Quotulatiousness

March 16, 2025

Sir Wilfred Laurier is apparently the next designated target for the decolonialization mobs

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

Having run out of ways to desecrate the memory of our founding prime minister, the shrieking harpies seem to have designated the best Liberal prime minister in Canadian history to be unpersoned this time:

Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister of Canada (1896-1911)

The so-called “Laurier Legacy Project” began in 2022 when the eponymous post-secondary institution in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, decided to conduct a “scholarly examination of the legacy and times” of Canada’s seventh prime minister (1896-1911). The academic investigation was launched in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the U.S. and the suspected but unconfirmed discovery of unknown graves near the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. Institutions were facing pressure to publicly demonstrate they were taking immediate action against colonial legacies.

But was the school really committed to “conducting a scholarly examination” of Laurier? One that would weigh evidence, consider context, and arrive at a conclusion? Spoiler alert: of course not.

The university’s own website is a dead giveaway. A page titled “Who was Wilfrid Laurier?” begins with a single paragraph summarizing the former prime minister’s accomplishments, noting his ability to forge compromise, his participation in the construction of a second transcontinental railway, and the addition of two provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

The rest of the answer to the question “Who is Wilfrid Laurier?” is four negative paragraphs detailing his record on Indigenous relations, restrictive immigration policies, and his role in “actively support[ing] the expansion of British imperialism on the African continent through his involvement in the South African War”. The page offers no hint of balance or objectivity. Perhaps this is what we have come to expect when institutions engage in historical investigations: the judgement has already been made. It’s just the path to get there that remains.

While the Laurier Legacy Project began in 2022, it is relevant today because the university quietly published its conclusion last fall. The report, written by post-doctoral fellow Katelyn Arac, called for 17 recommendations, most of which relate to the university and its extensive DEI policies. These included creating scholarships for communities “marginalized by Laurier” as well as building “artistic displays … in equity-deserving communities”. But few of the recommendations had to do with the actual legacy of the former prime minister.

Much like the school’s website, however, the language of the report made its bias known. Dr. Arac admitted her focus was on policy decisions related to “immigration and relations with Indigenous peoples”. She went on: “These policies were designed with two objectives in mind — assimilation and/or erasure; in other words, the eradication of Indigenous peoples in the land we now call Canada through policies of settler-colonialism”.

The report is part of an unfortunate trend in history today: measuring historical figures by a process of selective evidence. Rather than look objectively at the legacy of Canada’s first francophone prime minister, the project set out to investigate only where Laurier could be seen to have failed. And there were failures. That is part of history and governing.

March 15, 2025

Canada’s Unique WW2 Rocket Artillery: The Land Mattress

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

OTD Military History
Published 12 Nov 2022

The Land Mattress, officially known as Projector, Rocket 3-inch, No 8 Mk 1, was the Canadian rocket launcher used during World War 2. The last surviving example is on display at the ‪@CanWarMus‬.
(more…)

March 13, 2025

“Canadian liberalism has been regime ideology since at least Lester B. Pearson in 1963”

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

Fortissax on “Leaflibs & Puckstick Patriots”:

The past week has been very special because something happened in Canada. This something is not anything I could have anticipated, but I find myself not particularly surprised. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau propped up the husk of Jeff Douglas like an old Fisher King from some retelling of Arthurian legend. Jeff Douglas is famous for his appearance in the Molson Canadian beer commercial, released in the year 2000. This commercial was possibly the hardest-hitting, if not among the top hardest-hitting, propaganda pieces ever produced in service of regime ideology. That regime ideology is Canadian liberalism — a form of left-liberalism that emerged out of the Second World War, in direct contradiction to American right-liberalism.

Many American correspondents have asked me to explain why it seems like liberals are patriotic in Canada, while conservatives are not. The answer is simple: Canadian liberalism has been regime ideology since at least Lester B. Pearson in 1963, Pierre Trudeau’s predecessor, who laid the groundwork for a sinister, transformative cultural revolution — the likes of which I can only compare to the USSR or Communist China.

What occurred in this era was a complete and total restructuring of society — an absolutely Orwellian mind-wipe of Canadian identity, a retconning of Canadian history, culminating in the explicit purpose of erasing the historic Canadian nation. So successful was this cultural revolution that, for my entire 30 years of life, the narrative has been that Canada is an illegitimate, post-national state on stolen land. Paradoxically, the people are viciously patriotic toward the hollow state, whose newfound identity obsesses over its own dissolution, its symbols and icons mostly channeled into corporate brands and products, like Canadian Tire, fast food chains like Tim Hortons, and the timeless bread and circuses of hockey.

