DiNovo has this to say about their monstrous cruelty:

The Freedom Convoy: white supremacist homophobes who harassed and brutalized LGBTQ+ people and immigrants and the disabled, lashing out in a stunning wave of public cruelty. It was like a NUREMBERG RALLY with trucks, obviously. Here, look at some of the monstrous acts of public brutality committed at this mass expression of hate and rage:

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE DANCED TOGETHER THINK ABOUT IT

Rupa Subramanya, a journalist who uses the old and mostly forgotten technique of talking to people, wandered the crowds in Ottawa (in her own neighborhood) and reported that Freedom Convoy protesters mostly talked about their desire to recover a sense of hope. Their grievances were clear, thoroughly explained, and entirely defensible. Here’s a sample paragraph, a discussion with one of the VICIOUS WHITE SUPREMACISTS:

    Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Covid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. He said that he and his wife used to do their grocery shopping at Costco, until the government decreed that the unvaxxed would be barred from big-box stores. Since then, their monthly grocery bill had jumped by $200. “Before,” he said, “we didn’t look at the price of what we were buying. Now, we sometimes put items back because we don’t have that much money.”

See this clearly against Cheri DiNovo’s framing, and remember it:

The white supremacist protesters who hate immigrants; for example, Kamal Pannu, a Sikh immigrant and trucker.

In fact, Sikhs make up a substantial share of the trucking industry in Canada, and so had a significant presence at the Freedom Convoy:

See the WHITE SUPREMACISTS saying that they HATE IMMIGRANTS!?!?!? Because Cheri DiNovo does. She thinks categorically: good people who support the Liberal Party, Literally Adolf Hitler who doesn’t. She has no capacity for seeing the thing itself, as it was on the ground, in physical reality. Literally nothing, no evidence or substance of any kind, could ever have prevented her from saying that a protest against Justin Trudeau’s government was white supremacist and homophobic. She’s out of her fucking mind. She has no connection to any form of reality, at all, in any way, ever. She doesn’t see anything. She doesn’t know anything. She’s ignorant noise and infinite sanctimony, with a pair of legs to carry it around.

This is “left” politics in the Anglosphere. Symbol symbol symbol, you NAZI! It doesn’t connect. It’s all chanting and performance and status-signaling, and it never leaves the house. It left reality behind ten years ago, and now it’s out there sailing past Pluto. For adherents of the Manichean religion of wokeism, categorical thinking covers all bases. People who don’t get mRNA injections are misogynistic racist bigots, obviously.

Update: Fixed broken link.

I’m sure I would never have heard of Sean Feucht until they tried to silence him

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

It’s hard to believe how Canadian municipal and provincial authorities deal so gently with disruptive pro-Hamas protests that regularly threaten the lives and property of Canadian Jews compared with the positively authoritarian way they are reacting to “MAGA” Christian performer Sean Feucht‘s concerts:

July 26, 2025

VIA Rail’s premier passenger train, The Canadian

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

In the National Post, Raymond J. de Souza discovers the aging crown jewel of VIA Rail’s passenger services, The Canadian, which VIA inherited from Canadian Pacific Railway when the country’s long-distance and intercity rail passenger services were merged into a single Crown Corporation in the 1970s:

Canadian Pacific FP7 locomotive 1410 at the head of The Canadian stopped at Dorval, Quebec on 6 September, 1965. The Canadian was Canadian Pacific’s premier passenger train before VIA Rail was formed.
Photo by Roger Puta via Wikimedia Commons.

What did I learn after four days and four nights, some 4,500 kilometres, from Vancouver to Toronto on board Via Rail’s The Canadian? Many things, as it happens.

I learned that The Canadian attracts train aficionados the world over for one of the last great rail journeys on one of the last great trains. The stainless steel rolling stock is 70 years old, the cars having been upgraded along the way, but still rolling as a living part of railway history.

