Quotulatiousness

January 7, 2025

Justin Trudeau announces his resignation … and a nation rejoices!

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

Rather than letting Canadians have an election, Justin Trudeau announced that he is resigning as Liberal party leader but that Parliament will be prorogued for long enough for the Liberals to run a full leadership campaign. This means that Trudeau’s replacement will likely be prime minister for roughly as long as it takes for Parliament to come to order after prorogation and not a minute longer. Nice work, Justin!

Full credit to the Babylon Bee for their coverage:

It’s impossible not to feel that Trudeau’s ego has been the biggest player in our national psychodrama over the last few months (years, actually), as it seems inevitable that Trudeau’s hapless successor is going to be the Liberal Party’s version of former PM Kim Campbell, although probably not being reduced to a caucus of two seats in a landslide, as Campbell endured.

The Line‘s immediate response quite properly describes Trudeau as “an absolute Muppet”, and I think that’s pretty unkind … to Muppets:

There was only one major thought that crossed your Line editors’ minds when watching Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation speech on the porch of Rideau Cottage on Monday morning: “Jesus Christ, the absolute self regard of this fucking Muppet.”

Yes, that’s harsh. We’re even almost sorry about it. And we’ll touch on the humanity of it all in a moment. But for now, like, gosh. This isn’t good.

We are well aware that much of the media will be replete with mopey paeans to the decade-long service of this prime minister, even as he announces his entirely hypocritical plan to prorogue Parliament until March 24 in order to enable his party to assemble a chaotic and hasty leadership race. You’ll get none of that from us here at The Line. Trudeau deserves no such consideration — at least not at the top. From where we sit today, the sheer arrogance of this man, and the party that has enabled him, has just locked the nation into months of parliamentary paralysis in the midst of what is likely to shortly become an economic trade war and a broader international geopolitical realignment.

While we fully expect news of Trudeau’s resignation to lead many of our readers to sound the bells, we share none of their relief. The decision he announced on Monday demonstrates a total lack of respect for voters, an utter disregard for the good of the nation, and a profound obliviousness to the realities of the international environment we are about to find ourselves in.

And while we’d like to give Trudeau some credit for demonstrating an ounce of genuine humility in his resignation speech, too much of it was crammed with statements of breathtaking, overweening egotism; he pegged his decision to leave squarely on internal divisions — a fantastic parting “fuck you” to his caucus that abrogates any attempt at accountability for his own policy or leadership failures.

Trudeau repeatedly justified his decision to ask for the house to be prorogued by noting that Parliament had become dysfunctional, the opposition parties had stalled business of the house on process questions, and the government was in need of a “reset”.

This blithely ignores a few points, including the fact that part of the reason Parliament has been stuck in a procedural quagmire is because Trudeau’s own government has refused to hand over a potentially incriminating dossier that may demonstrate thwacks of taxpayer cash being siphoned off to well-connected businesses and insiders via what the opposition has deemed a “green slush fund”.

This is a matter upon which the Commons’ Liberal speaker ruled against his own party. The Liberals could have stopped the pseudo-filibuster by turning over to Parliament the documents that they are required to turn over. They didn’t.

The very foundations of the Westminster parliamentary system are rooted in the concept of confidence: if you can’t maintain the confidence of the house, you cannot rule Parliament. Prorogation is a procedural tool intended to govern ordinary logistics. It should never be used to circumvent a matter of confidence — and while it was delicious to watch Trudeau squirm on this point during his resignation speech, defending Stephen Harper’s 2008 use of it in order to justify his own, the fact remains that both leaders have now set and affirmed a dangerous norm that undermines one of the foundational democratic concepts of our democracy and how it functions.

When a government finds itself this battered and unpopular, and when a long-serving leader has announced that he’ll step down, while prorogation may be legal, there’s only one politically and even morally right thing to do. There is only one way to “reset” parliament. Only one.

Call an election.

Paul Wells says “The Liberals give themselves three months to save the furniture”:

He was late as usual. He sounded sad. The wind blew his script away. He said more or less what you expected. When his time in office ends at the end of March, he’ll have been prime minister for a few months less than Stephen Harper was. His party has very little chance of recovering, but more than it had yesterday. It would have been so easy to pick his own time, maybe at the end of 2022, but apparently these decisions are hard to make.

Things happen fast. It’s been six weeks, Monday to Monday, since Donald Trump threatened 25-per-cent tariffs on everything Canadian. Three weeks since Chrystia Freeland resigned from cabinet. In two weeks Donald Trump will be sworn in as President of the United States. Justin Trudeau’s resignation is a pure product of this crisis.

I see a straight line from Trump’s Truth Social outburst of Nov. 25 to this week’s events. Trudeau’s circle once thought a second Trump victory would help them make the case against Pierre Poilievre. It’s fair to say the results are not up to their hopes. With Elon Musk continuing his hobby kibbitzing in the politics of countries around the world, Canada will now stand as a warning to governments elsewhere: Trump and his crew can take you down.

Having stalled until he ran out of options, Trudeau will now become incidental to events. There’s a lot going on. Wistful tribute speeches in the House of Commons will have to wait. The Trudeau succession will play out quickly, in four arenas at once: Parliament; the Liberal Party; the electorate; and Canada’s national security. Events in each venue will influence the others.

Some people accuse Trudeau of doubling the national debt during his time in office — from C$612B in 2015 to C$1.2 trillion currently — but as mathematically inclined commentators have noted, Trudeau also successfully engineered the decline of the value of the Canadian dollar so that the actual increase in national debt is less than 55%! Success!

At Spiked, Tom Slater bids farewell to “Canada’s first black prime minister”:

Yes, Justin Trudeau – the man who proved that in these topsy-turvy political times you can be a liberal and an authoritarian, and painfully woke while also having spent much of your youth in black face – has finally resigned.

The writing’s been on the wall for some time now. After historically low poll ratings, came the resignation before Christmas of his deputy, Chrystia Freeland, who clashed with Trudeau about how to tackle president-elect Donald Trump’s imperious threats of a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian goods. In the end, Justin jumped before he was pushed.

