Quotulatiousness

November 1, 2024

Canada – 30 protectionist marketing boards wrapped in a flag

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

In The Line, Greg Quinn points out just how blatantly hypocritical Canada’s politicians and diplomats are in any discussion with other nations when the subject turns to free trade:

Let me say this upfront, and clearly: when it comes to international trade, Canada is protectionist to an astonishing degree whilst at the same time claiming it is a supporter of global free trade. It wants every other country to open up (and complains when they don’t, or when they stand their ground) whilst ensuring access to the Canadian market is more difficult. This is a result of federal policy, inter-provincial restrictions, and vested interests. And it is flagrantly hypocritical.

When it comes to dairy, beef and the mutual recognition of professional qualifications, for example, Canada’s claim to openness is simply a lie. Agricultural groups and businesses dominate and control the local landscape and attempts to either overcome that (or bring external companies in) have failed on many occasions over the years. This could well get worse if the Liberals agree to what the Bloc Québécois has demanded — even more dairy protections — in a desperate attempt to remain in power for a little while longer.

Some of these issues are well known to Canadians — particularly the domestic ones, or the ones that touch on national unity frictions. But I’m not sure Canadians understand how this is perceived globally, including by Canada’s allies. Readers may recall that there was a mild furore a while back when the U.K. dared to pause trade negotiations as Canada refused to move on access for British cheese. There were accusations of the U.K. not playing fair and such like.

It’s bad enough that we “protect” Canadians from lower-priced foreign food, but we even manage to maintain inter-provincial trade barriers that directly harm all Canadian consumers:

Then we have interprovincial trade barriers. According to the Business Council of Alberta in a 2021 report, these barriers are tantamount to a 6.9 per cent tariff on Canadian goods. They also noted that removal of these could boost Canada’s GDP by some 3.8 per cent (or C$80 billion), increase average wages by some C$1,800 per person, and increase government revenues for social programming by some 4.4 per cent.These barriers hinder internal trade between the provinces, including the work of those companies that import goods from other countries.

A freer market, at home or globally, would not solve all the issues that exist with prices, but it would certainly increase competition and give consumers more choice. What exists at the minute is a pretense of choice.

Opening up the Canadian market would certainly benefit other countries, including my own United Kingdom, and there would be some impact on local business and producers. This is true, and acknowledged. But opening itself up to more global trade and dismantling internal trade barriers — and these are things all the politicians insist they like the sound of in theory — would be a win-win for Canadian consumers and Canadian society as a whole. Some big companies and carefully coddled special interests would be upset, but they aren’t supposed to be the ones making decisions in a democracy, or in a free market.

October 31, 2024

Riley Donovan – “October 24th was a tragic day …”

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

Riley Donovan enumerates some of the most notable losers from the federal government’s belated realization that cutting immigration numbers was politically necessary:

A billboard in Toronto in 2019, showing Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message. The PPC has been the only federal party against mass immigration from its founding.
Photo from The Province

October 24th was a tragic day for real estate developers, speculators, cheap labour employers, business lobbyists, slumlords, corrupt immigration consultants, and strip mall diploma mill operators. On that day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reluctantly caved to public opinion and announced that the Liberal government will slash permanent resident levels by 21%.

Less than one week before the October 24th announcement, an Abacus poll revealed that support for immigration restriction has reached 72% – a statistical supermajority. This includes a majority of all four major political parties and every age group. A month before the announcement, a Leger poll found that majorities of both white and non-white Canadians want lower immigration.

It is now impossible to find even one demographic subset of Canadians that registers majority support for high immigration – except perhaps if you exclusively surveyed CEOs, bank presidents, or woke university professors (politics makes for strange bedfellows).

There is no prominent, well-funded immigration restriction lobby in this country – in fact, there is a prominent, well-funded pro-immigration lobby. Columnists – with the exception of yours truly – almost never wrote the word “immigration” before the summer of 2023. The Canadian public was not goaded by public figures into opposing mass immigration by a margin of three to one; this trend was entirely grassroots.

The shift in public attitudes was the result of countless private conversations in which regular people shared worries about job lines full of international students that stretched around the block, Canadian youth outcompeted by foreign workers for positions at Tim Horton’s, seniors living in RVs because of sky-high rent, and hospitals overcrowded by an annual inflow of 1.3 million newcomers.

October 26, 2024

Thank goodness somebody finally had the courage to say that Trump is a fascist

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

I mean it’s been obvious since his supporters have been goose-stepping around the Reichstag the White House in their brown shirts, red armbands, and constant chanting of the “Horst Wessel Lied“. How have the mainstream media managed to avoid seeing the clear inspiration of Trump’s Kampf and reporting it to credulous flyover state cretins Americans?