Part of the cultural history Via Rail preserves is superlative meals thrice daily, served in fine style in the dining cars. Four dinners: rack of lamb, beef tenderloin, AAA prime rib, bone-in pork chop. Delicious desserts. Canadian wines and craft beers. Fish eaters and vegans also had options. The question arises ineluctably: Why is the Via Rail food between Montreal and Toronto so horrible?

Perhaps it would be too expensive; The Canadian in sleeper class certainly is. Expense was really the question in the 1870s.

“Could a country of three and a half million people afford an expenditure of one hundred million dollars at time when a labourer’s wage was a dollar a day?” asked Pierre Berton in his 1970 chronicle of that decision, The National Dream.

The cost of not building was greater, argued Sir John A. Macdonald. It was the price of remaining a sovereign continental country. Part of the financing was creative; the Hudson’s Bay Company gave Rupert’s Land to Canada, and Canada paid the contractors partly in free land.

Growing up in Calgary, I presumed that the greatest challenge was putting the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) through the mountains. And it is true that the most spectacular scenery on the route is the Fraser Canyon and the mountains of the Yellowhead Pass. (The Canadian now travels the northern route of the Canadian National (CN) Railway, not the original southern route of the CPR.)

Yet it was the Canadian Shield, thousands of lakes and muskeg atop the hardest rock on earth, that was the real obstacle. John Palliser, one of the 1860s expeditioners between Thunder Bay and the Rockies, reported back that while getting through the mountain passes could be done, the impenetrable land north of Lake Superior was the insuperable problem. And without getting around the Shield, Canada would be constrained, cooped up, with the prairies and mountains and west coast inaccessible.

VIA dome observation car on The Canadian in 2007. The best views are available from the domed seating on the upper level.
Photo by Savannah Grandfather via Wikimedia.

I’d always hoped to travel The Canadian at some point, but I was never able to afford the tickets at the same time that I had available time to travel, and there’s no hope I’ll ever be able to scrape up the money these days. According to VIA Rail’s website, the trip from Toronto to Vancouver would be between C$5860 to $9460 per person.

July 25, 2025

The Royal Canadian Navy announces eight of the Kingston-class ships will be retired this year

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

The Kingston-class Maritime Coastal Defence Vessel (MCDV) has been in RCN service starting in the mid-1990s and they’ve apparently done well for the navy in their intended role. Unfortunately, naval ships have a normal working life expectancy of 20-30 years, and the Kingstons are at the upper end of that range, so it’s not surprising that they will be taken out of service. It is a bit of a surprise that the announcement came on Thursday and two-thirds of the class will be paid off this fall, without a direct successor class of ships on the slipways:

The Kingston-class Maritme Coastal Defence Vessel (MCDV) HMCS Moncton in Baltimore harbour for Sailabration 2012.
Photo by Acroterion via Wikimedia Commons.

Starting this fall the Royal Canadian Navy will begin divesting of the Kingston-class vessels. Eight of the Kingston will be divested while four, Moncton, Yellowknife, Edmonton, and Nanaimo will remain in service for the time being.

Formal ceremonies will take place in Halifax for Shawinigan, Summerside, Goose Bay, Glace Bay and Kingston. Ceremonies in Esquimalt, B.C. will be held for Saskatoon, Whitehorse and Brandon.

The remaining four will be divested over the next three years:

  • Yellowknife in 2026
  • Edmonton in 2027
  • Moncton and Nanaimo in 2028.

The duties of the Kingstons will be transferred to other vessels in the fleet. The AOPS have already taken over the OP CARRIBE and Patrol roles the last few years, while training duties will be moved fully to the Orca [class].

The new Remote Minehunting and Disposal Systems, being containerized can theoretically be deployed on any available vessel, and will be another role taken by the AOPS and the Kingston divest. They’ve already been doing MCM testing so that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

The remaining four Kingstons will likely continue to participate on things like OP REASSURANCE, which Yellowknife and Edmonton are currently deployed on until October as part of SNMCMG1.