After almost a decade in power, he will step down as prime minister and Liberal leader as soon as a successor can be found. Polls suggest that, such is the hole he has left his party in, whoever replaces him will likely face a shellacking in the upcoming election.

Where did it all go wrong? When Trudeau took the reins of his nation back in 2015 – following in the footsteps of his father, Fide … sorry, Pierre – he rode on a wave of popular support and corporate-media swooning.

With the election of another pampered rich kid south of the border a year later, Trudeau was praised in the international media as the anti-Trump – progressive, pro-migration and drop-dead gorgeous, to boot!

Indeed, the next time an establishment scribe slurs Trump supporters as doe-eyed dolts dazzled by celebrity, point them in the direction of the gushing coverage of “hunky” Trudeau, who seemed to govern as if he was in a budget version of The West Wing.

Soon enough, he began carrying on like an unsubtle caricature of a cringe, establishment liberal, chiding women for saying “mankind”, instead of “peoplekind”, and declaring that he was insisting on a 50:50 male-to-female cabinet “because it’s 2015“.

Trudeau is the apotheosis of a hectoring style of politics that assumes voters are terrible bigots in need of lecturing, and women and minorities are perennial victims in need of his paternalistic assistance.

I’m frankly amazed it took the good people of Canada almost 10 years to wipe that smug look off his face.

January 6, 2025

If you’ve ever been in any military organization, you’ve encountered this

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Shady Maples on the frequent issue needing a particular piece of equipment, but … bureaucracy:

Have you heard the one about the soldier and supply technician?

    Soldier: I need a sleeping bag.

    Supply Tech: We’re not issuing sleeping bags right now.

    Soldier: I can see a sleeping bag on the shelf right there.

    Supply Tech: But that’s my last sleeping bag! If I issued that one then I wouldn’t have any left in stock. I need to keep at least one sleeping bag in stock in case someone needs it.

    Soldier: Yes! That someone is me! I need the sleeping bag!

    Supply Tech: Look, my job is to keep the shelves stocked. See the sign on the door? It says Stores, not Gives. If I give you that sleeping bag then we’ll be out of stock.

    Soldier: But I need the sleeping bag.

    Supply Tech: You’ll have to come back after we restock.

    Soldier: Fine, when are you restocking sleeping bags?

    Supply Tech: When we’ve depleted our current stock.

This is barely a joke, I’m convinced it’s a script that supply techs learn in Borden.1 A common variant involves a soldier trying to get a piece of kit ahead of a training exercise. The supply tech tells them they can’t have the kit because they don’t need it. If the soldier needed the kit then it would be issued to them and since it’s not issued to them they don’t need it. I have personally had that conversation multiple times with everyone from lowly supply techs to quartermasters up to Life Cycle Material Managers in ADM(Mat). A notable one involved asking the depot in Montreal to send my unit a specific piece of optical equipment2 which we desperately needed, only to be told that they could not release that kit to us because the Army divesting it. My unit had just taken on a new capability that required this kit, why were they throwing this equipment away? “Nobody uses it anymore.” But I’ll use it, I’m telling you that I’m going to use it! My appeal failed, the depot had to divest because no one used the kit and they wouldn’t let us use the kit because they had to divest. I subsisted by borrowing equipment from other units off-the-books.

Pic related, from Patrick McKenzie.

There is a deep and difficult-to-articulate emotion that I feel whenever I have interactions like this. It’s a middle shade of anger, frustration, sadness, and loathing triggered by a people who so are so lost in process that they stop caring about real-world outcomes. Via Scott Alexander’s Links For December, I just learned? that Scott Aaaronson coined the term “blankface” for people like this:

    What exactly is a blankface? He or she is often a mid-level bureaucrat, but not every bureaucrat is a blankface, and not every blankface is a bureaucrat. A blankface is anyone who enjoys wielding the power entrusted in them to make others miserable by acting like a cog in a broken machine, rather than like a human being with courage, judgment, and responsibility for their actions. A blankface meets every appeal to facts, logic, and plain compassion with the same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare — a blank stare that, more often than not, conceals a contemptuous smile.

Once, my 2IC3 was trying to access a childcare benefit intended to reimburse members for babysitting when they are in the field or called in for overnight duties. My 2IC enquired about reimbursement but word came down from Ottawa that she wasn’t eligible since since had not used a licenced childcare provider. Nevermind that there are no licenced providers offering overnight childcare in our geographic area. When my 2IC submitted a grievance for her exclusion from the policy, the grievance analyst rejected it on the grounds that, since she never applied for the benefit (after being told she wasn’t eligible), she had not technically been denied anything. The analyst recommended applying for the benefit in order to be denied and then submitting another grievance based on that denial. At a time when the CAF is desperately trying to attract and retain female leaders, you know what really makes our case? Nickle-and-diming single moms over $70 of childcare. The analyst’s rejection letter made me feel like maybe Ted Kacynski had a point.

In his blog post, Scott Aaronson used Dolores Umbridge as the canonical example of a blankface. Umbridge is conspicuous do-gooder who uses her positional authority to make life miserable for everyone around her. As the story progresses and she accrues more power to her office, it becomes apparent that her virtuous posturing conceals a cruel authoritarian heart. Scott noted that:

    The most despicable villain in the Harry Potter universe is not Lord Voldemort, who’s mostly just a faraway cipher and abstract embodiment of pure evil, no more hateable than an earthquake. Rather, it’s Dolores Jane Umbridge, the toadlike Ministry of Magic bureaucrat who takes over Hogwarts school, forces out Dumbledore as headmaster, and terrorizes the students with increasingly draconian “Educational Decrees”. Umbridge’s decrees are mostly aimed at punishing Harry Potter and his friends, who’ve embarrassed the Ministry by telling everyone the truth that Voldemort has returned and by readying themselves to fight him, thereby defying the Ministry’s head-in-the-sand policy.