This week Kamala Harris described Donald Trump as a “fascist” who seeks “unchecked power”. Conservative commentators have expressed outrage at this absurd strategy, one which will doubtless backfire. And yet they appear to have forgotten that Trump has repeatedly referred to Harris as a “fascist” and, one on occasion, called her a “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist”.

We have grown accustomed to the tactics of social media, the online crèche where those who bawl the loudest are rewarded with treats. What has become known as “Godwin’s Law” states that the longer an online discussion continues, the higher the probability that a comparison with the Nazis or Hitler will take place. Even Godwin has succumb to Godwin’s Law, penning an article for the Washington Post last December with the headline: “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you.”

If this election is going to be reduced to each candidate shouting “fascist” at the other, we may as well give up hope. I have never been more convinced of the growing infantilism of political discourse than in the last few weeks, or that the US is now divided – perhaps irreparably – between two groups who see the world in entirely incommensurable ways. With sensible discussion now seemingly impossible, the election has descended into a battle of memes.

Harris’s campaign team, for instance, gleefully embraced the “Brat” identity bestowed upon their candidate by Charli XCX. I must confess that I have no idea who Charli XCX might be. Her surname in Roman numerals means 100 – 10 + 10, so I can only assume she’s a classical scholar making a sardonic point about the philosophical principle of eternal recurrence.

Likewise, Trump’s now infamous reference to the eating of cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, has been remixed multiple times and shared more widely than any campaign statement. All of which is very funny, but one might be forgiven for yearning that the election of the leader of the free world should be a generally humourless affair. International conflicts are not best resolved through a series of “yo momma” jokes.

This week I wrote a piece for the Washington Post about George Orwell’s essays, and the lessons that might still be gleaned from them. Specifically, I pointed out that Orwell continually cautioned against tribal thinking, and is still despised today in certain left-wing circles for reminding his readers that authoritarianism can occur on both sides of the political aisle. I quoted Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism” (1945), in which he identified “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” I also quoted his dismay that the word “fascist” is so commonly misused. The piece can be read here.

I don’t often read the comments under my articles (except for here on Substack, of course), but I was interested to see how the overwhelmingly Democrat-supporting readership of the Washington Post might react. The comments are extremely revealing, given that most of those wading in seem determined to prove my point. I have rarely seen such unthinking and flagrant tribalism on display. Apparently, Trump is a literal “fascist”, and Orwell would have been the first to identify him as such. Orwell, of course, took up arms against actual fascists in Spain and was shot in the throat for his troubles. Would these commentators argue that if Orwell were alive today he would have packed up his gun and headed for the US in the run-up to this election? If not, why not?

October 25, 2024

How a Soviet Clerk Took Down a Spy Network

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

World War Two
Published 24 Oct 2024

Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cipher clerk in Canada, defected in 1945, bringing with him documents that revealed a massive Soviet espionage network in the West. His actions forced the world to confront Soviet infiltration, shifting global politics and igniting early Cold War tensions. This episode uncovers how one man’s bravery exposed a hidden war.
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Diversity at all costs

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

In the National Post, Harry Rakowski explains why Toronto Generic University — sorry, I mean “Toronto Metropolitan University” — is reserving 75% of available enrolment in their new medical school for more diverse candidates, even if they wouldn’t normally qualify by their grades:

We have a critical shortage of doctors and nurses in Canada. Almost a quarter of our population can’t find a family doctor. Wait times for seeing a specialist, getting medical imaging and surgical dates continue to climb, with only Band-Aid solutions being proposed by the federal and provincial governments. We desperately need to expand medical schools and the licensing of highly qualified foreign medical graduates.

So it was welcome news to hear that 94 undergraduate medical students and 105 postgraduate students (residents) will be entering the newly established Toronto Metropolitan University School of Medicine when it opens in September 2025. The city of Brampton, Ont. donated a former civic centre along with $20 million in funding for renovations in order to make the school happen.

However, it was highly disturbing to learn that admissions to the new facility will be driven by a culture-war philosophy that will dilute the quality of medical practice.

There’s no doubt that diversity in medicine helps to optimize care and provide better outcomes for the differing needs of Canada’s highly diverse population, which includes many individuals disadvantaged by their geography as well as racial and economic inequality. But TMU is going about it the wrong way. Its admissions policy will focus on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) rather than quality.

TMU’s plan is to reserve 75 per cent of its enrolment slots for “equity-deserving” students — Black and Indigenous applicants and others who meet “equity-deserving” criteria including students who identify as members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, those who are “racialized” and individuals “with lived experiences of poverty or low socio-economic status.” It will accept a minimum grade point average (GPA) of 3.3 (B+) — or even less for select Black and Indigenous applicants — and then use GPA only as an application criterion, not as a selection criterion. By comparison, the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine requires a minimum GPA average of 3.6 for undergraduate applicants (although average acceptance is now 3.95).

