The Tank Museum
Published Jun 7, 2024An opposed beach landing is the most difficult and dangerous military operation it is possible to undertake. Anticipating massive casualties in the Normandy Landings, the British Army devised a series of highly specialized tanks to solve some of the problems – Hobart’s Funnies.
Named after General Sir Percy Hobart, commander of their parent unit, 79th Armoured Division, the Funnies included a mine clearing tank – the Sherman Crab, a flamethrower – the Churchill Crocodile and the AVRE – Assault Vehicle Royal Engineers which could lay bridges and trackways, blow up fortifications and much else besides.
In this video, Chris Copson looks at surviving examples of the Funnies and assesses their effectiveness on D Day and after.
00:00 | Introduction
01:24 | Operation Overlord
03:02 | Lessons from the Dieppe Raid
05:31 | The Sherman DD
07:21 | Exercise Smash
14:38 | Sherman Crab
17:38 | The AVRE
19:47 | Churchill Crocodile
23:15 | Did the Funnies Work?
28:49 | ConclusionThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
#tankmuseum #d-day #operationoverlord
September 19, 2024
D-Day Tanks: Operation Overlord’s Strangest Tanks
September 18, 2024
Canucks. In. Space – “racist, exploitative, elitist, and environmentally destructive”
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper‘s First Reading on a recently commissioned report for the Canadian Armed Forces on space exploration from an intersectional feminist viewpoint:
As Canada prepares to send an astronaut on the first manned moon mission in more than 50 years, its own military has commissioned a $32,250 report on how space exploration may actually be “racist, exploitative, elitist, and environmentally destructive”.
The 48-page report, entitled Hidden Harms: Human (In)security in Outer Space, concludes that human usage of space is currently “masculine, militarized and state-based”.
The authors also bemoan a space exploration field that is beholden to colonial concepts such as “technospeak” and “expertise”, and which doesn’t give appropriate weight to “spirituality, astrology, and cosmology, the last of which views celestial bodies in space as animated beings and not mere objects”.
As such, the report concludes that space will continue to be a realm of “hidden violence” against the world’s marginalized until “gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality” can be put at “the centre” of how decisions are made in the cosmos.
“Leadership is needed to normalize inclusion of different perspectives,” reads a conclusion.
The report has very little positive to say about the current state of human space exploration or space technology.
The whole endeavour is criticized as “technology-biased” because it fails to consider “gendered effects”. It’s “geography-biased”, because it doesn’t include equal participation from poorer countries.
It “normalize(s) violence and exploitation” by using language that depicts “outer space as a hostile and desolate environment that is unpeopled/inhuman and controlled so that it can provide an extractable resource”.
The construction of launch pads, satellite receivers and other ground infrastructure causes “disproportionate harm to Indigenous communities by severing their connection to ancestral lands”.
The report is also deeply critical of the fact that space is disproportionately inhabited by able-bodied males from wealthy countries. “Existing approaches are ahistorical and thus invisibilize diverse stakeholders and voices,” it reads.
Hidden Harms contains little to no discussion of the technical aspects of space exploration or technology. The word “rocket”, for instance, appears only once in a footnote in relation to how a falling rocket stage could hurt Inuit people. The word “orbit” appears in the text just once, when referencing how states could impose extraterrestrial harm by “permanently damaging objects on orbit”.
Nevertheless, the report is clear that all of these technical considerations should become secondary to “intersectional, decolonial, and humanitarian perspectives”.
“We must make space for the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable,” it reads.
It’s hardly surprising that an “intersectional feminist” view of space exploration would be harshly negative — what is surprising is that the Canadian Armed Forces paid to have this intellectual drivel written. A bit over $30k isn’t even a rounding error for the federal government, but as an indicator of just how federal bureaucrats are spending their departmental budgets it does seem to indicate that there’s a lot of fat in those budget numbers.
September 17, 2024
Noormohamed: “Nice newspaper, National Post. It’d be a shame if …”
One of the more blatant examples of Liberals saying the quiet part out loud:
We need to talk about Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed and his not so subtle reminder to the National Post that it wouldn’t exist without the benefaction of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government.
Noormohamed, Parliamentary Secretary for Heritage – the ministry responsible for media welfare – did so via a post on X in which he told NP Comment senior editor Terry Newman: “Your paper wouldn’t be in business were it not for the subsidies that the government that you hate put in place — the same subsidies your Trump-adjacent foreign hedge fund owners gladly take to pay your salary.”
