Quotulatiousness

May 14, 2025

Carney’s new cabinet – remarkably similar to Trudeau’s cabinets

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

Prime Minister Mark Carney talked as if he was initiating a new era in Canadian politics, but when it came to nominating his first cabinet, it’s plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose with most of the same cast of incompetents, crooks, lickspittles, and fart-catchers. Justin Trudeau would feel right at home:

Prime Minister Mark Carney promised change, a new way of doing things at speeds never before seen. Yet to help him do this, he is relying on the same old, tired, incompetent ministers who got us into the mess we’re currently in.

The Liberals will trumpet the large number of new faces in Carney’s 28-member cabinet — there are 15 MPs who have never served before.

But the top tier of ministers — the ones sitting in the front row at the swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday — were all former Trudeau acolytes, cabinet ministers now committed to rescuing us from a crisis of their own making.

In the front row was Sean Fraser, our new justice minister and attorney general, and the man who, under former prime minister Justin Trudeau, was responsible for immigration and then housing, two files he spectacularly failed at. If we want to know how bad Fraser was in those jobs, we need only look to Carney’s election platform.

“The last time we faced a housing crisis at such a broad scale was after the Second World War”, read the platform. This crisis “has left younger generations facing rents, down payments and mortgage payments so high that it turned housing into a barrier to opportunity instead of a cornerstone of opportunity”.

What about Fraser’s record at immigration? According to the Liberal platform, the Trudeau government let immigration “grow at a rapid and unsustainable pace”.

In December, when Liberal fortunes were in the toilet, Fraser announced that, for family reasons, he was quitting politics. Strangely, after the party witnessed a reversal in the polls, he announced he was returning.

In Carney’s eyes, Fraser’s blundering on two key files qualifies him to become justice minister. The only thing worse than Fraser as a cabinet minister may be Carney’s judgment.

Also in the front row was Chrystia Freeland, who served as deputy prime minister and finance minister under Trudeau and is now returning to cabinet as minister of transportation and internal trade.

Freeland’s record is best summed up, again, by the Liberal platform: “Business investment in Canada has dropped from 14 per cent of GDP in 2014 to 11 per cent in 2024, undermining long-term economic growth”.

Meanwhile, long-time Trudeau lieutenant Mélanie Joly, whose reign at foreign affairs was about as successful as Fraser was at housing and immigration, moves to industry.

Well, if we’re stuck with Carney’s retreads, at least we can laugh about ’em. Through the tears:

Noah has some faint praise for the new minister of National Defence and the new Secretary of State for Defence Procurement:

Welp it’s official. Bill Blair is out.

I cant say that it’s overly shocking. I don’t think anyone truly expected Blair to be MND by the end of today. While I will give Blair some credit for holding the fort, most of you already know I wasn’t his biggest fan.

He was a great placeholder who was able to smoothly roll out the plans left to him. He also did have several good public showings, such as his efforts in Korea last year. I will give credit where it is due.

However, he was also uninspiring, too passive in his role, and while I have no doubt he took it seriously, was never going to be a great long-term option. He had long overstayed his welcome […] Now he’s out completely from cabinet and in his place we have not one but two new ministers on the defence profile!

David McGuinty, best known for his eight-year stint as Chair of the National Security and Intelligence Committee has taken the reigns as the new Minister of National Defence While Kelowna MP and veteran Stephen Fuhr will take on a new role as Secretary of State for Defence Procurement.

In this role Fuhr will work under McGuinty specifically to tackle the file of Defence Procurement ahead of the establishment of the DPA. He is one of eight new secretaries of state that will operate on a “junior” level in cabinet.

Now McGuinty wouldn’t have been my first pick. I will openly admit that, but it is hard [not] to argue that he is the most prepared for the role, and likely the best we have available.

McGuinty previously held the NSICOP chair from 2017 all the way until December when he was appointed Minister of Public Safety. He has a background in International Development before becoming a parliamentarian, including stints with UNICEF.

He isn’t coming into this without a background on the current security climate we’re facing. He certainly can’t be said to be ill-prepared to take the role at a time when CAF and the DND are at one of their most pivotal moments in restructuring.

May 12, 2025

Hiding Sir John A. from the woke mob

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

Woke iconoclasm swept across the country, but the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald outside the Ontario Legislature in Queen’s Park was hidden away inside a plywood box. James Pew catches up on the situation inside Queen’s Park Crescent:

“Free John” spray painted on the plywood boards covering the statue of Sir John A. MacDonald in Queen’s Park Toronto.

It’s not just historical content distorted by bad actors, it is the entire way history is thought about, taught, and used to legitimize all sorts of nefarious agendas, which forms a broader set of concerns. For instance, a Toronto man recently found himself in trouble over a meaningful act of non-destructive civil disobedience involving a monument to a beloved and needlessly contentious Canadian historical figure. Daniel Tate is an ardent patriot and founder of a civic advocacy group called IntegrityTO, who describe themselves as “a coalition of concerned citizens who want to restore integrity-driven leadership so that Toronto can be a great city once again”. In a minor act of public vandalism, and in a moment of frustration over the disrespect shown to Canada’s boxed up father of confederation, Tate spray painted “Free John” on the plywood hoarding covering the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald at Queen’s Park in Toronto. No paint touched the statue itself, just the plywood that hides it away from the public, and protects it from the angry and destructive social justice mob.

Sir John A’s Queen’s Park statue initially became the unseen centerpiece of the current unsightly plywood enclosure after an incident which took place in 2020; three radical social justice activists splashed it with pink paint. It is worth pointing out that this cherished monument to the father of confederation was first installed in 1894. And although Black Lives Matter activists Daniel Gooch, Danielle Smith, and Jenna Reid initially found themselves in hot water over their costly and disrespectful acts of public vandalism (they also painted statues of Egerton Ryerson and King Edward VII Equestrian), all charges were withdrawn in 2021. In their statement to the media the group said, “along with a coalition of artists, the group artistically disrupted statues of slaveholders and monuments to colonialism at Ryerson University and at Queen’s Park”. One would think Daniel Tate should be extended the same leniency for his “artistic disruption”.