Voldemort is evil, yes, but he is a moral agent who chooses and sacrifices according to his principles. The series pits his perverse will-to-power against the protagonists heroic defence of good. Unlike Voldemort, Umbridge doesn’t have any vision or principles, her only goal appears to be rigorous application of Ministry rules and procedures. She is not an agent of evil so much as its midwife, allowing evil to spread by obstructing any effort to stop it.

    1. CFB Borden is the home of Canadian Forces Logistics Training Centre, a place that nobody says anything good about, especially the loggies.

    2. This piece of kit was specialized enough that I would effectively dox myself if I told you what it was.

    3. 2IC: Second-In-Command.

January 4, 2025

Winning WW2’s Most Important Battle – Battle of the Atlantic

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historigraph
Published 15 Aug 2024

The Second World War featured many important land battles on a colossal scale. They involved hundreds of thousands of participants, ranged across hundreds of miles and inflicted the most terrible destruction. But none of them were as long-running, as vast or as crucial to allied victory as that fought at sea in the Atlantic, where for four years Allied navies and civilian sailors fought a life or death struggle against Germany’s U-boats. This is the story of how it was fought, and how it was won.

00:00 – WW2’s most important battle
00:45 – The U-boat menace in the early years
08:53 – The massacre off the eastern seaboard
13:12 – American ship printer go brrrrrrrrr
19:31 – The Allies gain the upper hand
21:49 – Black May: the convoy battles of 1943
24:41 – The most important victory of WW2
(more…)

December 31, 2024

No matter what Poilievre does, it’s still Trudeau’s decision to stay or go

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

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has been doing a masterful job of staying on top of the Canadian news cycle even through the normally dormant holiday period, but he does not have a way to eject Justin Trudeau ahead of the inauguration of US President Donald Trump or for many weeks afterwards:

During a time of year when Canadian politics typically descend into a semi-coma, the Conservatives are leading an all-out drive to bring down the Liberal government before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a chance to save it.

Whatever they do, though, Trudeau continues to hold all the cards. The Tories can shame him, they can rally the opposition against him and they can call for the intervention of the Governor General. But – as per every available constitutional precedent – this only ends when Trudeau says it does.

Just before Christmas, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre called on Governor General Mary Simon to recall Parliament before New Year’s Eve in order to hold a vote of non-confidence in the Liberal government.

When that didn’t work, the Conservatives announced an early recall of the Public Accounts Committee. It’s one of the more influential House of Commons committees headed by a Conservative, New Brunswick MP John Williamson, and it’s thus one of the only organs of state that the Conservatives can order back to work.

The committee obviously has no power to decide the Liberal government’s future, but the idea is to have them draft a shovel-ready non-confidence motion that can be fast-tracked to the House of Commons when it reconvenes on Jan. 27.

This campaign all makes political sense: Just as NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is finally signalling a willingness to bring down the Trudeau government, the Conservatives are hammering on him to actually make good on the pledge.

“Conservatives are now presenting the NDP with this first opportunity to bring down the Liberal Government and force an election,” reads a Friday statement outlining the Conservatives’ Public Accounts Committee plan.

But whatever else the Tories do between now and Jan. 27, Trudeau’s ability to head them off is virtually absolute.

There was never any realistic chance of Governor General Mary Simon calling Parliament back to work. And if Trudeau ultimately decides to prorogue Parliament past Jan. 27 to prevent a confidence vote, it’s extremely unlikely that she or any other occupant of Rideau Hall would stop him.

December 22, 2024

Canada’s founding peoples

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

Fortissax contrasts Canadians and Americans ethnically, culturally, and historically. Here he discusses Anglo-Canadians and French-Canadians:

The arms of Canada include those of England, Scotland, Ireland and France in that order.

To understand Canada, you must first understand its foundations.

Canada is a breakaway society from the United States, like the United States was a breakaway society from the British Empire. You might even argue that Britain represented a thesis, America an antithesis, and Canada the synthesis.

Anglo-Canadians

Anglo-Canadians are descendants of the Loyalists from the American Revolution. They were North Americans, not British transplants, as depicted in American propaganda like Mel Gibson’s The Patriot. They shared the same pioneering and independent spirit as their Patriot counterparts. All were English “Yeoman” or free men. American history from the Mayflower to 1776 is also Canadian history. It is why both nations share Thanksgiving. Some historians have identified the American Revolution as an English civil war, and this is a fairly accurate assessment.

The United States’ founding philosophy was rooted in liberalism; it is a proposition nation based on creed over blood, shaped by Enlightenment thinkers like Edmund Burke and John Locke, now considered “conservative”. American revolutionaries embraced ideals of meritocracy, individualism, property rights, capitalism, free enterprise, republicanism, and democracy, which empowered the emerging middle class.

Anglo-Canada’s founding philosophy is British Toryism, emerging as a traditionalist and reactionary force in direct response to the American Revolution. During the revolution, many Loyalists had their private property seized or redistributed, suffered beatings in the streets, and in the worst cases, faced public executions or the infamous punishment of tar and feathering. Canadian philosopher George Grant, who is considered the father of Anglo-Canadian nationalism, traced their roots to Elizabethan-era Anglican theologian Richard Hooker.

Canada’s motto, Peace, Order, and Good Government (POGG), reflects a philosophy in stark contrast to the American ideal of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Anglo-Canadians valued God, King, and Country, emphasizing public morality, the common good, and Tory virtues like noblesse oblige — the expectation and obligation of elites to act benevolently within an organic hierarchy. While liberty was important, it was never to come at the expense of order. Canadian conservatism before the 1960s was not a variation of liberalism, as in the U.S., but a much older, European, and genuinely traditional ideology focused on community, public order, self-restraint, and loyalty to the state — values embedded in Canada’s founding documents.

Section 91 of the Constitution Act, 1867, empowers Parliament to legislate for the “peace, order, and good government” of Canada, giving rise to Crown corporations like Ontario Hydro, the CBC, and Canadian National Railway — state-owned enterprises. Canada’s tradition of mixed economic policies is often misunderstood by Americans as socialism, communism, or totalitarianism. These state-owned enterprises have historical precedents, such as state-controlled factories during Europe’s industrial revolution, often run by landed nobility. Going further back, state-owned mines in ancient Athens and Roman Empire granaries also exemplify this model, which cannot be simplistically labeled as “Islamofascist communism” — a mischaracterization of anything not aligned with liberalism by many Americans, and increasingly many populist Canadians.