I wrote at length about this for The Line and, being aware that there is some crossover among subscribers, I won’t repeat that, but here’s a summary, followed by an update and then we’ll dig a little deeper into government funding for media, trans activist extremism in the Senate and other juicy stuff.
As I wrote in The Line concerning the government’s willingness to put the squeeze on media, “Nothing Noormohamed said was untrue. He and I are in perfect alignment in the view that were it not for the patronage of the Justin Trudeau government, Postmedia (and likely the Toronto Star) would by now have ceased to exist. Some of its titles may have sold for parts, but most of its zombie products would have been dispatched long ago with a bankruptcy bullet to the brain, allowing new media to spring forth from decay.”
You can read it all here.
But the most alarming part of this story isn’t that Noormohamed said what he said. That was appalling but predictable. What’s truly chilling is that he could flex his muscles, whip out his influence and intimidate what was once a free and independent press in this country and get away with it.
There were just a handful of media responses to his highly inappropriate but not unexpected behaviour. A week later, I could find no fiery or even gentle editorials condemning his statements. My Google search revealed just three news stories (Western Standard, True North & Rebel News) while none of the nation’s leading commentators cleared their throats to object.
Perhaps this is because media decided it was no big deal that an influential government MP was reminding them to keep in mind just who is paying their bills when they sit down to write. It could also be that they are bothered by it but don’t wish to draw the public’s attention to their new role as government dependents because they know it undermines public trust in them. Or, they have just given up on the idea of freedom of the press but want to keep it as their dirty little secret. Maybe all three. All I could hear was the silence of the lambs being led to the slaughter.
September 9, 2024
Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act
In the National Post, Barbara Kay explains why the Trudeau government will probably be urgently trying to get Bill C-63 through into law when Parliament resumes sitting later this month:
The sands of time were already running low for Justin Trudeau’s government. Jagmeet Singh’s just-announced withdrawal from their mutually supportive contract has widened the waist of the hourglass. Parliament resumes sitting on Sept. 16, and the Liberals will urgently seek to pass Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, now in its second reading.
If passed in its present incarnation, this deeply flawed bill will drastically curtail freedom of speech in Canada (which, to be fair, is not an outlier on digital crackdowns in the West. Switzerland, of all places, just passed similar legislation).
We already have hate-crime laws in the Criminal Code that address advocacy for genocide, incitement of hatred and the wilful promotion of hatred. Apart from its laudatory intentions in removing online content that sexually victimizes children, Bill C-63 seeks to curb all online hate speech through unnecessary, inadvisable and draconian measures inappropriate to a democracy.
The law would create a new transgression: an “offence motivated by hated” which would raise the maximum penalty for advocacy of genocide from five years to life imprisonment. What kind of mindset considers the mere expression of hateful ideas as equivalent in moral depravity to rape and murder? Such instincts call to my mind the clever aperçu by anti-Marxist pundit David Horowitz that “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out”.
Another red flag: The law would give new powers to the federal cabinet to pass regulations that have the same force as legislation passed by Parliament, and that could, say, shut down a website. Unlike legislation, regulations created by cabinet do not require debate, votes or approval of Parliament. They can be decided in secrecy and come into force without public consultation or debate.
Yet another is the restoration of the “communication of hate speech” offence to the Canadian Human Rights Act, a provision similar to the one repealed in 2012. Frivolous or malicious complaints could be made against persons or organizations, granting complainants significant potential for financial reward at no personal cost, win or lose. Moreover, under this law, a complainant’s sense of injury from published words would trump a defence of objective truth. This is an open invitation for myriad social malcontents and grievance-mongers to swarm the system, with no regard for the inevitable harm done to those who they target.
September 8, 2024
The last dispatch from Toronto before the catastrophe began
Toronto, in fact all of Ontario, may no longer be there when you get up tomorrow morning. As Chris Selley explained in his brave, final communiqué from the doomed province:
Doug Ford, the form of the destructor Ontario chose.
Dear non-Toronto friends,
This city is in crisis. This may be my last communiqué before the telex goes down for good, and I feel honour-bound to tell the world of my city’s plight. If the worst should occur, which it almost certainly will, please tell our story.
The unthinkable has occurred: Doug Ford’s madmen and women at Queen’s Park have licensed hundreds upon hundreds of new locations — called “convenience stores”, in local parlance — to sell beer, wine, cider and pre-mixed cocktails.