Image of Black Lives Matter activists vandalizing the Queen’s Park statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, (via CBC)

As it stands, Tate has been criminally charged with mischief under $5000 which carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison. Still in the preliminary stages, his next court appearance is scheduled for June 30.

Last month Tate appeared on AM 640’s The Oakley Show where he remarked, “The sad irony of it, people were defacing and vandalizing national monuments with impunity … four or five years ago. No Charges. We were all watching aghast at how this was all happening. And, it was acceptable somehow. And here I am five years later. I didn’t even deface a statue or a monument, it was literally a piece of plywood – the cheapest plywood you could find. And now I’m clogging the criminal justice system with this completely frivolous charge.”

While covering Tate’s case, independent journalist Daniel Bordman said, “This is a great example of 2-Tier policing because if he wrote Free Palestine instead he’d probably be given the key to the city”. And journalist Anthony Furey posted the following on X: “There has been so much lawlessness and disorder on Toronto streets in recent years that goes totally unchecked … But if you write FREE JOHN on a boarded up statue of Sir John A, police handcuff and arrest you on the spot – which is what happened to Daniel Tate the other week”.

This begs the question, if security was on-site to arrest Tate in the immediate moments that followed his minor spray paint transgression, why does Sir John A. need to be boxed up at all? One security guard around the clock would suffice. Does the Queen’s Park premises not already have security? It appears they keep a close eye on Sir John A’s unfortunate wooden container. So, why not free John? Beef up security a little if necessary, but let our first Prime Minister once again be visible and unadulterated in his rightful place of honour. For the sake of our blessed Holy Peter, it’s been five bloody years!

May 9, 2025

They keep saying the quiet part out loud – democracy is a threat to the establishment

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Cancon, Europe, France, Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

N.S. Lyons went to Barad-dûr Ottawa earlier this month to speak at the 2025 Civitas Canada Conference, and posted his remarks on his Substack:

The 2022 Freedom Convoy induced a state of panic in the Canadian federal government, yet the elected representatives proved completely unwilling to even talk to anyone from the protests. The government clearly persuaded itself that this was an actual insurrection, and waited for the violence to break out … and there was no violence, other than that provided by the police and a few paid actors.
A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen! It’s a pleasure to visit the North and get a glimpse behind the new Iron Curtain …

As it happens, the official theme of this conference is “Freedom and its Discontents: Liberal Democracy at a Crossroads”. That is a timely theme indeed. Because I think it isn’t too extreme to say that, all around the Western world today, democracy is under assault — even that it risks extinction. It risks extinction because the authorities that run our societies seem to find the practice, values, and very spirit of democracy to be increasingly intolerable.

In France, where the ruling government maintains power despite being the most widely hated in decades, the most popular candidate of the most popular political party has been barred from challenging that government in upcoming elections, on legal grounds that are openly political.

In Romania, when the “wrong” outsider candidate appeared poised to win an election, authorities simply canceled the election outright and then had him arrested, the unelected national security state inventing entirely unsupported excuses about foreign meddling to justify their coup d’état against the democratic process.

In Germany, the state has now begun the process of banning the country’s most popular party, supported by more than a quarter of the voting population, in order to avoid facing any real political opposition. “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary”, is how a former European Commissioner confidently foreshadowed events on live television a few months ago.

One gets the sense that the honest view of our exasperated political elites is as captured in a Bloomberg News headline from last year which read: “2024 is a year of elections, and that’s a threat to democracy”.

In country after country, governments are moving to desperately tighten their grip over the people they rule, sharply curtailing freedom of speech and access to information, and using alleged threats to security and stability to justify granting themselves emergency powers, weaponizing the law, criminalizing dissent, and suppressing any meaningful political opposition.

In the United Kingdom, more than 12,000 people per year (that’s 33 per day on average) — are now arrested for speech- and literal thought-crimes, including silent prayer. UK jails now hold hundreds of political prisoners, more than anywhere else in Europe outside of Russia and Belarus. These are people persecuted for, essentially, voicing dissent over their government’s catastrophic policies. Recently, for instance, a British woman with no criminal history was jailed for more than two years for a single Facebook post criticizing the state’s willful failure to stop illegal migration.

In Brazil, a single Supreme Court judge, in alliance with the country’s leftist president, has effectively established a judicial dictatorship, locking up political rivals by decree, silencing the speech of opposition figures, and utilizing state leverage over the financial system to punish political enemies by banishing them from public economic life.

But of course Brazil’s authorities learned these tactics by observation. Observation of Canada, to be precise, where Justin Trudeau’s government first employed debanking — along with a little brute force — as a tool to crush peaceful protest of his draconian and disastrous pandemic lockdown policies.

Today, the Canadian government’s weaponization of the legal system and public institutions, including state-funded media, to impose a quasi-totalitarian progressive ideological regime, censor and jail dissenters, and effectively transform Canada into a one-party state, has, I’m afraid, won your country a real measure of global infamy. Many Canadians here may not be aware of just how your government appears from the outside, but I’m afraid it’s not a good look at all. Unfortunately I must report that when many of us look at Canada what we see is a global leader in progressive authoritarianism, out-of-control migration, growing anarcho-tyranny, foreign subversion, and ideologically-induced economic stagnation.

But then, what we might realistically call the liberal-authoritarian model is, sadly, the new normal in the West, where many hyphenated liberal-democracies seem to have concluded that they must now begin to cast off the democratic half of that historical compact.

It may seem that this hardening of control is a response to the rise of so-called populism, which has swept the Western world. Certainly many authoritarian measures have been justified, without any sense of irony, as necessary to defend “our democracy” (so-called) against the dissatisfaction of the actual demos. And it’s true that fear of populism — which is really fear of genuine democracy — does seem to consistently provoke a spiral of ham-fisted reactions by our increasingly authoritarian states. But the reality is that populism is itself a reaction, an organic immune response to the particularly unresponsive and anti-democratic new form of governance that has visibly overtaken the West in recent decades.