October 23, 2024

Canadian history through the propagandist lens

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

Fortissax casually tosses a few bricks into the glass house of Canadian history as it has been taught to schoolchildren over the last 30-40 years:

During our annual Not One Body Found season, I thought I’d discuss the truth about the brutal violence and savagery of North America’s most early, prominent and influential indigenous tribes, and popular narratives surrounding them.

If you’re an ethnic Canadian, born in the 1990s, you’re no doubt familiar with the education system’s attempts to subject you to a program of Maoist-style struggle sessions over the alleged genocide of the indigenous peoples in Canada. These struggle sessions in classrooms and collective humiliation rituals serve multiple purposes. One is to de-legitimize the history of, and perpetuate the ongoing deconstruction of Canada. The other is to de-legitimize the existence of the Canadian people as a nation (defined as a group sharing ethnic, cultural, and historical ties), in preparation for demographic replacement via mass migration.

The average Canadian’s school experience is filled with a turbo-charged version of liberal Noble Savage mythology, which is still propagated by leftists and indigenous activists. This has given the impression to many of the indigenous tribes as a singular race, continent-wide, uniformly peace-loving, non-binary, nature-appreciating matriarchal egalitarians until the evil, white, patriarchal Christian man arrived.

This resembles equally revisionist history about the Indo-European invasions into Europe around 4000 B.C. against the Pre-Indo-Europeans. You know that story: patriarchal brutes from the Eurasian steppes, with their advanced bronze weaponry and horse-powered chariots, wiped out the longhouse-dwelling, peace-loving, egalitarian agricultural Early European Farmers, who were feminist. This theory, conceived by Maria Gimbutas, a feminist intellectual, was debunked and discarded years ago. In reality, the Early-European-Farmers were extraordinarily warlike, violent, engaged in child murder or sacrifice and were apparently innovative as they built monuments like Stonehenge. This is much the same for indigenous in North America. All of this is framed in a Marxist oppressor-oppressed paradigm.

Tales of cruel treatment, deliberate biological warfare via smallpox blankets (of which there is only one known reference, with attempts to implement unknown), or extermination by colonial death squads haunts the minds of Canadians, planting the seeds of self-doubt and masochism. If you listen carefully to the rhetoric of leftists and indigenous activists, you’d be led to believe there was an industrial mass-slaughter of tribes, with conveyor belts funneling indigenous people into machines that spit out moccasins and dream catchers. The depopulation of indigenous tribes was not the result of deliberate action but rather Europeans being far more numerous and carrying diseases to which they had no immunity. The second cause was perpetual, brutal warfare by the survivors against each other. The mass depopulation from epidemic disease in North America occurred in the mid-1600s, after epidemic breakouts in the filthy, cramped conditions of Europe. Not almost a hundred years later in 1763, where smallpox blankets are merely discussed by General Jeffrey Amherst and Colonel Henry Bouquet.

Indigenous activists believe they were subject to a holocaust-style genocide. It is not a coincidence that the amplifying of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation occurs at the same time as the Managerial Regime in Canada has declared itself a “post-national state” (which the indigenous also live in and suffer consequences from). They believe Canada is a country without a people. Ironically this lines up with activists’ own definition of “cultural genocide”, because in 1867 during Confederation Year, according to census data, Canada was 92% Anglo-French, 7% miscellaneous Europeans, and the remaining 1% indigenous. Canada is unquestionably, unmistakably, a European construct of Anglo-French extraction.

In 2021, seemingly out of nowhere, the public was subjected to the establishment of this astroturfed federal holiday, which was made statutory—still only for employees of the federal government (what a coincidence!)—as of March 2023. Participation in this public humiliation ritual involves the coerced wearing of orange, and sometimes red, shirts. Canadians across the political spectrum knowingly or unknowingly participate in this ritual, with many rough, cowboy-hat-wearing, lifted-big-black-truck-driving conservatives, as well as tattooed, soy-eating, vegan ketamine enthusiast quartz-worshiping leftists also enthusiastically partaking.

It’s called being a decent human being, Chud! Schools, the monopolized legacy media, corporations, and brands all recognize and partake in the humiliation ritual, directed exclusively at ethnic Canadians. Football games have their players sing the national anthem, and every clinically obese, corn-syrup-slurping sportsball fan claps as the announcer humiliates and shames him or her with a land acknowledgement to prove to the crowd and community that they “don’t see race”. Medical professionals and university faculty across the country also include land acknowledgements in professional email signatures. Even law enforcement gleefully participate in the the ritual, dancing like circus monkeys to the tune of people who despise them.