Canada was transformed into an international economic zone of individuals with relatively maximal allotments for personal fulfilment — including the most licentious, disgusting, and degenerate, as long as it remains acceptable within the Overton window of the time.

A cornerstone of this identity is precisely outdoing the U.S. in how liberal it can be — true to the end goal of transnational liberals like Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man. In this 63-year era, there are two archetypes of the average man or woman. These archetypes manifest as more moderate, more common versions of the populist American wannabe or the neurotic DEI cultist I discussed in my other article. These are what I’ve coined “leaflibs” and “puckstick patriots”. They represent the centre-left liberal and centre-right liberal majority of Canada.

There is often overlap between the two, but what they have in common is an extreme ignorance of Canadian and world history and national identity. Both regularly partake in the communion of the left-liberal civic religion but do so in different ways. They are also united in that the vast majority of information they obtain about local, regional, and national politics comes from legacy media outlets like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (state-owned, publicly funded broadcaster), CTV, and Global News — old-school news outlets whose private owners and shareholders differ little in belief.

What the Canadian ruling classes have in common is that they are extremely insular and scarcely interact with the public. In many ways, Canada resembles European countries. Canadians were, for a long time, educated along stratified British class lines, and everyone knew their place. Canada’s national value is Order, not Liberty, and traditionally, society functioned as a collective, organic whole in a proper communitarian model, where the social expectation of the enlightened and powerful elites was to tend to their responsibilities of responsible government.

Let’s discuss these two “normie” archetypes. International readers, especially Americans, may notice parallels with their own mainstream liberal and conservative, yet otherwise ill-informed, media-consuming relations.

Leadership of HMCS Harry DeWolf take a TOUR of HMCS Haida National Historic Site, Parks Canada

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

Royal Canadian Navy / Marine Royale Canadienne
Published 10 Nov 2024

Canada’s “most fightingest ship” served in our Navy for 20 years between 1943 and 1963. The last Tribal Class Destroyer in the world, it and its company persevered through the Second World War, Korean War and Cold War.

The ceremonial flagship of our Navy, HMCS Haida was saved from the scrapyards and now rests in Hamilton as a museum ship, a Parks Canada National Historic Site.

One of HMCS Haida‘s Captains was the Naval hero Harry DeWolf — the namesake of the Harry DeWolf Class of ships. The grandson of a Veteran who served on the ship recently took the leadership of HMCS Harry DeWolf for a tour after arriving alongside, showing the stark differences between the newest vessels of our fleet and this vintage destroyer showing the many differences between life in the Navy then and now.

#CanadaRemembers #HelpLeadFight

March 12, 2025

Free speech in Canada takes yet another hit, as Palestinian activists granted special protections

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper outlines the jaw-dropping contents of the Guide to Understanding and Combatting Islamophobia published by the federal government recently:

The federal government has dropped a new guide that, according to critics, deems it “racist” to criticize Palestinian advocacy or extremism.

The guide also defines both “sharia” and “jihad” as benign terms that are misrepresented by Westerners, with sharia defined as a means “to establish justice and peace in society”.

It’s contained in “The Canadian Guide to Understanding and Combatting Islamophobia“, a document published last week by the Department of Canadian Heritage.

The report endorses the idea of “anti-Palestinian racism”, an activist term with such a broad definition that it technically deems any criticism of Palestinians or “their narratives” to be racist.

“Public discourse often unfairly associates Palestinian and Muslim identities with terrorism,” reads the guide.

The new guide specifically links to a definition of the term circulated by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association. Their 99-word definition says that it’s racist to link the Palestinian cause to terrorism, to describe it as “inherently antisemitic” or to say that Palestinians are not “an Indigenous people”.

The term is broad enough that merely acknowledging the existence of Israel could fall under its rubric. The definition describes the Jewish state as “occupied and historic Palestine”, and its creation as “the Nakba” (catastrophe). “Denying the Nakba” is specifically cited as one of the markers of “anti-Palestinian racism”.

In a March 4 statement criticizing the new federal report, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) said that the term is so vague that “denouncing Hamas – the terrorists behind the October 7 massacre – could be portrayed as an act of racism”.

The new report was praised, meanwhile, by the vocally anti-Israel Centre for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, which called Ottawa’s embrace of the term anti-Palestinian racism “groundbreaking.”

“We are extremely pleased that Canada, through this guide, finally recognizes the unique racism that Palestinians experience daily,” said the group’s acting president Michael Bueckert.

The federal government’s new guide writes that Canada’s “understanding of anti-Palestinian racism” is growing, and directs readers to a 2022 report on the phenomenon by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association.