The growing problem of antisemitism in Canada

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

In The Free Press, Casey Babb considers the growing risks to Jews on the streets of Canadian cities after the October 2024 terror attack and resulting Israeli military reaction:

“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Late last year I sat down to breakfast in Ottawa, Ontario, with Dr. Einat Wilf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She had come to Canada’s capital to speak about the war in Israel, what Palestinians really want, and the future of a possible two-state solution. Near the end of our chat, I asked if she had seen any of the “pro-Palestinian” rallies that had become a weekly occurrence in the city. “One of them went by my hotel last night,” Wilf said. “There’s a very dark energy to them. Serious pre-pogrom vibes.”

The word pogrom is the Yiddish word for “devastation” or “destruction”. What it refers to, historically, are the mob attacks that were a regular feature of life for Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries — attacks that most often were passively or openly supported by the state.

Wilf chose it deliberately.

In the roughly six months since we sat down together, the situation in Ottawa and across the country has only worsened. Canada has become one of the most antisemitic countries in the Western world.

If you doubt that assertion, it’s important to note that’s how others have described it, too.

In a report released on May 6 by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, it states that from October 7, 2023 through the end of 2024, antisemitism in Canada skyrocketed an astounding 670 percent. Further, between October 7, 2023 and October 7, 2024, there were 1,500 pro-Palestinian rallies in Toronto alone. That’s over four a day — every day — for a year straight.

While the outbreak of antisemitism throughout the West has been precipitous in virtually every country — the tenor, violence, and extremist nature of Jew-hatred in Canada has ratcheted up in a way few other places on Earth have experienced.

Consider the following — much of which has gotten scant media attention.

Targeting Jews in Their Backyards

  • In September 2024 protesters sympathetic to Hamas and the “resistance” jubilantly rallied outside a Jewish retirement facility in Ottawa where several Holocaust survivors live, and where 60 percent of the residents suffer from dementia. Chants of “Go back to Europe” and “We want bullets and missiles!” in Arabic could be heard from their bedrooms.
  • On Remembrance Day in 2024 at Sir Robert Borden public school in Ottawa, where there is a large Jewish student body, a Palestinian protest song was the only song played during an event to honor Canadian soldiers. When pressed on the choice of music, Principal Aaron Hobbs said it was chosen to add some diversity and inclusion to a day usually about “a white guy who has done something related to the military”.
  • There have been numerous instances where, in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, protesters have dressed up like Palestinian terrorists, including the October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar.
  • Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protests surrounded the Holocaust Museum in Montreal in March 2024, where they shouted, “Death to Israel” and “Death to the Jews”.
  • At a softball game for teenage girls between Canada and Israel as part of last year’s Canada Cup Women’s International Softball Championship in Surrey, British Columbia, protesters stood on the sidelines wearing keffiyehs, holding signs that read “Israel is a genocidal state”, with another equating Israel with Nazi Germany.
  • In April, a pro-Hamas rally was staged in Winnipeg, just steps from a Jewish community center where children attend school and day care.
  • During Israel’s official day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism on April 29, protesters stood in front of Beth Emeth Bais Yehuda Synagogue in Toronto waving Palestinian flags. One man wore a sweater that read “Palestinian Holocaust: Never Again Is Now”.
  • Earlier this month in Montreal, protesters were filmed chanting “All the Zionists are racists” through megaphones at a school for students ages 4 to 16 with intellectual disabilities and autism-spectrum disorders.

These activities aren’t normal protests. They aren’t in front of the Israeli embassy in Ottawa or the Israeli consulate in Toronto. They aren’t directed toward a specific Israeli policy, law, regulation, or act, and they certainly make no mention of Hamas, Hezbollah, or any other terrorist organization that has brought immense death and destruction upon the Palestinians. These are belligerent acts of aggression designed to intimidate Canada’s Jewish community, to coerce them into silence, and ultimately, to extinguish their public presence.

May 7, 2025

Ontario versus the courts

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

In general terms, you would expect the government — in this case the Ontario provincial government — to pass the laws and the courts — when called upon — to rule on their legality. We don’t expect courts to act as if they can overrule legislation passed by the government unless it clearly contravenes the Charter or goes beyond the powers assigned to that level of government. But Canadian courts seem to be choosing to expand their powers to curtail the actions of elected government more and more these days:

Bike lanes on Yonge Street north of Bloor Street in downtown Toronto.
Image from Google Street View

In the weeks of the election period, Canadian courts were busy preventing any legislation of controversy from taking effect — and they went relatively unnoticed. On March 28, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice blocked the Ontario government from banning supervised consumption sites near schools and daycares. It struck again on April 22, halting the Ontario government from removing Toronto’s bike lanes.

Days later, on April 24, the Quebec Superior Court cancelled the province’s planned mega-tuition hike for out-of-province students.

In the case of Toronto’s major bike lanes — on Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue — Ontario Premier Doug Ford had, in theory, all the power he needed to remove them. Municipalities are creatures of the province, and traffic regulation is also a provincial domain; thus, provincial legislatures can override just about anything that a city council does, especially if related to roads. So, in November, Ford legislated the removal of the lanes, which were previously constructed by city authorities (he was later re-elected premier, so clearly bike lane preservation wasn’t a priority for voters).

In December, cycling advocates launched a court challenge that, really, should have been laughed out of the room. They argued that the removal of bike lanes amounted to a violation of their Charter rights, specifically the Section 7 catch-all right to life, liberty and security.

It remains to be seen whether there is a Charter right that guarantees two per cent of the population the right to have specialty lanes built for their commuting pleasure — the trial process is still underway. In the meantime, Ontario’s Judge Paul Schabas, a Liberal appointee, has granted the cycling advocates an injunction to keep the lanes in place, because allowing their dismantling to go forward would impose an injunction-worthy risk of “irreparable harm” to Toronto’s cyclists.