In basic terms the AOPS will be taking over a majority of the Kingston‘s tasks, which they have been slowly adding to their belt already. To say there hasn’t been a slow transition would be ignorant of me.

Nor is this surprising. We knew this was coming. Its been an open discussion for a while. I expected we would hear something this year about the divestment plan, however I didn’t expect eight to be paid off right away.

That comes as a surprise to me, also dropping it out of the blue. I wasn’t expecting this to come at this time, so this is a rare moment of genuine shock for me. Of course the Kingston fleet isn’t in the greatest of shape.

Several haven’t sailed in years (I believe Whitehorse is on almost five?) and the decision to not do another refit was basically the death blow to the class as a whole.

Things get harder before they get better. It is better to divest now and have people available for the platforms that are working and in greater need than it is to try and stretch the Kingstons for a few extra years, nor was it deemed worth the ever-increasing cost to keep them in service.

The Kingstons will be replaced by the future Continental Defence Corvette. I expect as the fall comes that we will be hearing more publicly about the project. I was a bit surprised they didn’t bring it up in the Press Release given it’s not exactly a secret, although it was teased a bit.

Arctic Offshore Patrol Ship (AOPS) HMCS Harry DeWolf shortly after launch in 2018. The ship was commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy in June, 2021.

July 20, 2025

Generational differences about … ugh … talking on the telephone

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

As a late boomer — and unlike most of my cohort — I’ve always hated talking on the telephone to someone. I’m sure part of it is my innate shyness and social awkwardness: if I can’t see how the other person reacts to my verbal blundering, how can I correct myself in time to salvage something from the call? As a result, I’m rather more sympathetic to younger Millennials and Gen Z’ers who have a common generational aversion to telephone calls:

“Candle-stick phone with courtesy pay box” by CodeName47km is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

I’ve been working to wean myself off the phone. I try to use it only when it feels necessary: we require an answer now, things are too complex to lay out in an email, or I want to be sure what I’m saying is received as I intend it. Sometimes these calls are spontaneous. Increasingly, I schedule them, or ask permission first.

I’ve done this because it’s how business communications work today, and I don’t like to remind people that I’m getting on. I also do it in deference to my colleagues, all of whom are much younger than me. They prefer email, texts, or the group chat.

The landline decision was forced by our acquisition of Fitzhenry & Whiteside, which has had the same telephone number for decades. F&W has many more authors than does Sutherland House, and a good number of them are over sixty. We’re trying to make the transition to new ownership seamless. We didn’t want people calling up to hear “this number is no longer in service”. So the newly installed phone sits on a stand beside the desk I share with Shalomi. I call it Shalomi’s phone and make her answer it when she’s around. Mostly it goes to voicemail and tells people how to contact us by email.

Accustomed as I’ve become to phone-free work, I was taken aback this week when I asked one of our interns to call a printer — we needed a quick quote — and she responded, “I don’t do telephones”. She looked at me bewildered. I responded in kind.

My mind was racing to figure out if I’d mishandled the matter. I’d just read that story in the New York Times about the “Gen Z stare”, the blank look given by a young person (usually in a service job) where a verbal response would be common. It is often interpreted as a freeze on the part of the starer, an inability or reluctance to engage, perhaps rooted in anxiety, perhaps a remnant of the pandemic’s social dislocations, although some insist the starer is telling their interlocutor “you’re in my space and you ought to back off”.

I heard from a number of people about that article this week, and while the Times had not mentioned phone usage and etiquette, my conversations did. Apparently there are a lot of young people who don’t know how to answer their phones. They see a call pop up on their screen and they stare at it, waiting for it to go away. Or they press answer and listen without saying anything. Some, I’m told, answer even scheduled calls from people they know with silence.

I’ve heard parents say they didn’t expect they’d have to teach their children to answer a phone. A university lecturer explained that journalism professors now demonstrate use of a telephone before instructing students on how to conduct an interview over it. Apparently, the same goes for rookie salespeople.