October 22, 2024

VIA Rail’s $1B investment somehow ends up making the trains … slower

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

In the National Post, Chris Selley explains why VIA Rail’s newest locomotives — part of a $1B motive power upgrade program — are making the trains run more slowly in the heaviest-traffic portion of the passenger rail network:

VIA SCV-42 2202 Charger pushing Train 33 through Michael St. in Ottawa over level crossing, 7 March 2023.
Photo by Tiernan Johnson via Wikimedia Commons.

The news this past week for Canada’s long-suffering rail passengers would be funny if it weren’t so utterly pathetic: Government-owned Via Rail’s brand new, nearly $1-billion, much-ballyhooed new Siemens Venture train sets will take longer to navigate the Windsor-Quebec City corridor than their predecessors.

“Via Rail Canada would like to advise its passengers that we are currently experiencing delays on certain trains due to unexpected speed restrictions imposed by CN, the railway infrastructure owner,” a recent email to customers read. “Delays of 30 to 60 minutes are possible on trains travelling on the … corridor.”

The issue concerns signalling at level crossings. CN requires train sets to have a minimum of 32 axles in order to guarantee warning bells and barriers are properly activated as they approach. The Siemens train sets have 24 axles, meaning they have to slow on approach to at least some level crossings — of which there are many hundreds on the corridor — to ensure the signals have indeed activated. These trains were exhaustively tested beforehand on CN rails, which are what Via mainly uses.

The mind boggles as to how this issue could have been missed, and it’s not clear whose fault it is. CN warned Via of the 24-axle issue way back in 2021, according to CN spokesperson Ashley Michnowski, and confirmed the issue once it became official that the Siemens trains wouldn’t meet the 32-axle requirement. Via counters that this all came “without prior notice.”

Either way there’s no excuse. This has been a known issue with these same basic train sets on other North American passenger railways. And maybe the worst part: There’s a workaround technology called a “shunt enhancer” — an alternative way to trip the level-crossing signals remotely — that Siemens actually manufactures. Amtrak announced months ago it was installing them on the same Siemens locomotives Via now uses. Years too late, apparently, Via now says it’s looking at the technology.

Via customers are remarkably forgiving and earnest people, in my experience, but I imagine learning of possible “delays of 30 to 60 minutes” must have set eyes rolling. In my wretched experience in being sentenced to travel Via rail, a 30-minute delay between Ottawa and Toronto counts as a red-letter day. In the week before the new restrictions went into effect on Oct. 11 — just in time for Thanksgiving! — ruinous Via delays included a train that was one hour and 39 minutes late arriving in Toronto from London, which is a two-hour bus ride away. On one Saturday, trains arriving in Toronto from Ottawa and Montreal were on average 71 minutes late.

October 19, 2024

Changing gender balance in occupations and in higher education

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

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter ruminates on the likely downward path of many institutes of higher learning as current gender balance changes continue:

An occupation that flips from male to female dominance invariably suffers not only diminished prestige, but also a decline in wages … which, once again, makes sense in the context of sexual psychology. A man’s income is one element (and a big element) of a woman’s attraction to him, but the reverse is not true; if women are paid less, this does not really hurt their value in the sexual marketplace at all, and so they will push back against it much less than men would. This is probably what lies behind the tendency of women to be less forceful when negotiating salaries.

To the point: ever since the 1970s, women have overtaken and gradually eclipsed men within higher education. There is a gap in enrolment, consistent across racial groups:

[…]

Across all programs, at all academic levels, American universities recently reached the threshold of 60% of the student body being female.

This will be a disaster for academia.

Indeed, it’s already a disaster. About a year ago, I analyzed a Gallup poll which revealed that the confidence of the American public in the trustworthiness and overall value of the academic sector had declined precipitously over the course of the 2010s.

In that article I examined several factors contributing to this DIEing confidence in the academy: the explosive growth in tuition fees, even as continuous relaxation of academic standards dilutes the actual value of a degree; the deplorable state of scholarship, with endless revelations of fraud, a seemingly irresolvable replication crisis, and the torrent of psychotic nonsense that passes for ‘research’; the increasingly frigid social environment enforced by the armies of overpaid, sour-faced administrators. Almost all of these, however, are related in some way or another to the feminization of academia.

And it is probably going to get much worse before it gets better.

As discussed in this recent article by Celeste Davis of Matriarchal Blessing, research on male flight indicates that a 60% female composition represents the tipping point beyond which men perceive an environment as feminine, which then leads to a precipitous decline in male participation. Davis appears to be some sort of feminist3, but I want you to look past that and give her article a read; it is very thorough, well-researched, and thought-provoking (and also the direct inspiration for this article).

[…]

Universities are belatedly starting to notice that male enrolment is dropping fast, particularly among white men (I wonder why…), and are starting to make noises about maybe thinking about perhaps looking into ways of trying to recruit and retain more men (albeit, not specifically white men).