“There is no evidence that the government has engaged in any planning as to how the bike lanes will be removed or what will replace them,” Schabas wrote in the decision. “The demolition and reconstruction will create its own impacts on traffic — both for cyclists and motor vehicles — and will likely result in considerable disturbance and congestion while that is taking place. Cyclists who continue to use these routes will be at risk of irreparable physical harm for which … the government will not provide any compensation in damages.”

And, just like that, a judge overruled a decision of the elected legislature, opting instead to take, temporarily, the zero-risk-tolerance advice of unelected government consultants. It’s at least good that Ford is appealing Schabas’ decision.

May 6, 2025

If “a trade imbalance constitutes an American ‘subsidy’ justifying annexation of that country, then the US is going to have to annex most of the planet”

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

Despite getting his preferred choice elected as Canadian Prime Minister, US President Donald Trump still seems determined to troll Canadians about becoming the “51st state”. Among his shifting set of justifications for this is the trade imbalance between the US and Canada, which Trump chooses to interpet as a “huge” subsidy the US is providing to Canada. On that basis, there are going to have to be a lot more US states in the future:

So now we have serious commentators gaming out the pros and cons of war with Canada. What started out as a mildly amusing bit of presidential “trolling” is now being discussed as next year’s Donbass.

If, for the purposes of argument, one accepts the President’s line that a trade imbalance constitutes an American “subsidy” justifying annexation of that country, then the US is going to have to annex most of the planet: last year Washington had a one-and-a-quarter trillion-dollar imbalance with the world. It’s not hard to figure out why: over recent decades the uniparty turned a country that used to make things into a crappy low-wage service economy. […] The US now has trade imbalances with — or “subsidies” of — not only the countries that you’d expect (China, Mexico, Germany, Japan, India) but a lot of ones you wouldn’t (Finland, Algeria).

True, Canada is closer than Algeria, so there are national-security implications for Washington: the country and its politicians (Trudeau, Carney) have been entirely hollowed out by Peking, but then so it goes south of the border (Biden, McConnell). And Trump’s plan for a “fifty-first state” will not solve that problem.

The “fifty-first state” shtick can’t ever have been serious, can it? Geographically, the fifty-first state would be bigger than the other fifty combined, and with a bigger population than California’s. Last time they added stars to the flag, both parties got something out of it: the GOP Alaska and the Dems Hawaii. So wouldn’t it make more sense to make Canada’s ten provinces and three territories a baker’s dozen of new American states with a couple of senators apiece? Yeah, sure – if you want Republicans never to win a national election again.

So, aside from last week’s vote, how is the other side reacting? Last Thursday’s print edition of The Spectator contained a curiously phrased squib from my old editor, Charles Moore:

    The President may be only hazily aware that the King, of whom, he says, he has the “honour to be a friend”, is also King of Canada. If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person, Trump may come to see that his next-door neighbour is part of a long-standing, legitimate order which Canadian voters are happy to endorse.

Let’s just run that again:

    If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person …

The last time his mother opened Parliament in Ottawa was in 1977 — her Silver Jubilee year. Trudeau-wise, Justin’s father Pierre was not keen on it, but didn’t feel he could pick and win a fight with the Palace over it. A quarter-century later, Trudeau’s successor Jean Chrétien, a towering colossus of micro-pettiness, was annoyed at being given a crappy seat at the Queen Mum’s funeral and so scuttled Her Majesty’s Golden Jubilee throne speech.

So why would Charles Moore think it “likely” that the King would be opening Parliament in Ottawa later this month? If, as it was in my day, Speccie columns for Thursday’s magazine have to be filed on Tuesday, that would make Moore the first guy in either the Canadian or UK media to know what was not revealed to the world until Friday […]

The King has travelled far less in the first three years of his reign than his mother did: shortly after her Coronation, the Queen set off on a tour of parts of the Commonwealth that kept her away from London for six months. Her son can’t do that because he’s very sick with cancer. So it’s quite something that he’ll land in Ottawa on Monday May 26th, deliver the throne speech the following day, and then fly out again. Carney wouldn’t be doing this if he weren’t going to take the opportunity to put his view of Canadian sovereignty into the Sovereign’s mouth.

So, if Trump really has the “honour to be a friend” of the King, the only point of this 24-hour flying visit is so His Majesty can send the message that friends don’t let friends threaten to steal each other’s countries. In fact, he has made a point of referring to himself as “King of Canada” quite a bit of late. […] The “King of Canada” bit was done at the instigation of Carney. Which is odd. Especially from a party that has spent half-a-century diminishing and degrading the Crown, and for a monarch who is, unlike his mother, largely unloved and unloveable. Yet Carney seems belatedly to have come around to the old-school monarchist view that, without the Sovereign, there is insufficient to distinguish Canada from its domineering southern neighbour — especially when that neighbour keeps talking about taking it. On the other hand, both the King and his Canadian prime minister are bigtime players at the World Economic Forum, so they’re not the most obvious choice for defenders of national sovereignty. On the other other hand, it’s one thing to surrender it to fellow globalists, quite another to surrender it to Donald Trump.

I have no idea where this is headed, and if anyone can enlighten me I’d be happy to hear it. But Trump has doubled down on it, and Carney is playing the King card to oppose it. As longtime readers know, I have a general preference for smaller nations as happier homes for their people. If Alberta or Quebec voted to secede, why would you take the trouble to do that just to become a minor and inconsequential part of another big country?

But, that aside, why would it be in America’s interest to absorb a hostile population of mostly lefties over a vast and unpoliceable landmass? The history of the last thirty years is that China has shown there are subtler ways of taking over the world without firing a shot, while America has persisted in doing it the old-fashioned way and, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and elsewhere, has gotten nowhere. Why add Canada to the list?