It is also a lesser-known historical fact that Canada was almost ennobled into a kingdom rather than a dominion. This idea was suggested by Thomas D’Arcy McGee, a prominent Irish-Canadian politician, journalist, and one of the Fathers of Confederation. Deeply involved in the creation of Canada as a nation, McGee proposed in the 1860s that Canada could be formed as a monarchy with a hereditary nobility, possibly with a viceroyal king, likely a son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He believed this would provide stability and continuity to the fledgling nation. While this idea was not realized, its influence can be seen in the entrenched elites of Canada, who, in a sense, became an unofficial aristocracy.

An element of Canada’s conservative origins can also be found in its use of traditional British and French heraldry. Every province, for example, has a medieval-style coat of arms, often displayed on its flag, which reinforces this connection to the old-world traditions McGee sought to preserve.

McGee’s vision was rooted in his belief in the importance of monarchical institutions and his desire to strengthen Canada’s bond with the British Crown while fostering a distinct Canadian identity. He argued that ennobling Canada would give the country legitimacy and elevate it in the eyes of Europe and the wider world.

French-Canadians

French Canada, with Quebec as its largest and most influential component, has a distinct history shaped by its French colonial roots. Quebec was primarily settled by French colonists, and its unique culture and identity have evolved over the centuries, heavily influenced by Catholicism and monarchical traditions.

The Jesuits and other Catholic organizations played a pivotal role in shaping early French Canadian society. They not only spread Christianity but also laid the foundation for Quebec’s social and cultural identity. The Jesuits, part of the Society of Jesus, were among the first Catholic missionaries to arrive in New France. Invited by Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Quebec, in 1611, they helped convert Indigenous populations to Catholicism but often remained separate from them. By 1625, they had established missions among various Indigenous nations, including the Huron, Algonquin, and Iroquois.

Unlike France, Quebec bypassed the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Isolated from the homeland, the Catholic Church in Quebec consolidated its power, and French colonists faced the threat of extinction due to their initially low numbers, particularly during the one-hundred-year war with the Iroquois. This struggle only strengthened their resolve. Over time, this foundation gave rise to Clerico-Nationalism, particularly exemplified by figures like Abbé Lionel Groulx, a theocratic monarchist and ultramontanist influenced by anti-liberal Catholic nationalist movements in France. Groulx and his contemporaries emphasized loyalty to the Pope over secular governments, and their influence was so strong that the Union Nationale government of Maurice Duplessis embodied many of their beliefs.

Attempts to secularize education in the 1860s were thwarted, as the Catholic theocracy shut them down and restored control to the Church. Quebec remained a theocracy well into the 20th century, with the Catholic Church controlling public schooling and provincial healthcare until the 1960s. For much of its history, Quebecois culture saw itself as the last bastion of the traditionalist, Catholic, monarchist Ancien Régime of the fallen Bourbon monarchy. Liberal republicanism and the French Revolution were regarded as abominations, and French-Canadians believed they were the true French.

This mindset persists today, especially regarding Quebecois French. The 400-year-old dialect, rooted in Norman French and royal court French, is still regarded by many French-Canadians as “true French”. However, Europeans often deny this claim, pointing out the influence of anglicisms and the use of joual, a working-class dialect that was deliberately encouraged by Marxist intellectuals and separatists during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s to proletarianize the population.

“It’s a major award!”

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

We’ve been fans of the movie A Christmas Story for many years, but I hadn’t heard this particular detail from winery owner Martin Malivoire’s end-of-year newsletter:

The Legacy of the Lamp!

As you may already know, in the years before I put my name on a winery, my profession was related to the motion picture industry.

In a pursuit spanning forty years, I collaborated with many great people. Few were as rewarding to work with as the late Bob Clark.

He was a seasoned and visionary film director, and it was at Bob’s suggestion that I undertook an unlikely project, one whose memory became the most enduring of my pre-winery career: the leg lamp made famous by the holiday film, A Christmas Story.

Why do I say “unlikely”? My expertise was in Special Effects, which I designed and executed for motion pictures, television and stage. Frequently these were loud and dramatic; I engineered fires, explosions, crashes and the like. Prop-making was a little outside my usual practice, but I happily agreed to build this one for my friend.

With a jolly demeanor and a sly smile, Bob handed me a napkin, bearing a sketch of a flamboyant light fixture. The rest is history.

A suitably proportioned young woman was hastily recruited to model for a leg mold, which was no small task, as it required immersing her entire leg, from big toe to navel, in quick-setting plaster.

From the mold, we cast a series of translucent plastic lamps. Each had to be individually crafted to the specific requirements of a scene and uniquely, meticulously illuminated by our Director of Photography. Accordingly, not one of the fixtures was a complete, C.S.A. anointed, “plug-in, switch-on”, and as Ralphie reminisces, “bask in the soft glow of electric sex” lamp.

Nonetheless, the illusion was a success. The presence of the lamp brought elements of levity, the ridiculous, fantasy and nostalgia to the film, magnified by the Director himself. Bob, as narrator, gave his own warm voice to Ralphie’s childhood memories, and made them ours.

When production wrapped, the lamps had nowhere to go. I stored them in Toronto, and for years they adorned the windows of my studio. However, the film company still owned them and when I was told to dispose of these props, I complied, leaving nothing behind.

As movies go, A Christmas Story was what we call “a sleeper”. It drew modestly on release, but grew in popularity year after year, to join the ranks of modern Christmas Classics.

We did not foresee this, nor did we foresee that of all the images generated by this now-iconic movie, the leg lamp would become its most-remembered, most-cherished, and most-copied Christmas symbol, launching a huge industry of luminous celebrations and decorative reproductions.