This seems unlikely to succeed.

Even if universities are successful in setting up programs to increase male recruitment, they will be fighting an uphill battle against the sexual perception that has already set in. Once something is coded as being a feminine hobby, it is extremely difficult to change that code. While it’s very easy to list examples of professions that have switched from male to female dominance, off the top of my head I have a hard time coming up with examples of the reverse. This suggests that female dominance tends to be sticky. There’s no reason to expect this will be any different with academia, either within individual programs, or across the sector as a whole.

This is an entirely different problem from the one faced by female entryism. In the initial phases of female entry, the primary difficulty faced by women is that it is simply more difficult to compete with men – in the case of athletics, effectively impossible. Women must therefore either work extremely hard, or the work must be made easier for them. In practice, since the 1970s we’ve seen both of these, with “working twice as hard as the boys” predominating in the early years, and assistance from special programs predominating later on.

By contrast, the central obstacle faced by anyone trying to attract men to a female-dominated environment is that men are deeply reluctant to enter. As a third of young men told Pew when asked why they didn’t attend or complete university: they just didn’t want to. It isn’t because they can’t compete with women. They can, usually with ease, but competition is pointless because it will gain them nothing. Special programs to assist men are beside the point; if anything, they work against you, because the implicit message with any special program for men is that they need help to compete with women … thereby making competition even more pointless. “You beat a girl but you needed help to do it”, is going to impress the girls even less than beating a girl unaided.

October 18, 2024

Justin Trudeau “has, yet again, outsmarted himself for the short-term win”

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

A rare appearance of a Matt Gurney column outside the paywall at The Line explains why the Prime Minister couldn’t resist the temptation to attack Pierre Poilievre on the national security file, despite the fact that it gives Poilievre a strong counterattack:

Prime Ministers Starmer and Trudeau at the NATO summit in Washington.
Image from Justin Trudeau’s X account.

What Justin Trudeau did on Wednesday from the witness standing at the foreign interference inquiry — when he made his dramatic announcement of having seen a list of Conservatives who are compromised by or vulnerable to foreign interference — makes a kind of sense.

It does. It was an effective attack on Pierre Poilievre, who has stubbornly led with his chin for months. The reaction of many of my Conservative friends was telling. They knew Trudeau landed a hit, and they were pissed. They were ready for it — I think their counterattack was as good or better. But this whole story, or at least this little snippet of it, starts with Trudeau taking a swing, and not missing.

[…]

In that context, Trudeau’s decision to tease the possibility of some unnamed Conservatives being involved in the machinations of foreign interference makes sense. He saw Poilievre’s chin and decided to shove his fist into it. It’s politics. I get it.

But, once again, I’m not sure that the PM thought this through all the way. Our PM has a habit of occasionally letting his combative instincts get the better of him. The man has a weakness for showy, dramatic gestures, and loves to try and seize the big moments. Sometimes they blow up in his face. I think this one will, too. It is, I suspect, less a punch to the face, and more of an elbow-to-the-boob. It’ll cause more problems than the gesture was worth.

[…]

Trudeau doesn’t get a lot of opportunities to look like a tough leader these days, and he got two this week. His eviction of six Indian diplomats that Canadian intelligence believes were involved in guiding violent crimes in Canada, aimed at politically connected members of Canada’s large Indian diaspora, was one (and I am not yet cynical enough to believe the timing was politically motivated). The second, of course, was Trudeau’s bombshell testimony. Given the shellacking he’s been taking of late, it probably felt amazing [to] go on the attack yesterday.

The problem for the prime minister is that, today, having had his dramatic moment, there’s no follow through. He dropped the mic and then Poilievre did what he was always and obviously going to do: the opposition leader picked that mic right back up again and started talking into it.

Here’s part of Poilievre’s statement (full statement is here):

    My message to Justin Trudeau is: release the names of all MPs that have collaborated with foreign interference. But he won’t. Because Justin Trudeau is doing what he always does: he is lying. He is lying to distract from a Liberal caucus revolt against his leadership and revelations he knowingly allowed Beijing to interfere and help him win two elections. … If Justin Trudeau has evidence to the contrary, he should share it with the public. Now that he has blurted it out in general terms at a commission of inquiry — he should release the facts. But he won’t — because he is making it up.

If Poilievre’s decision to forgo a security clearance is overly complicated and technocratic, then Trudeau’s decision to attack him for it suffers the same drawbacks. By comparison, Poilievre’s approach, here, is better, simpler, and most crucially, it’s right: Release the names!

If MPs from any party have been compromised, the public deserves to know.