May 5, 2025

Post-election Bullshit Bulletin from The Line

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

Last week’s federal election has left us in the weird, unresolved situation of being not significantly different than the situation before the writ dropped. We still have a Liberal minority government, probably supported by the rump of the NDP caucus (minus Jagmeet Singh) and a reliable vote from the Green MP, which is enough to pass at least an initial confidence vote in the Commons. Before The Line‘s editors put the Bullshit Bulletin back into mothballs, we get a useful wrap-up post:

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

We want to now offer some advice to Pierre Poilievre: grow up.

Seriously. Because not calling your opponent to congratulate him is bullshit.

We don’t mean Mark Carney! We do think Poilievre should call Carney and offer congratulations and also test the waters to see what extent, if any, there is room for cooperation. We aren’t naive idealists. We know neither man is going to want to hop into the sack — politically speaking — with the other. But there are still norms in a democracy, and they should be observed. Poilievre did congratulate Carney in his remarks on election night, and did so with professionalism and grace, and that’s good.

But we’re actually talking about Bruce Fanjoy, the newly elected Liberal MP for Carleton, the riding that had been held for many years by … Pierre Poilievre. Fanjoy defeated Poilievre on Monday, and by a decisive margin. In an interview with NewsTalk 1010 in Toronto, Fanjoy said that he hadn’t received a call from Poilievre to congratulate him. Calls to the winners of a riding race by the opponents in that riding are routine. Fanjoy doesn’t seem much fazed by the lack of a call, but still. It’s not a great look.

Indeed, we might go so far as to say that not making a call will be seen as confirmation in the eyes of some voters of what they already thought about Poilievre. We aren’t the first to note that the Conservative leader is polarizing and has high “negatives” — Canadians tell pollsters that they dislike him. We understand that congratulating the guy that beat you must be like pulling your own teeth out. We also think we have a good enough read on Poilievre’s personality to know why this is particularly difficult for him.

Too bad. A would-be national leader is expected to sometimes do unpleasant things. And we’re calling about a two-minute phone call here, not making a decision to send troops into battle (some of whom will die) or a decision that will alter the trajectory of our national history.

Make the call, offer congratulations, wish him well, offer any cooperation you can, and get it over with. And if you don’t, Canadians will be right to call bullshit on that.

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte notes the oddly incurious attitude of the Canadian mainstream media toward the man who became Trudeau’s successor as PM and leader of the Liberal Party:

Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Mark Carney became prime minister of Canada in March without our media delivering a single meaningful profile of him.

There was a time, only recently ended, when every party leader and most prospective party leaders (and most senior cabinet ministers and chiefs of staff) were subjected to scrutiny the moment they were deemed serious players. A reporter, usually a high-ranking feature artist, would be assigned by Maclean’s, Saturday Night, Report on Business, The Walrus, The Globe & Mail, The National Post, a CBC documentary desk, or any number of other outlets, to dig into the person’s past, read everything on the record, speak to friends and enemies and knowledgeable observers, weigh all the evidence and craft a narrative to give readers (or audiences) a sense of what made the person tick, and some idea of how to think about him or her in relation to public office. At their best, these profiles would provide a welcome counterpoint to how political actors chose to define themselves and how they were defined by their opponents. They were an arbiter of sorts, a first draft of history depended upon by participants in the political process, other media, and the informed public.

No one bothered to profile Carney, even though his advent in our politics had been rumoured for years. It was as though the press gallery in Ottawa assumed he was a known quantity because he’d shown up at the Politics & The Pen Gala for several years in his capacity as governor of the Bank of Canada.

Carney was not only sworn in as prime minister without sustained scrutiny, he made it all the way to the last week of a national campaign before the Globe landed what read like a well-intentioned but hastily assembled and not terribly revealing profile of him. Also in the last week, The Logic, a very good upstart business news site, produced a better one, but for a relatively tiny audience behind an expensive paywall.

Thinking and reporting in depth about the careers and characters of our leaders is perhaps the most important thing that journalists do. Yet Carney’s experience is not unique. If you want to know anything about our last two prime ministers, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, you won’t find much in newspapers, magazines, or documentaries. You’ll need to read the books about them: Stephen Harper by John Ibbitson, Right Side Up and The Longer I’m Prime Minister by Paul Wells, Party of One by Michael Harris; Trudeau by John Ivison, Promise and Peril by Aaron Wherry, The Prince by Stephen Maher, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes by Paul Wells. There is a whole other shelf of aggressively critical takes on the two leaders which offer valuable insights amid their axe-grinding: Tom McMillan’s Not My Party (Harper), Mel Hurtig’s The Arrogant Autocrat (Harper), Brooke Jeffrey’s Dismantling Canada (Harper), Mark Bourrie’s Kill The Messengers (Harper), Yves Engler’s The Ugly Canadian (Harper), Ezra Levant’s Libranos (Trudeau), Candice Malcolm’s Losing True North (Trudeau). Additionally, there are books by the leaders themselves, Harper’s Right Here, Right Now, and Trudeau’s Common Ground, and a range of others written about particular issues or by other participants in their governments.

The past year has brought a wealth of books on our political leadership. Justin Trudeau on the Ropes (Sutherland House) and The Prince (Simon & Schuster) chronicled the last days of Trudeau’s prime ministership. Catherine Tsalikis’s Chrystia (House of Anansi) profiled the woman who ultimately brought him down. Andrew Lawton’s Pierre Poilievre (Sutherland House) and Mark Bourrie’s Ripper (Biblioasis) treated the Conservative leader who sought to replace him. Carney, seemingly intent on dominating the conversation about himself, was ready with another book this spring. The election delayed it until summer.

May 3, 2025

Carney sets his agenda

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

On his Substack, Paul Wells says that newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney had a good opening press conference on Friday morning:

Mark Carney at the National Press Theatre, 2 May, 2025.
Photo By Paul Wells via his Substack

The first news conference is the easiest, because armies of public servants have been working on deliverables for weeks, and because little has had time to go wrong yet. Even by that congenial standard, Mark Carney had a good morning.

He began by noting something few of us had: that there was no serious organized attempt to reject Monday’s election result. “The leader of every party quickly and graciously accepted the results. At a time when democracies around the world are under threat, Canadians can be proud that ours remains strong.”