If we had known … well, I’m certain I’m not the only one who would have rushed back to rescue those fishnet stocking-clad plastic leg lamps from a Cherry Street dumpster.

No, I do not receive any royalties, but it gives me pleasure to see how many folks today own a modern copy of our original creation.

If you’re among them, may it light this Christmas and many more to come … and if you don’t have a leg lamp of your own, I hope that by sharing this story I’ve left you with a smile.

December 21, 2024

The Canadian Armed Forces are doing great on diversity … but not much else

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper reports on the amazing progress in anti-racist activism, diversity, equity, inclusion and — for all I know — drag queen story times in the officers’ messes but too bad about all the other stuff, eh?

A new report finds that while the Department of Defence is making steady progress on all its new “equity and diversity” goals, morale is plummeting and the Canadian military has reached new lows in terms of its ability to actually deploy forces.

For the first time, more than half of Canada’s naval and air fleets were marked as being unfit to “meet training and readiness requirements”, according to the military’s latest Departmental Results Report, published Tuesday.

Only 45.7 per cent of Royal Canadian Navy ships are fit to be used for “training and operations”, and the same is true for just 48.9 per cent of RCAF “aerospace fleets”.

And the figures weren’t much better in the army. The report wrote that the serviceability of Canadian Army equipment remained in a “persistent downward trend”, with army personnel forced to rely on “aging and increasingly obsolete fleets”.

One example was the BV 206, a tracked snow carrier that is ostensibly the main form of transportation at the Nunavut-based Arctic Training Centre. The vehicle now has an incredible 80 per cent failure rate, with the report saying that it can’t be safely used for “essential” tasks.

Morale is also hitting new lows. In a survey, just 30.4 per cent of military personnel said that the armed forces provide a “reasonable quality of life” — that’s far less than the official target of 85 per cent.

And among full-time personnel, just 53.5 per cent said they felt “positive” about their job.

Some of the few figures in the document that weren’t in decline were in the realm of “equity and diversity”.

The Canadian Armed Forces slightly increased the share of personnel who “self-identify as a visible minority” (from 11.1 per cent in 2023 to 12.2 per cent in 2024).

There was also a moderate uptick in the number of civilian employees “who self-identify as a woman” (from 42.4 to 43 per cent).

The report boasted of a new system of military promotions that does not “disadvantage the intersections of diverse groups of women, men and non-binary people”.

It also announced that “Gender Advisors” were now being routinely deployed on overseas operations, including on Operation Unifier, Canada’s mission to provide combat training to Ukrainian soldiers engaged in their ongoing war with Russia. “The Task Force Gender Advisor was involved in all aspects of this training mission”, it read.

December 20, 2024

Imagine if Chrystia Freeland had done as well as finance minister as she did emasculating the Prime Minister

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

I was no fan of Chystia Freeland but like Mitch Heimpel, I have to admire how artistically she sliced off the Prime Minister’s balls on her way out of cabinet:


Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking in 2022.

One thing that is obvious from the former finance minister’s now infamous Monday morning letter is that she internalized the lessons of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott and Bill Morneau. If you do not immediately put out your version of your demotion or dismissal, it will be done through anonymous leaks to the Parliament Hill Toronto Star or CBC bureau. Ottawa will wonder what really happened. There will be murmurs and whispers about whether you were ever much of a “team player.”

[…]

She left no doubt about what happened, how it happened, or how she feels about it.

In doing so, she did something remarkable. She made it impossible for the PMO’s spinners and issues managers to put the prime minister out to address the media after her letter. He couldn’t answer for anything in the letter without having to answer for everything in the letter. Trudeau may be the most impressive communicator the Liberal party has produced since his father. And he was of no use to the PMO to try and counter Freeland’s narrative on Monday. He could only make matters worse. His one public appearance was in front of a big money Liberal fundraising event, with a pool camera. A bit like an Eastern-bloc gymnast performing before the East German judge.

Even when TIME magazine had him in full blackface, he still addressed the press from the plane. But not Monday.

Never in his almost 10 years as prime minister has Justin Trudeau had a day like that. Supposedly, nominally, the Liberal’s party’s best campaign and communications asset was rendered functionally useless to a television audience. To mix sports metaphors, she beat him in the paint. She drove the lane on him, and he could do nothing. And he did nothing. As of this writing, the prime minister has still not addressed either the media or the country, and is, in fact, cancelling previously scheduled interviews.

And then, Freeland went to the caucus meeting. Anything he wanted to say there, he had to say it to a crowd that could get her version by simply looking over to gauge her reaction. She sank a three pointer on him at the end of the day, just to prove she could.

We can debate her record as finance minister later. Lord knows I have my own qualms with it. But this isn’t about that. Everything else on Monday, the $62-billion deficit and the tanking loonie, are about that.

But her resignation was something unexpected. She bested Justin Trudeau in an air war. She didn’t just beat him, she ran him over. She silenced him.

She may have ended him. That much we still don’t know yet. But she ensured she won’t be remembered for either Disney+ or the “vibecession.”

The first line of her political history is now Chrystia’s Version. And we’ll remember it all too well.

The legacy “mainstream” media is not going to be replaced with a new monolithic competitor

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

Ted Gioia says the transition is almost complete and what used to be the mainstream is rapidly becoming a fringe to the new, much more chaotic mainstream:

Last week, a cable news pundit struggled to understand the new media landscape. So he sought advice from his teenage son.

He asked the youngster to name the most influential people in the world today.

Can you guess the names he picked?

Here’s what happened:

    I’m thinking to myself he’s going to say Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z.

    He says Kai Cenat, Adin Ross, Jynxzi, and Sketch. I don’t know who he is talking about.

    I said ‘What platforms are you on?’

    He said ‘I’m on Twitch, Kick, and Rumble.’

    I said ‘That sounds like you need to go to the hospital’.

    What are these platforms? I’m telling you guys, the mainstream has become fringe, and the fringe has become mainstream …

    There are people out there that are getting 14 million streams. And we are on cable news getting one or two million.

This is the new reality. The future of media has arrived — but people above a certain age won’t even recognize the names.