I don’t say that lightly or impulsively. There are absolutely downsides to releasing the names, including the very real risks to compromising our investigations and destroying the reputations of people who may have committed no crime. This sucks. But there are greater downsides to not releasing the names — until the Canadian public knows them, our entire democratic system is suspect. To put it another way, if it is inappropriate to release the names in full, then it is equally if not more inappropriate for a prime minister to publicly tease those names during his testimony, while hiding behind oaths of national security in order to avoid handing over the receipts. Protections of “national security” are intended to protect real sources and reputations — not to serve as a launchpad to lob allegations at foes while dodging accountability and transparency.

October 17, 2024

Historian Reacts to Canada and the Scheldt Campaign

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

OTD Military History
Published 8 Oct 2024

My reaction to the ‪@LEGIONMAGAZINE‬’s video on the Battle of the Scheldt. This campaign was one of the toughest ever fought by Canada in World War 2.

Canada and the Scheldt Campaign from Legion Magazine
• Canada and the Scheldt Campaign | Nar…
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Failing upward into the federal civil service

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

Woke Watch Canada charts the rise and rise of Kimberly Murray from failure to higher-paid failure to the federal civil service on a six-figure annual salary:

Kimberley Murray – Image from APTN News

Kimberly Murray has just wasted $10 million dollars of Canadian taxpayers’ hard-earned money with the blessing of two successive Ministers of Justice, David Lametti and Arif Virani.

By June 2022 — after five years as Executive Director at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a one-year stint as Executive Lead at the Survivors’ Secretariat looking for allegedly missing children — Kimberly Renée Murray had failed to produce the name of a single verifiably-missing residential school child.

Despite this abysmal record of six years looking for the name of a verifiably missing child without being able to find one, Kimberly Murray was appointed by Order in Council as a federal civil servant under the Public Service Employment Act as special adviser to the Minister of Justice at a salary in the range of $228,900 – $268,200 to continue her fruitless search:

    Appointment of KIMBERLY RENÉE MURRAY of Toronto, Ontario, to be special adviser to the Minister of Justice, to be known as Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools, to hold office during pleasure for a term of two years, effective June 13, 2022.

    Her Excellency the Governor General in Council, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, under paragraph 127.1(1)(c) of the Public Service Employment Act, appoints Kimberly Renée Murray of Toronto, Ontario, to be special adviser to the Minister of Justice, to be known as Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools, to hold office during pleasure for a term of two years, and fixes her remuneration and certain conditions of employment as set out in the annexed schedule, which salary is within the range ($228,900 – $268,200), effective June 13, 2022.

During the two years of her mandate, while going through her $10 million dollar budget (and according to one of her interviews, knowingly exceeding Treasury Board guidelines), Kimberly Murray failed in her primary mission — i.e., to produce the name of at least one verifiably-missing child.

Despite this spectacular failure, and her admission to the Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples on 21 March 2023 that there are no missing children, the current Minister of Justice, Arif Virani, re-appointed Kimberly Murray for a further six months by Order in Council on 28 May 2024, this time at a salary in the range of $254,000 – $297,800.

October 14, 2024

Rumours of a caucus revolt against Justin Trudeau

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

The polls are historically bad, but Justin Trudeau seems determined to hang on until he has to call an election which is reported to be generating panic among Liberal backbenchers. Any Liberal Party leader is tough to unseat, but especially Trudeau after the most recent changes to the party’s operating rules instituted after he became party leader.

Image from Blazing Cat Fur

Could the season of Thanksgiving see the fall of Justin Trudeau?

Unlikely, but there will be no Happy Thanksgiving for the prime minister as he contemplates rebellious Liberal MPs trying to engineer a palace coup.

Such news may not surprise Trudeau, but the fact that it is now public is a starting gun. It is at times such as these that Sherlock Holmes tells trusty sidekick Watson, “The game’s afoot”.

As Trudeau returns from a trip to Asia, he is likely to hunker down with his faithful entourage to plot strategy while plotting of another kind will be on the minds of the Gang of 20 (the approximate number of Liberal MPs said to have signed a document in support of replacing the prime minister before the next election.)

The Toronto Star first reported on Friday that “anxious Liberals” were worried about the state of the party under Trudeau. People were saying on the doorstep that “your guy’s gotta go,” while one party source said two dozen sitting MPs were deciding whether to run again at the next election.

Fast exits and furry rodents are all associated with sinking ships.

The Star quoted Wayne Long, the only serving Liberal so far to publicly call for Trudeau to quit as leader, saying, “The status quo is leading us to obliteration”.

Party leaders never want to hear the word obliteration when it refers to their own electoral fortunes and certainly not when it comes from the mouth of one of their own MPs.

But Trudeau probably isn’t even listening to the shrill chorus of the caucus. Why now, after nine years, should he start listening to his members?