Canadians want “big changes quickly”. He promised to work “relentlessly” to deliver. He is “committed to working with others, governing as a team in cabinet and caucus … working in real partnership with provinces, territories, and Indigenous people and bringing together labour, business, and civil society”. Everyone always promises to work with the provinces, at first. He seemed to have something specific in mind. “In the coming weeks, I will unveil more of our plans to engage with Canadians as we embark on the biggest transformation of our economy since the end of the Second World War.”

There’ll be a new cabinet in 10 days. A return to Parliament on May 27. The King will read the Throne Speech. Before any of that, Carney will meet Donald Trump in Washington next Tuesday. He’ll remove “federal barriers to internal trade” by July 1. He’ll “identify projects that are in the national interest, projects that will connect Canada, deepen our ties with the world, and grow our economy for generations”. He’ll build a lot of houses. He’ll hire more border-services agents and muster “dog teams, drones and scanners to fight the traffic in guns and drugs”. He’ll “make bail harder to get for those charged with stealing cars, home invasion, human trafficking, and smuggling”.

There was more but you get the gist. Time for questions! What’s he expecting from his Washington trip? “Quite a comprehensive set of meetings,” mostly on tariffs. Does he expect a better reception than Volodomyr Zelensky got? “Look, I go there with the expectation of constructive — difficult but constructive — discussions.”

How’s he going to make Parliament work, with less than a majority? He offered no details at first, except to point out that the Liberals won more votes on Monday than any party ever has, and that it won seats in every province and a majority of the seats in seven provinces. He said he’s already spoken to Yves-François Blanchet and Pierre Poilievre. Speaking of Poilievre, there’ll be a by-election for the currently discomfited Conservative leader “as soon as possible … No games. Nothing. Straight.” Is the prime minister a subscriber? I don’t divulge such things.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the PM found a way to include the King in his agenda, but JJ is quite right here:

Poilievre to run in Alberta riding when the byelection is set

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

After losing the seat he’d held for more than 20 years in this week’s federal election, Pierre Poilievre’s political future was clouded. An Alberta MP-elect, Damien Kurek has volunteered to resign so that Poilievre can run in his riding.

Seatless Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre will run in an Alberta byelection as Conservative MP Damien Kurek “temporarily” steps aside.

In a press release, Kurek, the Battle River—Crowfoot MP-elect, said he was relinquishing his seat for Poilievre because it’s “what’s best for Canada” and the riding. Kurek was first elected in the Alberta riding in 2019.

Poilievre lost his Ottawa-area seat to a Liberal challenger by more than 4,000 votes in Monday’s election.

“The people of Battle River—Crowfoot will be represented well by Pierre for the remainder of this Parliamentary session, and I will keep working with our incredible local team to do everything I can to remain the strong voice for you as I support him in the process, and then run again here in Battle River—Crowfoot in the next general election,” Kurek said in a statement.

At a press conference in Ottawa on Friday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said he would call a byelection as soon as possible and that the government would play “no games” with Poilievre’s quest to win a seat.

Apparently, Carney is going with the less-unfriendly path rather than delaying the call for a byelection for the full allowable period (as Justin Trudeau certainly would have done).

May 2, 2025

Trump’s victory lap after getting his preferred PM elected in Canada

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper rounds up American reactions to the Liberal victory in the Monday election, as many Americans seem to agree that Carney’s win was at least partly their doing:

As the U.S. awoke to a renewed Liberal government on their northern border, Americans of all political persuasions embraced the view that they — for better or worse — had caused it.

“Carney owes his job to President Donald Trump,” was the Tuesday view of the Washington Post editorial board, declaring that the U.S. president had singlehandedly thwarted the election of a populist Conservative government in Canada.

The Centre for American Progress Action Fund — a left-wing Washington, D.C.-based think tank — framed Carney’s win as a model for how anti-Trump rhetoric can win elections.

“Prime Minister Carney’s success demonstrates that resistance to President Trump’s bullying has mass popular appeal,” read a statement.

Actor Billy Baldwin, a perennial backer of progressive causes, cheered Carney’s victory with a viral social media post declaring “Trump singlehandedly delivers the election for the liberals in Canada with his 51st state bullsh-t.”

Even Rolling Stone, which put Justin Trudeau on the magazine’s cover in 2017, opined that Canada’s newest Liberal government was effectively a Trump creation. “Donald Trump single-handedly elected a new Canadian Liberal Government that was down 25 points in January with his endless ’51st State’ bloviation,” wrote the publication.

Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro broke down the Canadian election in an extended segment on his Tuesday show, framing it as a direct failure of Trump’s foreign policy.

“Let’s be real about this; the rhetorical attacks on Canada have not actually resulted in a net good for the United States,” said Shapiro. A perennial critic of Trump’s tariff policy, Shapiro said that the White House’s habit of “yelling at Canada” had helped install a “far left-leaning internationalist” hostile to U.S. interests.

“All of this started off as a joke, and I think President Trump is so committed to the bit at this point that he couldn’t get off the train,” said Shapiro, in reference to Trump’s repeated pledges to turn Canada into the “51st state”.

A Republican consultant quoted anonymously by Politico on Tuesday was of a similar view, saying the outcome in Canada was a “pretty specific result based on the tariffs and 51st state trolling.”

On his Substack, Paul Wells offers some advice to Mark Carney about his dealings with Pierre Poilievre at this awkward time for the Conservative leader:

Stornoway in the Rockcliffe Park area of Ottawa, Ontario. It has been the official residence of the leader of the Official Opposition in Parliament since 1950.

One danger for Mark Carney is that he will be taught how to be a terrible politician by terrible politicians. A low-stakes test case is at hand. In this as in all things, a decent guiding principle should be: Don’t be like your opponent, and don’t be like your predecessor.