March 11, 2025

“In many ways, Carney is the technocrat’s technocrat. A bona fide citizen of nowhere”

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

In spiked, Fraser Myers expresses incredulity that Canadians have “chosen” yet another technocratic globalist as our next Prime Minister to succeed Justin Trudeau:

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.

Canadians have a new prime minister. After a leadership election in the ruling Liberal Party, it’s out with the woke globalist, Justin Trudeau, and in with the woke globalist, Mark Carney.

Extraordinarily, in an age where justified populist rage against an out-of-touch establishment is spreading across the globe, Canadians have ended up with a leader who embodies that very establishment. In many ways, Carney is the technocrat’s technocrat. A bona fide citizen of nowhere.

The new Canadian PM’s CV reads like a parody of an archetypal Davos man. He has been governor of the Bank of Canada, governor of the Bank of England and a United Nations special envoy on climate action and finance. Before he entered the public eye, he worked for Goldman Sachs – in London, Tokyo, New York and Toronto. He has degrees from Harvard and Oxford. Yet he has never once held any form of elected political office. He does not even currently hold a seat in Canada’s House of Commons.

Carney is living, breathing proof that expert credentials are no substitute for sound judgement or political acumen. He has embraced just about every naff and dangerous political trend of our times, never deviating from the Davos script.

Most notoriously, as governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, Carney became the high priest of Project Fear ahead of the 2016 Brexit vote. He warned before the referendum that a Leave vote would spark an instant recession. It didn’t. He claimed Brexit would make investment in British assets so risky that it could ‘test the kindness of strangers’ should the UK take the leap. Needless to say, this was politically motivated hysteria, not a sober assessment of Britain’s economic prospects outside the EU.

More recently, his endorsement of Labour’s Rachel Reeves as chancellor ahead of the UK General Election also smacked of both dubious judgement and needless political interference. Carney said in autumn 2023 that it was ‘beyond time’ her plans were put into action. Yet since Reeves’s plans were actually put into action, in her first budget in October last year, the UK economy has teetered on the brink of recession, unemployment has risen and government borrowing costs have shot up. Call it the Carney kiss of death.

March 10, 2025

“I, for one, welcome our new unelected globalist technocratic overlord”

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

With a resounding 99% 85.9% of the voters whose votes were allowed, Maximum Leader Mark Carney has finally been elected to a position for the first time in his adult life:

With the support of most of Justin Trudeau’s team, Carney has been ushered in to continue on with more of Trudeau’s signature economic policies, the ones Carney has been advising Trudeau on since 2020.

Yes, Carney said that he will scrap the capital gains tax changes that have hurt so many small business owners, but that had to go. He also promised to drop the consumer carbon tax but would also increase the industrial carbon tax, a move that will have the same impact on manufacturing industries like steel as Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Few Canadians will know about the discrepancy in Carney’s plan or any others because there has never been a leader in this country elected to such high office with so little vetting. Carney preferred speeches and rallies over news conferences and interviews with U.S. media outlets over Canadian ones because the interviewer would know little about Canadian politics.

When he wasn’t appearing on The Daily Show or the podcast of Trump’s short-lived spokesman Anthony Scaramucci, Carney preferred to speak to friendly liberal media outlets like CBC. While the media narrative is that Carney has reinvigorated the Liberal party and closed the polling gap with Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, neither claim is demonstrably true.

While more than 400,000 people signed up as “registered Liberals” to vote in this nomination process, just over 151,000 actually took the time to vote. This is a chance to pick the next prime minister of our country at a time when we are facing a threat to our sovereignty and a threat to our economic future, yet our next PM was chosen by so few people.

By comparison, the last Conservative leadership race saw more than 400,000 people vote with 295,285 ballots cast for Poilievre alone. Sure, it might have been a longer timeline, but the stakes – becoming leader of the official Opposition with no election in sight – were much smaller.

In the National Post Chris Selley doesn’t seem to be a fan of the new unelected leader of the federal government (assuming that Justin Trudeau will actually step down, of course):

Every speaker of note [at the Liberal leadership hootnanny], from the four leadership candidates to outgoing leader Justin Trudeau to former prime minister Jean Chrétien, who held the room in the palm of his hand for what felt like a day and a half, mentioned the need for Canadians to stand together, united and altogether resolute against the threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs.

At the same time, of course, Liberals were insisting that the Conservatives — who have as much or more support nationwide, and until recently had a lot more — are bent on destroying all that’s good and holy about this country. That isn’t really a unifying message.

“Pierre Poilievre just doesn’t get it,” Carney averred in his victory speech. “He is the type of life-long politician … who worships at the altar of the free market without having made a payroll himself. And now … at a time of immense economic insecurity, he would undermine the Bank of Canada. Poilievre has called for the shutting down of CBC at a time when disinformation and foreign interference are on the march. He insults our mayors and ignores our First Nations.”