Poking around online, I found a BBC article reporting that a quarter of people aged eighteen to thirty-four never answer their phones, more than half of them interpret any unexpected call as bad news. CBS reports 90 per cent of Gen-Z are anxious about phone calls.

In fairness, a lot of adults are similarly leery of their phones. They don’t want to engage with spam dialers or scammers — they answer and listen for the brief pause that betrays a call centre. Some let every unrecognized call go to voicemail. The savvier ones have figured out that your iPhone, properly configured, will send calls from people not in your contacts directly to voicemail.

Back to our intern. Eventually, I recovered myself. This wasn’t an instance of Gen-Z awkwardness or anxiety around real-time conversations. She is bright, confident, and as socially adept as anyone in the office. I asked if she had a phone. She did. I asked if she used it for calls. She said only to speak to her mom, who pays for her phone. Perfectly reasonable. And it was her personal phone, not a company phone, so she was under no obligation to use it at work. So we suggested she make the call on the company phone, which she cheerfully did.

We spoke later about generational differences with regard to communications technology. She likes the control one has over email communication as compared to the unpredictable nature of phone calls. I told her about life when no one had phones, yet we could all somehow manage to show up at the same place and the same hour. I can hardly believe I lived in such times. Hearing this must have hit her like I was once hit by the reporter Ray Stannard Baker’s account of how he used to walk up to the White House, knock on the front door, and ask to speak with the president.

July 16, 2025

Matt Gurney’s “Hollywood Thesis”

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

I almost skipped reading this one, as Matt and Jen usually keep their own columns behind the paywall, but this one is free to non-paying cheapskates like me:

… I actually think there is one way that Hollywood — and probably mass entertainment writ large — has kind of warped our society. It’s not that it has promoted degeneracy or loose morals or shameless enjoyment of vice. It’s more insidious. And probably more dangerous.

I think Hollywood has tricked us into thinking that, in an emergency, our governments will prove to be a lot more competent than they will be. And usually are.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve mentioned it to my Line colleagues before, and I call it my Hollywood Thesis. As I see it, the broader public has fairly accurate expectations about the level of service they can expect from their government. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but it’s mostly realistic. We basically know what we’re getting into when we, for example, drag the trash bin to the curb, or turn on a tap in the morning, or go to an emergency room because you need to get stitched up after a minor mishap.

But I’ve observed over the years an interesting exception. When the public is confronted with any kind of new or unexpected threat, people, for some reason, believe their government will have some secret ability or unexpected expertise in dealing with it. Maybe it’s a quirky scientist working in the bowels of some ministry or department. Maybe it’s an elite team of experts. Or some hidden base loaded with commandos and advanced weaponry.

Wrong. And I’ve been thinking about this. Why do we assume the same government that is, for instance, struggling to fill potholes in my city, or hire enough nurses in my province, or fix a federal payroll system, is going to be more competent when presented with something totally out of the blue? This flies in the face of all of our lived experiences with government. It’s a generous assumption of state capacity that is, to put it charitably, unearned.

So why? What explains this?

It’s Hollywood. It has to be.

Lots of smart, competent people have government jobs. One of the great joys of my career has been the opportunity to speak with many. There are shining lights of unusual competency in every department, and at every order of government, really — my colleague Jen Gerson recently told our podcast listeners about how one of these hidden gems helped her cut through a confusing and dysfunctional process so she could get a permit. And I will never get tired of saying good things about the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces — true miracle workers we do not support enough.

But there aren’t hidden capabilities. There aren’t secret teams. The same people trying to prevent Canada Post from going on strike will be the same people handling the next pandemic — or who would be responsible for opening a dialogue if aliens decided to land their mothership in the middle of a Saskatchewan farm.

It’s within the range of possibilities that, presented with a unique challenge, government leaders could rise to meet it … as long as it’s a completely unexpected situation with no pre-existing rules or regulations or bureaucratic processes in place. I admit it’s not the way the smart money would bet, but it’s technically a possibility.

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