Check out the list below of the most watched streamers in the US and Canada.

Jynxzi? Zackrawrr? Summit1g?

A few days ago, I’d have told you these are passwords, not people.

Now I know better. I’ve watched videos from each of these individuals—and it’s shocking how different they are from mainstream media fare.

Media empires are getting defeated, but not by their corporate competitors. They’re finding themselves replaced by a ragtag assortment of podcasters, pranksters, pundits, gamers, gadflies, and influencers.

Who would have believed these headlines just a few months ago?

December 19, 2024

Paul Wells – “I found myself telling La Presse, ‘”What the f—k?” has replaced “Hello” as the standard greeting in Ottawa since Monday'”

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

Paul Wells shares some thoughts on the unsettled waters of normally placid (if not catatonic) Ottawa in the wake of Chrystia Freeland’s dramatic resignation on Monday:

Image from Blazing Cat Fur

I want to write 5,000 words of narrative in the wake of Chrystia Freeland’s resignation, but we’re still in the middle of the story. Thoughts kind of pour out. I found myself telling La Presse, “‘What the f—k?’ has replaced ‘Hello’ as the standard greeting in Ottawa since Monday.” We’ll see whether they use that quote.

Here are some thoughts, from different angles. I don’t know whether Freeland’s resignation will blow over, the way Justin Trudeau’s last 20 messes did, because I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think Justin Trudeau hopes it’ll blow over. Because he always hopes it’ll blow over. I hear, as you do, rumours that the PM will resign.

[…]

I resist biography as an analytical tool. People outgrow their backgrounds all the time.

But just about everybody who follows politics has been wondering how Trudeau could fire his most loyal lieutenant by a Zoom call three days before he needed her to deliver a crucial fall economic statement. If the Globe‘s latest story is true, and he told her Mark Carney would take the job without knowing whether Carney will take the job, that’s even wilder. Who does that?

The short answer is, somebody who is used to getting his way. Then you look at Trudeau’s life and you think, why wouldn’t he expect to get his way?

The rich kid always knows the normies will cover for him. If he needs a ride, some kid with stars in his eyes will wave his keys and volunteer. If he’s hung over he can borrow the lecture notes. He shows up in racist makeup to yet another party — forcing every other person in the venue to decide how to respond — and once again nobody stands up to him or makes a fuss. Indeed, when the record of that behaviour threatens his political career decades later, there’ll be plenty of volunteers to criticize anyone who mentions the record, rather than criticizing the guy who acted like that.

He runs for the leadership of a national political party on a platform of “I’ll tell you what I stand for after I win”. He mentions carbon pricing precisely one time at his first national leaders’ debate. He dumps his electoral-reform promise at the first hurdle, and later, when asked about it, he blames the person who asks. He gaslights Canada’s first Indigenous attorney-general for months, but he is not particularly kinder to her replacement, who is ejected from Cabinet because, I don’t know, it’s Wednesday or whatever. He lets a 72-year-old man run for re-election and only after it’s over does he let the guy know he’s getting dumped from Cabinet.

He fires the Clerk of the Privy Council by news release while travelling.

In particular, if there’s anyone in the world he might have expected to tolerate the kind of high-handedness we’re hearing about Friday’s Zoom call, it’s Chrystia Freeland. Her eagerness to endorse him in the immediate aftermath of his latest cockup has been such a reliable feature of Canadian public life it’s devolved into a kind of shtick. SNC-Lavalin, 2019: “she has absolute confidence“. Blackface, six months later: “tremendous confidence“. WE Charity, 10 months after that: “The prime minister has my complete confidence“.

Perhaps only Jagmeet Singh has shown more confidence than Freeland, over the years, in Trudeau’s leadership. Given that record — and his own much longer record of taking advantage of others’ generosity — it’s not too much of a stretch to think that at some point he decided his deputy prime minister was just another easy mark.

Turns out that’s the kind of mistake he only needed to make once.

December 18, 2024

Justin Trudeau at bay

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

However much you may dislike the man — and there’s just so much to dislike — it’s impossible to write him off no matter how bad the situation may look. In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya explains to non-Canadian audiences what has been going on in the Deranged Dominion lately:

Justin Trudeau’s government could be at the point of collapse. And a social media post from Donald Trump about tariffs may have set off the latest in a chain of dominoes for Canada’s prime minister.

On November 25, Trump posted on his platform Truth Social that, as one of his first executive orders, he would “sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders”. Four days later, Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump for dinner. Although the content of their discussion has not been made public, Trump’s tariff threat may have landed a death blow to Trudeau’s cabinet.

On Monday morning, Trudeau’s most important ally — his number two, finance minister Chrystia Freeland — resigned in a fiery letter directed at her boss, which she posted on X.

“Our country today faces a grave challenge,” she wrote. “The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25 percent tariffs. We need to take that threat extremely seriously.” She continued: “That means pushing back against ‘America First’ economic nationalism with a determined effort to fight for capital and investment and the jobs they bring”.

The same morning, Trudeau’s housing minister Sean Fraser also announced his departure, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. This brings the total number of cabinet members who’ve resigned under Trudeau in 2024 to nine. But a walkout from Freeland, his most trusted lieutenant, who was expected to release her fall economic statement Monday, is by far the biggest. That such a loyal servant who has worked for Trudeau since 2015 would resign so publicly shows just how deep the rot is these days. Freeland stood by the prime minister as his popularity began to tank in February 2022 when Canadian truckers protested his harsh Covid vaccine mandates. She even authorized the debanking of those protesters, freezing their bank accounts as a means of punishment [NR: with no legal authority, it must be noted].

Now, her resignation is feeding feverish speculation that the longtime progressive darling could finally be on his way out, amid his sinking popularity and the country’s economic slump. By Monday night, a prominent member of Trudeau’s Liberal Party, Anthony Housefather, went on TV to say the prime minister is “past his shelf life“.