“A person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” Carney said of Poilievre, who has been raining invective on Trump just as fast as he can in recent days — and indeed someone whom Trump himself denigrated in recent days as “not a MAGA guy”.

Oh, and Carney said “Pierre Poilievre would let our planet burn” — on the same night he promised to axe the consumer carbon tax as a first order of business.

Other than all that, though, we’re in it together. Okey-dokey.

Dan Knight is even less impressed:

And here’s where it gets even better. The polling — oh, the polling. For months, the Liberals have been sinking. Before Trudeau resigned, they were floundering at 24% support. Then, magically, within days of picking a new leader, they skyrocket to 33%? A 9-point jump in the blink of an eye? Wow, what a coincidence! You mean to tell me that the same Canadians who couldn’t be bothered to sign up for a free membership, the same Canadians who have overwhelmingly turned against this party, suddenly decided they’re on board again — just because the party swapped one out-of-touch elitist for another?

No. That’s not how this works. That’s not how enthusiasm works.

This isn’t some grand Liberal resurgence. This is the Liberal-friendly media manufacturing a comeback narrative because their government subsidies depend on it. The same journalists who screamed for years about the Conservative “far-right” threat are now bending over backwards to convince you that Mark Carney is a fresh outside

And you know what? Maybe if they had actually let Ruby Dhalla into this race, they would’ve stood a chance. Seriously. I had to do a double-take when I looked at her policies — supporting small business, tough on crime, actual immigration regulation — I mean, that’s how you win the center. That’s how you stop a Conservative majority and turn it into a minority government. If they had let her run, we’d be having a very different conversation right now.

But what did the Liberals do? Oh, they disqualified her over — get this — campaign finance irregularities. But guess what? They kept the money. That’s right. The party flagged “violations”, kicked her out, and then conveniently pocketed the cash. If that’s not the most Liberal Party thing I’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is.

Can you feel the Carneymentum? It’s supposed to sweep the land from sea to sea to sea … any minute now.

Deep State delenda est

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

Elizabeth Nickson calls for the destruction of the deep state, Cato the Censor-style: salt the earth and leave no stone standing upon another stone:

There has been some argument in my house about Trump’s tariffs on Canada, and indeed the rest of the world. I’m on the American side; why on earth should the Americans pay for everything? Because they do. They pay for Europe’s defence, they allow every single country to tariff American products while allowing their goods in for pennies. When anyone, anywhere is in trouble, who do they call? The Yanks. Where do the pleas of all the desperate people all over the world land? America. Who did the Israeli captives hope for? Trump and the Americans. (Actually just Trump. They didn’t think that the Biden people would lift a finger. Which they didn’t.)

Please explain why these countries below, numbering 550 million people, cannot defend themselves?

Why can’t they defend themselves? They are broke.

The following represents $150 billion in missed opportunity in the last FIVE years. Canada is so broke, it is broke-ass broke; it is a shriveling carbuncle on the American economy. We send 80% of our exports to you because we are TOO DAMNED LAZY to develop our own country.

If we had built those projects, Canada would be rich, the middle class would be crackling along, creativity would have soared and we would actually be proud. No one is proud of Canada except for the people paid to bloviate or who hope to be paid to bloviate, and those too stupid to bloviate. The rest of us are sullen and angry and so frustrated we don’t know what to do with ourselves.

But no. Climate Change. Look, I am sorry to say this, but anyone who “believes” in climate change being somehow catastrophic is stupid, malignant or has not done the required reading. Which means lazy. Which means childlike. There is no there there. Climate alarmism is nonsense, it is bullshit, it is utter crap made up by subsidized kids looking for “significance” and an endless supply of taxpayer dollars. The science is far too new to be reliable, there are thousands of real (not NGO) scientists in opposition to it and the policy implications are so vast we are looking at a new feudalism. Anyone promoting climate change is unserious.

Childhood is where we are. Canada is the only country in the Western Hemisphere which exacts a crippling carbon tax. And this:

The above is a perfect illustration of vanity, of a detachment from reality. And the only way people can detach from reality is that they are subsidized by the Americans. This means the Heartland people, the Flyover people. Those subsidies to the world added to a massive, unsustainable, insane, debt of thirty-seven trillion, created a giant fuzzy rainbow coloured cloud inhabited by perpetual children built by ghastly people like Samantha Powers, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and their legion of sick, larcenous, pedophile supporters, the ferociously stupid women on the east coat of America, the idiots at all the Ivies, and the two million federal workers who are about to be reduced by, I wish, 50%.