They did this instead of fixing health care, if you can believe that. And, outrage upon outrage, the government even made a map of such locations — as if delivering fallen Ontarians one by one to Mr. Booze himself.
Why, within just a few hundred metres of where I write, through my tears, I can discern on the map more than five such new locations. There’s Mei Convenience, Mimi Variety, Lucy Grocery and Meat, Queen & Jarvis Convenience … the list goes on, and on, my God. Church attendance is reportedly soaring as Torontonians steel themselves for the forthcoming.
Ford’s government did this entirely to solicit corporate donations to his party (some say that’s actually illegal, but whatever) from his buddies at convenience-store empires 7-Eleven and Couche-Tard … and presumably from Mimi and Lucy, whoever they are. Very rich women, clearly.
Instead of fixing health care!
Until recently, some semblance of sanity prevailed: The nearest government-run liquor store to where I sit now is a 15-minute walk away; the nearest Beer Store, the privately owned former quasi-monopoly where you’re still supposed to return your bottles and cans, is nearer to 20 minutes.
And now, suddenly, a bottle or can is shockingly near to hand. And this will lead to more alcohol-related harms. Of this there is no doubt, as one expert recently told the Toronto Methodist Star: “Harm will increase in Ontario. That is straightforward.”
It is true that many jurisdictions around the world report similar or lower levels of alcohol consumption and related harms than Ontario despite having much greater access to retail alcohol — Italy, Greece, the United States — but that is not germane to this discussion. Ontarians are not like other people. Ontario is not like other places. We are worse. Or maybe better. Or some combination of the two.
It’s true! Even saintly Bowmanville has been sullied with the demon liquor thanks to Premier Ford’s diabolical plan:
September 7, 2024
What is Jagmeet Singh’s actual plan here?
In The Line, Jen Gerson outlines the NDP leader’s options now that the Confidence and Supply Agreement has been “ripped up”:
Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh announces the end of the Confidence and Supply Agreement.
Screencap from the NDP official video via The Line,
… I’m starting to consider the possibility that Jagmeet Singh is bad at politics.
I mean, think about this.
We at The Line have long pointed out that CASA was a bad deal for the NDP. It earned the party only a few piecemeal spending concessions like two-treatment Pharmacare and a half-baked dental program. It’s the Liberals who will, and have, taken full credit for both.
Meanwhile, Singh has lost all credibility as a government critic. What blows he can level at the Liberals are fatally undermined by the fact that he’s supported them for years. If the Liberals are complacent in enabling corporate greed, then Singh is demonstrably an enabler of a government that is “too weak, too selfish and too beholden to corporate interest to fight for people”?
I realize that nobody in Liberal-land is going to take this advice seriously, but I’m going to offer it anyway. On its current trajectory, Canada is heading toward a two-party system. Either the Liberals are going to eat the NDP, or the NDP is going to eat the Liberals. Until Wednesday, I put my money on the latter. Now, I’m not so sure.
If the Liberals maintain any existential instinct at all, they’d call Singh’s bluff. Drop the writ on a party that’s demonstrably unprepared to fight the battle it’s proclaimed. Eat the left, and survive to fight on another day. The meal is right there for the taking.
Singh’s big announcement about “ripping up” CASA — meep meep — gains him absolutely nothing. What additional leverage can he expect to acquire in a post-CASA parliament that he didn’t already possess?
Perhaps Wednesday’s announcement was merely a gambit to soothe internal problems, or distance himself from the Liberals. Okay, fine. This might be a viable strategy if it buys Singh a few months to trash Trudeau and raise funds off the effort while frantically trying to wash off the stinky stain of hypocrisy.
But what’s going to happen when the Liberals face their next confidence motion, presumably as soon as the Conservatives can arrange one? What happens at the next one, and the next one after that?
What credibility can Singh possibly hope to maintain if he votes for the Liberals, again? How in the world is the NDP seriously going to claim to have ripped up CASA while effectively acting as if it is in a CASA? The NDP cannot credibly distance itself from the sitting government while spending the next year propping up said government again and again and again in successive confidence motions. Especially after such a brazen display of pulling out of the deal.
No. They’re going to have to pull the trigger, and soon. Obviously. Clearly.
Singh sees this.
Right?
September 6, 2024
“I support Jagmeet Singh’s right to terminate his half pregnancy”
Matt Gurney on NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s decision to pull the plug on the Confidence and Supply Agreement that had propped up Justin Trudeau’s government, long after it became clear that the Liberals were garnering all the benefits and the NDP were losing core supporters over the arrangement:
Let us start with words of affirmation and support: I support Jagmeet Singh’s right to terminate his half pregnancy. How could anyone not? His constant daily humiliation was getting uncomfortable to observe.