December 17, 2024

Canada’s deputy prime minister heads for the exits

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

After being informed by Justin Trudeau that he no longer wanted her to be the finance minister on Friday, but still apparently expecting her to present the fall economic statement on Monday, Chrystia Freeland instead submitted her resignation from cabinet:

In the National Post, John Ivison calls it her “gangster move” against Trudeau:

Who saw Chrystia Freeland pulling a gun, after Justin Trudeau unsheathed a knife?

The finance minister is an unlikely champion of the Chicago Way, but she has just pulled off a coup that may end up toppling this government.

Just hours before she was due to give her fall economic statement, she quit.

Despite the widespread media speculation about a falling out between Freeland and Trudeau, it’s a good bet that no one was more surprised at the finance minister’s gangster move than the prime minister.

Her resignation letter was savage. She said that on Friday, Trudeau had told her he no longer wanted her as finance minister and offered her another job in cabinet.

She said that she concluded she had no option but to resign because she had lost the prime minister’s confidence.

The casus belli was the multi-billion-dollar affordability package that included a two-month GST holiday and mailing $250 cheques to nearly 19 million working Canadians.

As the National Post reported late Sunday, Freeland had already reversed the government’s position on the rebate cheques that would have cost an estimated $4.68 billion. One person with knowledge of the plans said that the measure will not be in the fiscal update but the government hopes to take another look in the new year, if it can find another party to support it.

Oh, and the financial update Freeland was still expected to deliver after being underbussed by Trudeau? It apparently did get released:

You can always count on the Babylon Bee to find the most accurate and tasteful way to present the news:

December 15, 2024

QotD: Elite luxury beliefs – cultivated non-disgust

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

Then there is the acceptance of what can only be described as unconventional lifestyles. Gay rainbow gender-bending madness is one thing. It seems progressive. Sodomites used to get ten years of hard labour. Look how advanced we have become.

But now they’ve moved on to the kids. It is easy to believe a listless, drug-addled elite might indulge in sexual degeneracy just for the hell of it. But how do we explain kindergarten teachers teaching their pupils about pronouns? Doctors emotionally blackmailing parents by insisting that the alternative to mutilating their children is their suicides? Or civil servants quietly putting gender-neutral bathrooms in public spaces?

How do we explain any of this? How do we even explain the emergence of transgenderism at all? There have been transexuals and gender dysphorics throughout history. They were typically understood as an offshoot of homosexuality, the extreme end of the effeminacy spectrum, and a vanishingly small fraction of the population.

But the current contagion is unusual and is clearly artificial. Its scale can only be a result of active promotion. Much of that is accomplished via the media and fellow travellers who champion these activities. But it is helped along by a collection of other professionals, and any attempt to question it is met with energetic pushback.

It is apparent that much of this comes from on-high, a literal top-down initiative. In less than twenty years we have witnessed a journey that began with gay rights and now includes active promotion of sexual deviancy to children, none of it natural or wanted by the majority. There is lots of speculation as to why this may be, including the part it may play in a comprehensive depopulation agenda.

What is apparent is that the professional class who endorse and promote this perceive it as an exercise in tolerance.

The notion of tolerance has typically been invoked for the distasteful, a last line of defence when direct measures fail, not a behavioural response indicating sophistication.

We rely on tolerance for things we dislike but cannot avoid. We learn to tolerate a persistent whine from an air conditioning unit, a noisy neighbour, or a noxious smell. But our goal is always to remove the source of the problem. Tolerance is a stopgap only when more permanent solutions are absent.

Their belief that tolerance is a virtue is one of the greatest shortcomings of today’s chattering classes. It is exactly the kind of signal error that exemplifies the disconnect between globalist elites and their obedient cheerleaders. The mechanism here seems to be a kind of learned override to natural disgust or discomfort. When others then object to whatever letter they have just added to the LGBTQWERTY+ community on the basis that it can’t be healthy or normal to endorse this stuff, that learned response includes the flare of superiority at your obvious backwardness.

How satisfying it must feel to have your natural inclination toward superiority endorsed in this way. Like whole food vegans at a Medieval banquet, it must provide an irresistible sense of smugness to know that you are the one-eyed man in the rainbow-decked land of the blind, with the uneducated hopelessly lost in their backward understanding of the benefits of sexual liberation.

While elites and their public relations machine happily endorse this misplaced emphasis on tolerance, all evidence suggests the elites themselves are not tolerating anything, despite what their obedient minions may think. They really are indulging in the cocaine-fuelled all-star human sacrifice orgies for real because they are cosmically bored and rich.

They aren’t rising above intrinsic disgust responses, they have sexualized them. They seem to have fetishized everything we consider unacceptable. Trafficked kids, femboys, chicks with dicks, gangbangs, farmyard orgies, human sacrifice, the lot.

They may even experience a thrill in seeing just how far they can push public morality as many have suggested, and especially how far they can get otherwise normal middle-class people to champion deviancy and hedonism most cultures find distasteful enough to ban.

The excessive promotion of tolerance is a defence against unnatural practices bored elites are rumoured to engage in. The professional class, for all their faults, probably aren’t into human sacrifice or animal orgies. So their response is to elevate the importance of visible acceptance of alternative lifestyles, hence gay kids, castrated boys, invented genders and other absurdities they cannot possibly believe themselves, and all of it instantly conveyed to one’s peers with nothing more than a multicoloured flag.

To top it all when they see how normals react, those unmoved by inept calls to be more understanding about sexual abuse, when they see parents reach for the shotgun at the very idea of sexually mutilating children, they get to invoke the conjoined twin of their cultivated tolerance, namely artificial superiority. The deep belief that they see further than the yokels with their primitive instinct to actually protect the vulnerable and embrace some basic sense of public morality.

These absurd beliefs can be observed in our educated classes because they ostentatiously demonstrate tolerance and its newfound position as the supreme virtue of the post-Christian age, one of the most successful public relations campaigns ever run by elites.

Spaceman Spiff (guest-post) “Praying to Absent Gods”, Postcards from Barsoom, 2024-07-16.