March 9, 2025

Mark “the human snooze button” Carney

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

In the National Post, Chris Selley explains the attraction of a Mark Carney-led Liberal Party to mainstream Canadians:

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.

Ironically I suspect what Poilievre is up against is one of the most basic and powerful forces in Canadian politics: conservatism, but in one of its purest forms, namely suspicion of change — especially in a crisis. Recall that Canada saw 10 elections during the pandemic — one federal and nine provincial. The incumbent parties won eight of them, in some cases even as their health-care and long-term care systems collapsed on their heads and their “pandemic preparedness” folders turned out to contain nothing but some old Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.

No question, there are problems here specific to Poilievre and the Conservatives. The Royal Order of Laurentian Elites nearly fainted when Poilievre started saying “Canada is broken”, but people seemed to calm down about it and engage with it once it became clear most Canadians agreed: 70 per cent, according to a Postmedia-Leger poll last year.

Saying “Canada is broken” nowadays is likely to get you branded a traitor by a mob of people who think Beaver Tails, Tim Horton’s, Molson advertisements and a Tragically Hip playlist comprise a national identity. Canada can be broken and Trump can be a lunatic at the same time, but nationalist outbursts have little time for such nuance.

[…]

Change is unavoidable in the forthcoming election, of course. And by rights, Canadians should want it: Like COVID, Trump’s demands on border security and military spending, and his obviously sincere belief in the power of tariffs — as untethered from reality and sense as these demands are — have exposed massive weaknesses on our part that we should want to fix for our own sake. Poilievre should speak more to us about those fixes.

Mark Carney never made any sense to me as a potential saviour for the Liberals. The most obvious recent event they needed to replicate was Kathleen Wynne’s jaw-dropping majority win in 2014 for the Ontario Liberals, after Dalton McGuinty had driven the party into a pond and left it there to drown. Wynne was a proven, veteran campaigner. Carney is … well, certainly not an “outsider”, but this is his first go at politics, and it certainly hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

But Carney seems set to win the party’s leadership race on Sunday, anyway. He’s boring, and he’s a technocrat, and Trudeau is neither. And neither is Poilievre. A boring technocrat might well look like a safe harbour for a lot of Canadians. Poilievre needs to put a more positive spin on the changes we so desperately need.

March 8, 2025

The Federal Court of Canada rules in favour of Trudeau’s authoritarian instincts and actions

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

Apparently we’ve all been under a delusion that Parliament was the paramount elected body and therefore that the Prime Minister needed to operate within the rules of Parliament. The Federal Court saw it otherwise, as Dan Knight explains:

Arms of the Federal Court of Canada

If you’ve been following this case, you already know what’s at stake: whether Justin Trudeau — Canada’s most brazenly authoritarian Prime Minister in modern history — can shut down Parliament whenever he finds it politically inconvenient. Well, today, the Federal Court of Canada, in all its wisdom, just gave him the green light.

Chief Justice Paul S. Crampton released his decision, and while he acknowledged that the courts do have the power to review the Prime Minister’s use of prorogation, he ultimately ruled that Trudeau didn’t exceed his constitutional authority. That’s right — according to the Federal Court, it’s perfectly fine for a sitting Prime Minister to shut down Canada’s elected legislature while his party scrambles to pick a new leader. It’s fine to suspend oversight at a time when Canada is facing real, tangible threats, including Trump’s tariff war. It’s fine to use a legal loophole to avoid answering for one of the biggest financial scandals in Canadian history — the SDTC affair, which saw millions of taxpayer dollars funneled into thin air.

Let’s be very clear about what happened here. On January 6, 2025, Justin Trudeau stood at a podium and declared that Parliament — Canada’s most important democratic institution — was “paralyzed”. He said it was no longer working, that it needed a reset, and that in the meantime, he was resigning. Oh, and conveniently, during that time, the Liberal Party would be selecting a new leader.

Pause for a second and consider that. He wasn’t just shutting down debate on a single issue. He wasn’t suspending a single bill. He was shutting down Parliament entirely — the very institution meant to hold his government accountable.

Now, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) immediately called this out for what it was — an unlawful, undemocratic, and unconstitutional seizure of power. They filed a legal challenge, and in that case, they pointed out some pretty basic, irrefutable facts:

First, Parliament was not paralyzed. In the weeks leading up to prorogation, four separate bills had been passed. Does that sound like a government that isn’t functioning? Or does it sound like a Prime Minister who was simply looking for an excuse to silence his critics?

Second, and more importantly, Trudeau wasn’t shutting down Parliament to “reset” anything — he was doing it to save his own party. His government was crumbling. His ministers were resigning. His own caucus was at war with itself. And just as an election loomed over his head, he pulled the plug on Parliament, giving his party a clean slate while robbing opposition parties of their ability to challenge him.