The test at hand is the uncomfortable predicament of Pierre Poilievre, who used to be a Member of Parliament and may want to be one again. In the meantime he is still the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Poilievre lost his seat in Carleton on Monday night. This is not entirely his fault. Liberal campaign teams from neighbouring ridings were invited to spend part of their time door-knocking in Poilievre’s riding. But candidates should try to win even when their opponents work hard to defeat them. I bet this thought has occurred to Poilievre since Monday.

The usual route to the Commons, for a leader who is not yet an MP, is to run in a by-election. Often new leaders find a sitting MP somewhere to vacate their seat and enable a by-election. Brian Mulroney ran in Central Nova in 1983, Jean Chrétien in Beauséjour in New Brunswick in 1990, Stephen Harper in Calgary Southwest in 2002.

Assume Poilievre can find some Conservative MP-elect willing to abandon a seat they just won so Poilievre can try his chance (again). How should Carney react?

It’s really a question in three parts. Should a by-election be held quickly or much later? Should the Liberals run a candidate? Should the Poilievre family keep living at Stornoway, the Opposition leader’s official residence, in the meantime?

I’m hearing from a lot of people who say Carney should wait as long as the law permits — up to a half year after a seat opens — before calling the by-election; that the Liberals should definitely run a candidate; and that Poilievre and his family should be evicted from their current fancy abode.

I spent part of Wednesday debating these questions with readers on Substack Notes. Most of the people offering this advice — let him twist, then hit him hard — pointed out that if Poilievre had a say about an adversary’s career plans, he would do everything in his power to make that adversary hurt.

I think it’s bad advice. It manages to be bad tactics and bad for the soul. The two considerations don’t always line up, but here they do.

Carney should call a by-election as soon as possible after a sitting MP resigns — 11 days after the notice of vacancy is received, the minimum permitted in law. If asked, he should prefer that the Poilievre family stay at Stornoway in the meantime. And while the third question is less clear, I’d argue that the Liberals should refrain from running a candidate in the by-election.

This plan would have Poilievre back in the Commons as soon as possible, with minimal risk and discomfort. He’ll be lucky to receive such generous treatment and, while I’m less confident than ever that I know how he thinks, what he should feel is gratitude. I suspect the feeling would confuse him.

May 1, 2025

Canada’s Conservative Party – every silver lining has a cloud

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

In the National Post, Colby Cosh considers the state of the party for the federal Conservatives after an election campaign that looked radically different than the one they had prepared to fight for more than a year:

Pierre Poilievre’s riding had an insane number of protest candidates registered for the election. Oddly, the same wasn’t true in any other riding in the country. This was an organized protest for electoral reform, supposedly.

The Conservative opposition is now bound to have a difficult year, with their leader inexplicably, inexcusably ejected from the Commons. Dedicated haters of Pierre Poilievre won’t find anything at all inexplicable about the Carleton disaster, but there will need to be a proper autopsy. Especially since Poilievre’s party gathered more vote share nationally than any right-wing party — or combination thereof! — has achieved since the days of Mulroney.

Even in Ontario, Poilievre’s Conservatives got over a million more votes than the hyper-critical Ford PCs did in a provincial election 60 days earlier, and they are headed toward a higher vote share within the province. So is Poilievre a generational leader potentially on the brink of a dynasty, or an unloved boob who got caught flat-footed by a change in public mood? I promise you that the quarrelling over that question is well underway.

I assume the CPC will keep its unlucky leader, which leaves only the question, “So then what?” The Liberals don’t have to call a by-election until six months after someone decides to resign to make way for Poilievre. And maybe I ought to say “if someone decides”. It’s not essential for a party leader to have a Commons seat, but it would certainly be ideal, especially with the Commons hung.

The Conservatives are bound to find themselves adopting more of a team approach to the Opposition job by default, and maybe this ought to have been considered while it was still optional. Even by Canadian standards, the CPC campaign was very leader-focused, and was obviously predicated on the idea that the people really wanted Poilievre and would like him more as they saw more of him. (And, again, this may actually have happened!) Now there’s a chance the CPC’s House leadership performs well over the next year or so — and then has to fade into the wallpaper behind the guy who already lost.

April 30, 2025

After the votes were counted

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

John Carter suggests that votes should be allocated to reflect the costs imposed on the voters by taxation, that is to ensure that those with the most “skin in the game” at least have their votes weighted more than those who pay little or no taxes but can still vote themselves more benefits:

Have you ever noticed how election results are regularly broken down geographically, as well by the demographic categories of age, sex, and – depending on the country – race, yet we almost never see the results separated into taxpayer vs taxeater status?

So anyhow.

For my American readers, in Canadian elections the Liberal Party is denoted by red, as the Devil and Karl Marx intended.

It is absolutely no surprise that Ottawa voted solidly for the Liberal Party of Canada, whose base consists of three primary groups: migrants, public sector workers, and baby boomers, all of whom are regime client groups, and all of whom are tightly packed into the nation’s capital.

Perhaps it’s that it’s tax season and I’m in a grumpy mood because I just got the bad news, but I can’t help but wonder about how electoral politics would change if only taxpayers were allowed to vote. It’s common for “taxpayers” to be used as a synonym for “the voting public”, but this is a bit of linguistic legerdemain which obscures a core dynamic rotting the heart out of every liberal democracy: most of the population are not, in fact, taxpayers. First there are those who don’t earn enough to pay taxes, such as university students; then there are those receiving direct welfare payments of one form or another; then there are public employees, who although they pay tax on paper, are clearly net recipients of government largess since their paychecks come from taxes in the first place.

The most successful parties in country after country are the parties that mobilize client groups by promising to steal money from productive citizens and transfer that wealth to their non-productive clients. This dynamic is baked into the cake of any universal suffrage democracy, which is why Universal Suffrage is a Suicide Pact. Parties need client groups for electoral support; wealth can only be plundered from the productive; therefore the only available relationship is to cultivate non-productive clients.

The problem, of course, is that over time this destroys the economic productivity of the liberal democracy, because the productive groups will become less productive because what’s the point, or they’ll just look for the exits, while the client groups will swell, becoming simultaneously too expensive to maintain and to electorally heavy to dislodge.