December 14, 2024

Matt Gurney’s final thoughts from the Halifax International Security Forum

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the things I regret about being totally broke is that I can’t pay for a full subscription to The Line, which is one of Canada’s best sources of (relatively) unbiased commentary on current events both in Canada and around the world. This is the third instalment of Matt Gurney’s report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum (earlier parts linked here and here):

This next one is going to be very brief, since it’s really just an observation. There was very little discussion of Israel. As I noted at the top, there was discussion of the situation in the Middle East. But it was mostly in the context of “The world is currently a mess”. Parts of the Forum involve breaking into smaller groups for more focused discussion on specific issues, and some of those might have focused on Israel or the Middle East more broadly. I can’t speak to what I didn’t see. But I was surprised by a relative lack of focus on the ongoing fighting around Israel in the main events.

A notable exception was the presence of Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy on one of the on-record panels. An international law expert, she has spent the months since the October 7th attacks documenting the mass sexual violence that was such an awful feature of Hamas’s attack. Her comments were brief but powerful and can be seen here starting at around the nine-minute mark. I’d like to zoom in on one comment in particular. Dr. Elkayam-Levy told the audience how the invaders were able to capture the personal devices of many of their victims, and use those devices to broadcast the abuse and sometimes murder of these victims via the victims’ own social media apps. This was something that was discussed shortly after the October 7 attacks but not much after: by seizing the victims’ phones, the invaders were able to spread terror and traumatize the loved ones of the victims by showing their friends and family, via photos and videos and live streams, exactly what the victims were being made to suffer.

“I thought I had seen the worst,” the doctor told the assembled audience. “But really, if there is hell, this is what it looks like. Someone abusing your kin. Someone killing your loved ones in front of your eyes.”

Though it was only a small part of the official agenda, Dr. Elkayam-Levy’s comments left an outsized impression on me, and I suspect on many others.

He also discussed his own professional path which he regrets didn’t include a lot of traditional on-the-spot reporting on tragedies and interviewing survivors, as he feels he doesn’t have a good “game face” for those times when he now finds himself doing that kind of work:

I am 100 per cent on side with Ukraine in its war with Russia. I’m not blind to flaws in Ukraine today or in Ukraine’s history, but I have absolutely no doubt who’s the good guy and the bad guy in that ongoing war. I’ve had wonderful opportunities to speak with many Ukrainians since their country was invaded. I have heard their stories and tried to share them on my platforms. I’ve also had opportunities to meet and talk to many Ukrainians who are living now in my own hometown, mostly women with young children, who fled the fighting or once lived in parts of the country that are now occupied by Russia.

I feel so profoundly that these people have been wronged, and tremendously wronged. I believe so sincerely that they should have our full backing as they try and drive back the invaders and liberate their country. That their cause is not just in the West’s strategic interests, and I very much think that it is, but also that it is morally just.

But I have concluded that they’re screwed. We’ve lost interest, and Ukrainians are about to get the Kurd treatment, if I can be so crass. And I just didn’t have the heart to tell them that. I don’t even know how I’d begin to say that to them. I write and speak for a living. And words still failed me.

During a meal in Halifax, a woman who’d flown in to give a presentation on the work her organization does in Ukraine assisting displaced people told me a story of her own experience with the war. The original Russian invasion in 2014 hadn’t been anywhere near where she lived. She was somewhat shocked, she told me, when in 2022, her hometown came under attack. She described the first time she heard air raid sirens. The first time she heard a bomb blast. The first time she could hear the gunfire of advancing ground troops. She told me about the first person from her small community to die, a paramedic who was on her way to collect wounded when their ambulance was hit. And then she told me how, months later, she realized she couldn’t remember any of those things anymore, except for the first time, because they’d happened so much. Constant sirens. Constant bombings. Constant gunfire. The deaths of more people she personally knew than she could even remember.

And as she told me this story, I found myself near tears. I was able to cover it up, I think. I wish I had better game face, but I have some. But my tears weren’t even of sympathy. I wasn’t overwhelmed by her sad story, though it was awfully goddamned sad. No, the tears I felt were tears of shame. I knew that at the end of the conference, I’d get to go home. Toronto is a bit rougher than it was when I was growing up, but it ain’t a war zone.

This woman doesn’t get to go home, assuming her home is even still standing. She knew it, I think. I knew it. I think we both knew that the other knew. But we talked around it.

History is going to judge us harshly for our failure to do more, faster, to help Ukrainians defend themselves.

And alas, we’ll deserve it.

Explaining the collapse in North American birth rates

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

The demographic collapse of both Canadian and American birthrates has many causes, but kulak definitely identifies a major one here:

📜Antidiscrimination law is the reason for the Birthrate Collapse.

In North America, for a guy to marry a girl, it’s basically expected that he must make enough more than her that he can pay for himself and support her while she provides for kids, without a decline in her lifestyle… and his status, quality of wife, and whether the marriage will be rocky or happy is determined by whether or not he can actually materially IMPROVE her lifestyle over unmarried life. Which was very achievable in the 50s and 60s when women were paid poorly and largely couldn’t get high status complex careers, and didn’t want to have to, and couldn’t, compete to male standards…

Whereas after antidiscrimination laws it is MANDATED 30-50% of high paying jobs must go to to women, no matter how many more hours men put in, or how less productive the women are. Ie. It is literally legally impossible for the average man to earn more than the average woman, no matter how hard or effectively he works… and because he WILL work harder to try, and because he competing against other men who are working harder to compete for the few high status jobs men can get, Men across the board are effectively POORER than women, they are doing way more work for equal or less pay and status.

It’s a meme now that girls will goof off at office jobs doing tik toks while the male workers are stressed and annoyed in the corner trying to keep the business afloat for the same pay. As such those girls won’t even date those men… because if you have to be stressed at the job for the same pay, you naturally seem poorer.

This is why western marriage and birthrates are collapsing.

And a follow-up response to another comment:

THis leads to spoiled delusional women convinced men are useless on the one hand, and the few self-aware women having to medicate to overcome their “imposter syndrome” as they subconsciously know they’re dead weight which psychologically breaks them.

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