Meanwhile, the CBC reported that Liberal MPs were meeting in rooms across Parliament Hill to sign a document that pledged them to call on Trudeau to resign. They were signing their own names and “in ink”, said CBC’s David Cochrane, making it sound like a Faustian bargain rather than a parliamentary coup.

Perhaps it is?

October 12, 2024

Canadians don’t hate their banks enough

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte follows up on an earlier item thanks to the many Canadians who responded with their own tales of woe in their dealings with Canadian banks:

Since I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we have published Andrew Spence’s Fleeced: Canadians Versus Their Banks, the latest edition of Sutherland Quarterly, I’ve been inundated with people’s horror stories of their dealings with Canada’s chartered banks. Jack David’s tale in the above interview is a classic of the genre.

In Fleeced, Andrew lays out in aggravating detail how Canadian banks, although chartered by the federal government to facilitate economic activity in the broader economy, do all they can to avoid lending to small and medium businesses, never mind that small and medium businesses employ two-thirds of our private-sector labour force and account for half of Canada’s gross domestic product.

By OECD standards, small businesses in Canada are starved of bank credit, and when they are able to secure a loan, they pay through the nose. The spread between interest rates on loans to small businesses and large businesses in Canada is a whopping 2.48 percent, compared to .42 percent in the US — more than five times higher.

Why? Because Canada’s banks are a tight little oligopoly, impervious to meaningful competition. Their cozy situation allows them to be exceedingly greedy. Their profits and returns to shareholders are wildly beyond those of banks in the US and UK (and, as Andrew demonstrates, their returns from their Canadian operations are far in excess of those from the US market, meaning they screw the home market hardest.)

Our banks never miss an opportunity to impose a new fee, or off-load risk. From their perspective, small business involves too much risk — some of them will inevitably fail. The banks prefer that publishers and dry-cleaners and restaurateurs either finance themselves by pledging their homes, or use their credit cards to cover fluctuations in cash flow or make investments that will help them hire, expand, and grow. And that’s what entrepreneurs do. According to a survey by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, only one in five respondents accessed a bank loan or line of credit. Half of respondents financed themselves, tapped existing equity and personal lines of credit, and about 30 percent used their high-interest credit cards.

By severely rationing credit and making it exceedingly expensive, Canada’s banks siphon off an ungodly share of entrepreneurial profit to themselves while leaving the entrepreneur with all the risk. Their insistence on putting their own profits above service to the Canadian economy is one of the main reasons Canada has such a slow-growing, unproductive economy and a stagnant standard of living.

There is much else in this slim volume to make your blood boil: exorbitant fees on chequing and savings accounts; mutual fund expenses that torpedo investments; ridiculous mortgage restrictions, infuriating customer service …

Fleeced: Canadians Versus Their Banks is a stunning exposé of the inner workings of our six major banks — something only a reformed banker and financial services veteran such as Andrew could write. He also explodes the myth that a bloated, uncompetitive banking sector is the price we have to pay for stability in times of financial crisis.

We are in desperate need of banking reform in Canada. Read this book and you’ll be shouting at your member of Parliament for prompt action.

October 9, 2024

Dangling the old “high speed rail between Toronto and Montreal” proposal again

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

In what seems like an annual ritual, the attractive-to-many (but economically non-viable) idea of putting in a high speed rail line between Toronto and Montreal is getting another airing:

The closest active model to the proposed VIA “High Frequency Rail” proposal is the Brightline service in Florida.
“BrightLine – The Return of FEC passenger service” by BBT609 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

In 2021, the Government of Canada confirmed its plans to significantly upgrade VIA Rail’s passenger rail service between the Windsor and Quebec City corridor into a high-frequency rail service.

As the name suggests, this new high-frequency rail service would offer significantly higher frequencies and reduce travel times on the route linking Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal by 25 per cent.

With dedicated passenger rail tracks separate from freight operations, which greatly contribute to current service delays, this new train service would more consistently operate at increased speeds of up to 177 km/h to 200 km/h, and reliability would improve to an on-time performance by over 95 per cent.

This is quite true … the existing rail network between Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa was designed and built to carry freight traffic first and passengers only as a secondary goal — in many cases to attract government subsidies for the construction of the lines. Passenger services are, at best, marginally profitable but generally passenger service is a dead loss for the railways and only maintained thanks to ongoing government subsidies, grants, and tax breaks.

Freight trains — the profitable part of the railway network — have gotten longer and heavier over time as technology has improved (and train crews have gotten smaller, reducing labour costs) and the signal systems are optimized for freight traffic: long, slow-moving trains that take a lot of time and energy to speed up and slow down. Passenger trains travel faster (well, theoretically anyway) and make frequent stops to pick up and drop off passengers … signalling systems (which are critical to safe operations) need to be designed to optimize the usage pattern of the majority of the trains which in practice means freight with some modifications in high-population areas to accommodate passenger traffic.