And here’s the part the mainstream media will never report — this move wasn’t just about Trudeau’s political survival. It was also a blatant attempt to escape scrutiny over his government’s refusal to release documents related to the Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) scandal. If you don’t know what that is, it’s simple: Parliament ordered the Trudeau government to hand over records about how millions of taxpayer dollars mysteriously disappeared into politically connected environmental companies. The Trudeau government refused, defied Parliament, and then shut Parliament down before anyone could hold them accountable.

March 6, 2025

Passionate belief in historical untruths

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As mentioned in earlier posts, one of the most toxic exports from Australia to the rest of the Anglosphere has been the academic indulgence in believing that “settler colonialism” explains everything about the history of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and anywhere else the British diaspora touched:

Welby in Zanzibar

Throughout the English-speaking world elites are falling over themselves to believe the very worst of their own countries.

In Britain, the Church of England has committed itself to spend an initial £100 million on slavery-reparations in response to the discovery that its endowment had “links” with African enslavement. “The immense wealth accrued by the Church … has always been interwoven with the history of African chattel enslavement”, a document explains. “African chattel enslavement was central to the growth of the British economy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the nation’s wealth thereafter”. And this has “continuing toxic consequences”.

Yet almost none of this is true. The evidence shows that the Church’s endowment fund was hardly involved in the evil of slave-trading at all. Most economic historians reckon the contribution of slave-trading and slavery to Britain’s economic development as somewhere between marginal and modest. And between abolition in 1834 and the present, multiple causes have intervened to diminish slavery’s effects.

Consonant with his church’s policy, the (then) Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby preached a sermon in Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar last year, in which he criticised Christian missionaries for treating Africans as inferior and confessed that “we [British] must repent and look at what we did in Zanzibar”.

Really? What the British did in Zanzibar during the second half of the 19th century was to force the Sultan to end the slave-trade. Indeed, the cathedral in which the archbishop was preaching was built over the former slave-market. And here’s what the pioneering missionary David Livingstone wrote about black Africans in 1871: “I have no prejudice against [the Africans’] colour; indeed, anyone who lives long among them forgets they are black and feels that they are just fellow men…. If a comparison were instituted, … I should like to take my place among [them], on the principle of preferring the company of my betters”.

[…]

St. John Baptiste church was one of many local churches to go up in flames during Justin Trudeau’s performative national guilt trip over “unmarked mass graves” at former Residential Schools across Canada.

Which bring us to Canada. The May 2021 claim by a Kamloops Indian band to have discovered the remains of 215 “missing children” of an Indian Residential School was quickly sexed up by the media into a story ‘mass graves’, with all its connotation of murderous atrocity. The Toronto Globe and Mail published an article under the title, “The discovery of a mass gravesite at a former residential school in Kamloops is just the tip of the iceberg”, in which a professor of law at UBC wrote: “It is horrific … a too-common unearthing of the legacy, and enduring reality, of colonialism in Canada”. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal buildings to honour the murdered children. Because the Kamloops school had been run by Roman Catholics, some zealous citizens took to burning and vandalising churches, 112 of them to date. The dreadful tale was eagerly broadcast worldwide by Al Jazeera.

Yet, four years later, not a single set of remains of a murdered Indian child in an unmarked grave has been found anywhere in Canada. Judging by the evidence collected by Chris Champion and Tom Flanagan in their best-selling 2023 book, Grave Error: How the Media Misled us (and the Truth about the Residential Schools), it looks increasingly probable that the whole, incendiary story is a myth.

So, prime ministers, archbishops, academics, editors, and public broadcasters are all in the business of exaggerating the colonial sins of their own countries against noble (not-so-very) savages — from London to Sydney to Toronto. Why?

As Trump’s tariffs begin to bite, Canadians strike back at … King Charles and Wayne Gretzky?

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

As if more evidence were needed that Canadians aren’t well-served by our political leaders, social media personalities and legacy media types are pointing at uninvolved figures to be rounded up as the targets of maple-flavoured Two Minutes’ Hate sessions:

Canada’s latest Emmanuel Goldstein replacement, “The Great One” aka Wayne Gretzky

You can’t have an outburst of nationalism without purity tests coming into play, and two prominent Canadian figures have failed theirs in the court of chattering-class opinion: Wayne Gretzky and King Charles III, of all people.

In recent consecutive days, hilariously, The Globe and Mail‘s website published the following headlines to its online readers’-letters pages: “Wayne Gretzky’s fall from grace is a long time coming”; “Let Wayne Gretzky feel some pain”; and “Wayne Gretzky has always been held in the highest regard … now, he is dead to me”.