I know you might be expecting some kind of political analysis here. What will the end of the Confidence and Supply Agreement — or Supply and Confidence Agreement (we probably should’ve settled on one before the thing collapsed)—mean for Canadian politics, the upcoming elections, and the next general federal election? But the truth is, I don’t know. No one does. All we can say with any particular certainty is that our minority government situation has become more complicated. The Conservatives will keep trying to bring the government down. Don’t be surprised if they try to make everything a confidence motion, if only to further embarrass Singh. The NDP, for their part, will face some brutal decisions. Most polls show them heading for a wipeout, with half of their seats looking likely to flip to someone else. They’d need a huge spike in the polls just to break even. So, that’s going to be fun for them to navigate. Then, of course, there’s Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. Their prospects look awfully bleak, too. But it’s entirely possible they might decide to rip the Band-Aid off and call an election at some point in the reasonably near future.
Am I predicting any of these things? No. Like I said, I have no idea what’s going to happen. If I had to guess, I’d say the NDP will continue to support the government unofficially for the foreseeable future while all the parties reassess the new reality on the ground. But that guess is entirely subject to revision as events unfold. Time will tell. What more can I offer you?
So, in terms of political commentary on yesterday’s news, that’s about it. I don’t expect any immediate changes, and we’ll see where things shake out. Thanks for reading.
But there is a related point I’d like to make. And though it may sound snarky, I mean it with total sincerity. I am so, so happy for Jagmeet Singh. Since the deal was announced, he’s had to keep Trudeau in office while also acting like he was as disgusted with the PM as the typical Canadian voter seems to be. It was, truly, cringe-inducing, a real-life manifestation of the first half of the Hot Dog Car sketch (the back half gets weird).
I wasn’t kidding when I said it was painful to watch. And it wasn’t just me who noticed — a few podcasts ago, Jen and I had a laugh at Singh getting hit by Twitter’s Community Notes fact-checking service. After one of his regular tweets attacking Trudeau, a note was added to it, reminding readers that Singh was officially, as per a signed agreement, responsible for keeping Trudeau in power. It was laugh out loud funny, and, alas for the NDP leader, we were very much laughing at him, not with him.
That’s finished now. His nightmare is over. He can stop looking so goddamn ridiculous every day now. The deal is dead.
And now that it is, we can finally take a long look back at it and wonder how the hell Singh ever decided that the deal, or at least how he behaved during the deal, was a good idea.
In the National Post, Chris Selley seems a bit less charitable toward Singh, for largely the same reason … the pain and humiliation was almost entirely self-inflicted:
So, the deal is off. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh apparently located a few scraps of dignity in some long-forgotten kitchen drawer or closet. Just minutes before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was set for a press conference to give himself yet more credit for the NDP’s national school-lunch program, Singh announced he was calling off the NDP’s two-and-a-half-year-old confidence-and-supply agreement with the governing Liberals.
“Canadians are fighting a battle … for the future of the middle class,” Singh pronounced. “Justin Trudeau has proven again and again he will always cave to corporate greed.” Reports suggest it was the Liberals last month ordering the railway unions back to work and into binding arbitration with their employers that finally soured the milk in Dipperland.
“In the next federal election, Canadians will choose between Pierre Poilievre’s callous cuts or hope” Singh continued, casting himself as the Barack Obama figure in the forthcoming contest — “hope,” he specified, “that when we stand united, we win; that Canada’s middle class will once again thrive together.”
Because a Canadian political announcement must come with some impenetrable bafflegab, Singh added the following: “It’s always impossible until it isn’t. It can’t be done until someone does it.”
Up is left. Forward is up. United we dance. The future.
All the reasons for the NDP to cut the Liberals loose on Wednesday were so myriad and obvious that it’s difficult to remember what on earth the point of this agreement was supposed to be. Singh got no cabinet seats out of it, maybe just a few “thanks for your contribution” pats on the back from Trudeau and his ministers along the way. But the NDP essentially gave away any policy wins to the Liberals.
New Democrats understand better than anyone else the fundamentally amoral nature of the Liberal Party of Canada. They understand the Liberals’ all but total conflation of the party’s best interests with the country’s, and therefore its utter lack of shame. Anything the Liberal party does, anything it says, even if it’s completely the opposite of it did and said yesterday, is precisely the medicine Canada needs. And the NDP understands as well as the Conservatives do how mainstream Canadian media privileges the Liberals in that regard.