This high-frequency rail service would use VIA Rail’s new and growing fleet of modern Siemens Venture trains operating on the Windsor-Quebec City corridor.

But as it turns out, the federal government is also contemplating a new service that is even better than high-frequency rail — the potential for a high-speed rail service, which would be the first of its kind in Canada.

Currently, the federal government is engaged in the Request For Proposal (RFP) process for the project. In July 2023, it shortlisted three private consortiums to participate in the RFP’s detailed bidding process, attracting international interest from major investors and some of the world’s largest passenger rail service operators.

This includes the consortium named Cadence, entailing CDPQ Infrastructure, AtkinsRealis (formerly known as SNC-Lavalin), Systra Canada, Keolis Canada, SNCF Voyageurs, and national flag carrier Air Canada.

The inclusion of Air Canada in the consortium is … interesting … as one of the goals of an actual high speed system would be to drain off a proportion of the short-haul passenger traffic that currently goes by air. A cynic might wonder if Air Canada’s interest in the project is to help or hinder.

According to a report in Toronto Star last week, each of the three consortiums was directed to create two detailed proposals, including one concept with trains that travel under 200 km/h and another concept with trains that travel faster than 200 km/h.

High-speed rail is generally defined as a train service that operates at speeds of at least 200 km/h.

It was further stated in the report that the new service could result in travel times of only three hours between Toronto and Montreal, as opposed to the current travel times of over five hours on existing VIA Rail services.

For further comparison, the travel time between Toronto and Montreal on flight services such as Air Canada is about 1.5 hours, which does not include the time spent at airports, while the driving time over this distance of over 1,000 km is about 5.5 hours — similar to VIA Rail’s existing services.

The potential holds for VIA Rail’s new service to operate at speeds over 200 km/h along select segments of the corridor.

The required costs to implement 200km/h speeds will be in eliminating as many grade crossings as possible and reconstructing some tight curves to allow the higher speed trains … and, as mentioned earlier, retrofitting the signal system for the faster passenger trains. Even those measures, which don’t really produce a true “high speed” system will be very expensive.

QotD: The hijacking of the Canadian identity

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

The anniversary of that first May 27, 2021 unmarked-graves announcement came and went a few weeks ago, with barely a peep from prominent figures in the Canadian progressive firmament. And the same Trudeau who’d recently served up lurid sermons about our status as a blood-stained genocide state has now switched into proto-campaign mode, gushing manically about the Liberal horn of plenty set to deluge this nation with riches. According to the latest Liberal agitprop, in fact, patriotic Trudeauvian boosterism isn’t merely permissible — why, it’s obligatory. So light up those Canada Day backyard barbecues. Canuck Yom Kippur is finally over.

But before we dismiss this three-year interregnum as a dystopian fever dream, it’s worth asking how our collective Canadian identity could be hijacked — even temporarily — in such a radicalized manner. And the truth is that it isn’t just progressive ideologues who bear responsibility; but also their counterparts on all parts of the political spectrum, few of whom exhibited any inclination to offer pushback while these falsehoods took root in the media. Even many writers at this newspaper, generally held to be a right-leaning outlet, greeted the unmarked-graves claims by heaping shame on their country.

In every other comparably advanced society, there exists a natural tension between conservative nationalists who reverentially sentimentalize their history, and the progressive critics who reflexively denounce it. And it is from out of that tension that something approaching the historical truth emerges. Or, at least something close enough to the historical truth that it provides a stable and coherent basis upon which a society can confidently pin its collectively embraced national identity.

What we learned in 2021 is that this necessary tension doesn’t exist in Canada, because traditionalists can no longer describe their nation’s history in a way that gives voice to their emotionally felt patriotism without attracting claims of racism and neocolonialism. As a result, our marketplace of ideas lacks the checks and balances required to inure us against — oh, gee, I don’t know, let’s take a crazy example — apocalyptic medieval fables in which legions of Indigenous children are thrown into furnaces and shallow graves by cackling nuns and diabolical priests.

So yes, shame on Trudeau for lowering the Canadian flag on federal buildings for half a year to honour victims entombed in non-existent mass graves. But shame on the rest of us for staring at our shoes while this blood libel was being signal-boosted. And now that Trudeau seems on his way out — and, with him, the maudlin, tear-soaked, bent-knee political shtick that accompanied this descent into hysteria — we might turn our attention toward developing a national self-identity sufficiently robust that it doesn’t fall to pieces the next time someone claims to have found genocide’s residue under an old tetherball court.

Jonathan Kay, “Don’t let politicians misinform you. Learn about Canada’s true history for yourself”, National Post, 2024-07-01.

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