Gretzky is friendly with President Trump, you see, which is unacceptable. And if Gretzky isn’t willing to publicly disavow Trump, he should be using his influence to sit Trump down and explain that Canada will never be the 51st state … at which point, presumably, something useful is supposed to happen. It’s never clear what that useful thing would be, beyond a cheap nationalist thrill.

Gretzky’s Yankeeism was confirmed when he served as honorary captain of Team Canada in the final game of the 4 Nations tournament in Boston. (Imagine if he hadn’t served as honorary captain!) He gave the American players a thumbs up — which in any other context would have been considered simple good sportsmanship. He didn’t wear a Team Canada sweater, but rather a suit — which in any other context wouldn’t even have been noticed. He didn’t wear his Order of Canada pin — well, now we’re just grasping at straws.

It’s funny that the same kind of people who have no time for the Crown under normal circumstances (even if they’re not quite out-and-out republicans) are delighted to pile on to any accusations that King Charles isn’t doing … something … to fight off the Bad Orange Man for us:

This brings us to our head of state, and the baffling calls in recent days for him to shake his sceptre toward Washington and declare that Canada shall never never never be the 51st state. If these calls were coming just from anti-monarchists, it would be understandable (though it’s odd to hear them suddenly demanding that the sovereign speak on our behalf). But all kinds of otherwise reasonable people jumped aboard as well, as if this was something the King should self-evidently be doing.

It is self-evidently not what the King should be doing — certainly not before receiving advice from the Canadian prime minister, and probably not at all. Charles’s mother wouldn’t have mouthed off, and I have to wonder if she would have gotten the same criticism were she still alive to see this mess.

Indeed, I think a moment like this is precisely when having an apolitical head of state — maybe even one that doesn’t live here — is most valuable. We have more than enough people, elected and unelected, completely and vocally embroiled in the Trump Tariff Wars, pursuing some combination of national, partisan and personal gain. Isn’t it nice to have precisely the sort of democratic constancy the United States now lacks? You don’t throw away an anchor, however rusty, with a gale on the horizon.

HMCS Bonaventure – The Pride of Canada’s Fleet

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

Skynea History
Published 22 Oct 2024

For today’s video, we’ll be looking at the last of Canada’s aircraft carriers. Not typically a navy you associate with that kind of ship, but the Canadians actually operated three during the Cold War.

The third, HMCS Bonaventure, is an interesting one. A small ship, that operated aircraft at the very edge of her capability. And routinely baffled American pilots in the process.

Yet, she was also a ship that came to an end before her time. Decommissioned and scrapped, right after an expensive (and extensive) mid-life overhaul. In what is generally seen as a bad political move, more than anything to do with her capabilities.
(more…)

March 4, 2025

Canada’s nasty authoritarian streak shows up in the “deprive Musk of his citizenship” online mob

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

In The Line, Leonid Sirota explains why we can’t just arbitrarily deprive a Canadian of his citizenship rights just because Charlie Angus has riled up a social media mob to demand it:

Elon Musk wrapped in the Canadian flag – created with Grok.

One other incontrovertible fact about Mr. Musk is that he is a Canadian citizen. His mother was born in Canada — which made her a citizen — as are her children, even though they were born abroad.

A large number of Mr. Musk’s and my fellow Canadians find the coexistence of these facts to be obnoxious. Whether out of anger or embarrassment, they are lining up to sign a petition to Parliament to demand that he be deprived of his Canadian citizenship. As of this writing, the petition has been signed by about 300,000 people. (In theory, these are Canadian citizens or residents, though on the Internet, nobody knows you didn’t actually watch the McDavid goal 97 times on loop.) At least one member of Parliament, the NDP’s Charlie Angus, is supportive.

This is appalling. The reasons given for depriving Mr. Musk of his Canadian citizenship are fundamentally authoritarian, as is the contempt for both the substantive and the procedural legal requirements involved in deprivation of citizenship that the petition manifests. That a member of Parliament is supporting this abomination is especially disturbing (and one reason this whole mess is worth caring about).

To start with the substantive point, the idea that a Canadian could be deprived of his citizenship for political reasons ought to be beyond the pale of polite discussion. It is the sort of thing the Soviets did to Mstislav Rostropovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others. Is Mr. Musk a Solzhenitsyn? Well, no. But so what? The principles at stake here are universal. They do not depend on whether one is a martyr or a millionaire, a genius or a jerk. (Solzhenitsyn, at any rate, was both jerk and genius. So is Mr. Musk. Not that it matters.)

More to the point, do you want the Canadian government to have the power to deprive people of their citizenship for their political beliefs, statements, or activities? If you are okay with a government led by a Justin Trudeau or a Mark Carney having this power, do you agree that one led by Pierre Poilievre should? (Or, of course, vice versa.)