September 5, 2024
CASA doloroso, or Jagmeet finally locates a pair
Ding, dong! The long-running deal between the New Democrats and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals has finally been terminated. It was Jagmeet Singh’s support that kept Trudeau in power and had been intended to run until next summer, but Singh announced he was no longer going to provide confidence and supply votes in Parliament. The editors at The Line warn us that this doesn’t automatically mean we can start heating up the tar and ripping open the feather pillows quite yet:
Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh in happier days at a 2017 Pride parade.
Photo via Wikimedia.
On Wednesday, Jagmeet Singh finally took longstanding criticism to heart, and announced he would be tearing up the Confidence and Supply Agreement, the deal that allows the Liberals to hold the confidence of the house.
That said, don’t expect an election just yet.
CASA has been an unmitigated disaster for the little sister of the non-alliance alliance between the two parties. As we’ve previously noted here at The Line, Singh proved to be a weak negotiator, agreeing to support Justin Trudeau with nary a cabinet seat nor a concrete spending promise. To date, the only real concessions the NDP have landed amount to, essentially, half-baked Pharmacare and dental programs that are little more than targeted subsidies to the poor. The merits of these programs in and of themselves is a debate for another day; however, what benefits they do bring have not benefited the NDP one whit.
That’s because the Liberals will — and have — taken full credit for these programs, while Singh has been left in the unenviable position of having to criticize a sitting government that he continues to buttress through the CASA. In other words, for virtually no spending concessions, the NDP has fatally undermined its position as a credible critic of the government.
Meanwhile, the Conservative Party — still strong in the polls — can lean on the NDP’s hypocrisy in order to gather up traditional blue collar and even union workers into the bosom of its culturally cozy embrace.
Obviously, this position is untenable. However, we at The Line admit to being surprised that Singh is actually ripping it up ahead of the deal’s natural expiry in June of 2025. Rather, we expected the Liberals to rag the puck on this government for as long as constitutionally possible — and, to be honest, we thought the NDP would stay in step because the party is, at its heart, weak.
Lo! We were surprised.
By ending CASA, the party has time to restore some of its spent credibility, bashing Trudeau hard to drum up fundraising ahead of the next election. Without the NDP’s support, the Liberals can carry on only until they are required to pass a confidence motion — likely the Spring budget. This gives the NDP a few months to generate support. Of course Singh won’t win that election, but he can now leave his party in a stronger position to live to fight another day.
That is … unless Trudeau decides to respond to the collapse of CASA by simply dropping the writ now, catching his opponents on the left off guard and unprepared to run a full election campaign.
September 4, 2024
There’s always been “BC weird”, but today’s BC politics is weirder than ever
Although I can technically say I’ve been to British Columbia, a couple of hours driving around just west of the BC/Alberta border in 1988 doesn’t give me any real understanding of Lotusland’s, uh, unique political landscape. Fortunately, here’s Rob Shaw in The Line to give a somewhat better-informed view of BC politics today:
British Columbia politics has always been weird.
This is a province in which an obese Taiwanese billionaire once bought a premier’s personal amusement park using envelopes stuffed with cash in his underwear; where the clerk of the legislature was convicted of fraud; where the Speaker claimed the legislature’s ceremonial mace was bugged by spies; and an MLA stole from a children’s charity for the disabled.
In short, the province has a bit of a reputation. So it might be tempting to view the most recent headlines about the implosion of the former dominant B.C. Liberal party — and the meteoric rise of the B.C. Conservatives — as keeping with British Columbia’s unique brand of zaniness.
Except, it isn’t.
B.C.’s political realignment mirrors one that’s already occurred in several other provinces and is playing out federally, as well, as a tired, middle-road centrist party is squeezed out by a harder-right, hungrier, more-energetic conservative movement.
At the leading edge of it all is an unlikely figure — a 61-year-old former Liberal cabinet minister with a low profile, who was booted from the B.C. Liberal caucus in 2022 by leader Kevin Falcon for sharing a social media post questioning the role of CO2 in climate change. Rather than retire quietly, John Rustad took the ejection, pivoted and joined the moribund B.C. Conservative party, which had clocked only 1.9 per cent of the popular vote in 2020. He gave the party a seat in the legislature, and a profile to grow. Since then, it has skyrocketed.