I suspect you could fix all of this by simply tying votes to tax receipts, with only those who are net taxpayers being given the franchise in any given election. At a stroke this would disenfranchise the welfare underclass, government bureaucrats, and university students, all of whom should be prohibited from voting as a matter of principle. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could implement a tax-weighted vote: the more taxes you pay, the more your vote counts.

In addition to the salutary effects of reducing the electoral weight of female voters (since men tend to pay more in taxes), weighting votes by tax receipts would lead to a very interesting incentive structure. On the one hand, everyone hates paying taxes, and wants to minimize the taxes they pay; if only taxpayers were voting, this would place a strong downward pressure on taxes and, hence, on the size of government (thus forcing states to find other ways of funding themselves, via e.g. tariffs or service fees). On the other hand, people like to vote, so there would be a strong incentive not to evade taxes. On the gripping hand, since paying more tax means your vote counts for more, there would be a countervailing incentive to pay as much tax as you can afford. One might imagine a state functioning as a sort of de facto oligarchy, with the billionaires happily paying obscene levels of tax in order to gather as much political power to their class as possible, and enforcing their tyranny by voting to keep taxes on everyone else to the absolute bare minimum. This would be a truly dystopian brier patch to be thrown into.

Alas, we do not inhabit such a political experiment. Returning to the ostensible topic of yesterday’s Canadian election, however, it would probably not be an exaggeration to posit that if we did inhabit such a system, Canada’s Conservative Party would have rolled the Liberals in this and, in all likelihood, almost every other election.

That is not, however, what happened.

The high-level outcome is that, after running the country into the ground for the last decade, the Liberal Party has been elected for the fourth consecutive time, with a mandate to complete the project of crashing the plane of Dominion with no survivors. It brings me absolutely no pleasure to report that I predicted the Liberals would win before the election was even called. The Liberals are four seats short of forming a majority in parliament, meaning they cannot quite form a stable government on their own. This is not a problem for the Liberals, however. Despite the glorious collapse of the New Democratic Party – which plummeted from 25 seats in the last federal election to 7 in the current election, by far their lowest in 30 years – the NDP retains just enough seats for them to form a stable coalition government with the Liberals. In other words, the outcome of this election is that Canada will be in essentially the same situation it was in before the election, with the only meaningful difference being that the Liberals have a few more seats than they did before.

The Korean War Week 45 – The Chinese Spring Offensive Begins! – April 29, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 29 Apr 2025

This is a week of nothing but battle action as the Chinese Spring Offensive crashes down on the UN forces like a tidal wave — literally hitting them along all of the front lines across the whole Korean Peninsula.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:46 Recap
01:59 The First Night
07:25 The Next Day
10:19 The Eastern Sector
13:56 The Kapyong Road
15:57 The Gloster Surrounded
19:48 Flight of the Glosters
(more…)

April 29, 2025

Canadian federal election result

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

April 27, 2025

“[T]he practical reality of electoral politics throughout the west: the choice is between a Leftward Ho! party and a Ratchet party”

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

Mark Steyn on the steady leftward march of pretty much every western nation that never, ever stops and only rarely slows down:

A ratchet allows rotation in one direction, but prevents rotation in the other direction. That’s been a common explanation of most western governments for decades … leftward motion occurs, but can only be stopped, never reversed.

In a shrewd assessment of the current campaign Down Under, Paul Collits cites a certain “niche Canadian”:

    Mark Steyn says that we cannot vote our way out of the Western mess. The 2025 Australian election is living proof of the truth of his claim. Whoever wins here will inherit an unholy mess, and will not have the will to address it.

Of course, he could be talking about next week’s Canadian election or last month’s German election. As we have noted, Fred Merz, the incoming chancellor in Berlin, has yet to take office but what Americans call the honeymoon is over before the coalition has been officially pronounced man and wife. Hermann Binkert, head honcho of Germany’s INSA polling agency, says the country has never seen loss of approval on this scale between the election and the formation of the government. The so-called “far-right” AfD is now leading in multiple polls. Which would be super-exciting if voting hadn’t already taken place.

In America, the new administration certainly has the “will to address” the “unholy mess” but the Trumpian Gulliver is beset on all sides by District Court Lilliputians whose position is that what a Democrat president has done cannot “lawfully” be undone. This is a pseudo-“constitutional” recognition of the practical reality of electoral politics throughout the west: the choice is between a Leftward Ho! party and a Ratchet party. If the Left wins, they dissolve the border and trannify your kids. If the “Right” wins (Stephen Harper, Scott Morrison), they may pause some of the more obviously crazy stuff but they never actually reverse the direction of travel. Unless they’re the UK Tories (Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak), in which case they stay in the leftie lane without even shifting down to third gear.

So “politics”, as increasingly narrowly defined, is less and less likely to save you. Because the gap between “politics” and reality grows ever wider. Consider the instructive example of one Hashem Abedi. Mr Abedi and his brother plotted the Ariana Grande concert bombing in Manchester. It was, from the Abedi viewpoint, a huge success: twenty-two dead, half of them kids, plus a thousand injured. It was a big deal at the time: lots of flowers, teddy bears, and heart-rending renditions of “Don’t Look Back in Anger”.

So you’d have thought even the British state would have at least pretended to take it seriously. Hashem Abedi was detained at His Majesty’s Pleasure, and under one of the three supposedly toughest prison regimes in England and Wales. Nevertheless, on April 12th he put three of his guards in hospital with what were described as “life-threatening injuries“. A fortnight later, two are still there. How did a maximum-security prisoner manage to do that? Well, he used boiling cooking oil and weaponised kitchen utensils.

So how did he get hold of boiling cooking oil? Was he a finalist for Maximum Security Masterchef? Ah, well. The details remain vague, and as usual the worthless UK media has shown not the slightest curiosity in how the Ariana Grande perp came close to bulking up his death toll by fifteen per cent.

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