And yes, no matter how patriotic and indignant the people who sign the petition, or support it, may feel, the demand to take away Mr. Musk’s citizenship is political. The first recital of the petition accuses him of having “engaged in activities that go against the national interest of Canada”. I think the accusation is well-founded. But it is a political accusation: the national interest is a political concept. The petition then claims Mr. Musk “has used his wealth and power to influence our elections”. If he has, that is political action that Canadian citizens are entitled to take, subject to applicable laws, which the petition isn’t even alleging Mr. Musk broke. Finally, the petition claims that Mr. Musk “has now become a member of a foreign government that is attempting to erase Canadian sovereignty”. Stipulated. But the actions of this foreign government, no matter how dishonourable, distasteful, and dangerous for Canada, have so far stayed within the realm of politics.

FDR – behind closed doors – was as bad as Trump while the Dunkirk evacuation was going on

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

Winston Churchill became prime minister of Britain the same day the Germans launched their attack against France and the Low Countries in May, 1940. The situation went from bad to appalling in very short order as the vaunted French army’s high command crumbled under the stress (even if the soldiers fought bravely in most cases). The British Expeditionary Force retreated with the French mobile forces toward the English Channel, eventually evacuating as many troops as they could from the port of Dunkirk. During this time, Churchill was appealing to the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt for whatever aid he could send.

Postwar histories tended to portray FDR as both benevolent and helpful toward Churchill in this stressful period, but behind closed doors FDR was far less a future ally, as Andreas Koureas explained on Twitter:

More than a year after FDR’s attempt to pry Canada and the Royal Navy away from a “dying” Britain, he and Churchill met onboard HMS Prince of Wales, in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, during the Atlantic Charter Conference. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (left) and Prime Minister Winston Churchill are seated in the foreground. Standing directly behind them are Admiral Ernest J. King, USN; General George C. Marshall, U.S. Army; General Sir John Dill, British Army; Admiral Harold R. Stark, USN; and Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, RN. At far left is Harry Hopkins, talking with W. Averell Harriman.
US Naval Historical Center Photograph #: NH 67209 via Wikimedia Commons.

Ironically, the truth is that in 1940, Roosevelt — behind closed doors — behaved worse than Trump.

On the 20th May 1940, after multiple failed pleas for aid, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt that:

“If members of the present administration were finished and others came in to parley amid the ruins, you must not be blind to the fact that the sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany would be the fleet, and if this country was left by the United States to its fate no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants. Excuse me, Mr. President, putting this nightmare bluntly.”

Roosevelt’s refusal for aid was understandable given the political situation in America. As he told Churchill earlier that month, it wasn’t “wise for that suggestion to be made to the Congress at this moment”.

However, what he did after the 20th May telegram wasn’t.

Not bothering to even reply to Churchill’s warnings, Roosevelt instead sought to get Canada to give up on Britain.

As Roosevelt thought that Britain would likely collapse, and Churchill could not be trusted to maintain the struggle, he summoned a delegation for Canada.

The aim was to get Canada to pester Britain to have the Royal Navy sent across the Atlantic, before Britain’s seemingly-inevitable collapse.

Furthermore, to ensure this, the Americans wanted Canada to encourage the other British Dominions to get on board such a plan, and likewise gang up against Britain.

You can see Mackenzie King’s (PM of Canada) disbelief and horror in his diary,

“The United States was seeking to save itself at the expense of Britain. That it was an appeal to the selfishness of the Dominions at the expense of the British Isles. […] I instinctively revolted against such a thought. My reaction was that I would rather die than do aught to save ourselves or any part of this continent at the expense of Britain.”

King telegrammed Churchill on the 30th May that this was the closed-door political situation across the Atlantic.

Bear in mind, Roosevelt was trying to instigate this during the Dunkirk evacuations.

How Churchill didn’t break knowing the one ally he needed in his darkest hour thought he’d fail, I have no idea.

On the 5th June 1940, Churchill wrote back to Mackenzie King,

“We must be careful not to let the Americans view too complacently prospect of a British collapse, out of which they would get the British Fleet and the guardianship of the British Empire, minus Great Britain. […] Although President [Roosevelt] is our best friend, no practical help has been forthcoming from the United States as yet.”

(The first key mover that swung Roosevelt into entrusting Churchill to continue the struggle — and as such aid would not be wasted on Britain — was when Churchill ordered the Royal Navy’s Force H to open fire and destroy the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kébir — after Admiral Gensoul had refused the very reasonable offers from Britain, despite Germany and Italy demanding the transference of the French Fleet as part of the armistices.)

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