“Of course nobody thought you could do this in a year, take a political party from two to three per cent to challenge to form government,” Rustad told me. “Lots of people ask me about it and I put it down simply to people are really desperate and looking for change.” Last week — two years and 10 days after he was fired — Rustad stood in a Vancouver hotel ballroom to accept Falcon’s political surrender. The leader of the B.C. Liberal dynasty, a party that ruled the province from 2001 to 2017 under premiers Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark, announced that he was disbanding B.C. United ahead of the next election. Supporters were encouraged to flock to the Conservatives.
“This is the right thing to do for the province,” Falcon said at the Aug. 28 press conference. “I said to John: I may only agree with about 75 per cent of what you might believe in, but I do know this, that on his very worst day John Rustad would be a far better premier than (B.C. NDP premier) David Eby on his very best day. And I’ve never lost sight of that bigger picture.” The Conservatives have been within striking distance of the governing NDP for months, according to polling done by almost every firm in the country.
September 3, 2024
Sten MkII: Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Simpler
Forgotten Weapons
Published May 29, 2024The Sten MkI had barely been approved for production when the Sten MkII was born. Initially requested to produce a version of the gun suitable for paratroopers, in March 1941 Harold Turpin redesigned the front end of the Sten to have a quickly detachable barrel and a rotating magazine well (for compact storage). This new model was tests in late June and early July, approved for use, and contracts for it were issued in August 1941.
Named the MkII, this model of the Sten would quickly become the standard, and it was ultimately produced by six major factories (with the assistance of hundreds of subcontractors) on three continents to the tune of 2.6 million examples made. In addition to the barrel removal, the new model has a simpler front sight, simpler stock, and a revised bolt locking notch (upward, instead of downward like on the MkI).
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September 2, 2024
There’s no limit to how progressive politicians want to control your life
In the National Post a couple of days ago, Carson Jerema provided many examples of how the Canadian federal government — despite failing and fumbling so many of its existing responsibilities — still wants to increase control over the daily lives of Canadians:
After a decade or so, progressives are on the defensive in Canada and elsewhere because regular people, as in those who are not activist weirdos, are tired of the agenda to control every aspect of our lives. Point this out to a progressive, and they will deny that anyone’s life is being interfered with and claim only some far-right monster would think otherwise. They can’t believe there are people out there who share a different view. They don’t understand how this could be.
But progressive governments are trying to control our lives in ways big and small, and in ways that range from subtle to a punch in the face.
In Canada, the federal government’s environmental policies are the most obvious example of this interference. The Liberals have banned plastic straws and plastic bags; even compostable bags are banned in grocery stores because they resemble plastic. Such bans are pointless irritants that make shopping more expensive, and life slightly less enjoyable as paper straws dissolve in one’s drink. People might dismiss these concerns as simply minor inconveniences, but this is how most people experience government policy, by being forced to replace their bag of plastic bags that they were already reusing, with more expensive, less useful options.
Next up, the Liberals are exploring options to bring in environmental regulations for clothing. The cost of clothes has actually gone down in recent years, so leave it to Ottawa to look for ways to bring the cost back up and to limit options.
There is also the plan to essentially force Canadians to purchase electric vehicles, that nobody would otherwise want, through government mandates to phase out the sale of gas-powered cars and trucks.
On a larger scale, the government is attempting to restrict the kind of work people do, specifically work in the oil and gas industry, through steep emissions targets, which will close off lucrative job opportunities in western oilfields. It will also limit the kinds of fuels people will be able to use to heat their homes.
There are also policies that the Canadian government hasn’t implemented, but which green activists have endorsed, such as the banning of gas stoves and the ludicrous suggestion from some academics that “climate lockdowns” be implemented to help cut emissions.
It is possible to be supportive of all these policies, despite their paternalistic and job-killing nature, but pretending that no one is trying to, or that no one wants to, interfere with our liberty is not a credible position to take.
September 1, 2024
Explaining everything on Canadian money
J.J. McCullough
Published May 19, 2024Who’s on it? What’s the history? How is it going to change?
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August 30, 2024
Experts are concerned that criticism of experts will weaken their role in our political system
In the National Post, Geoff Russ dares to imply that the experts are not the divinely inspired superior beings with unfailing wisdom about any and all issues:
So-called “experts” have weakened Canada’s political discourse far more than Pierre Poilievre ever has. Journalist and author Stephen Maher recently penned a column in the Globe & Mail titled, “By slamming experts, Pierre Poilievre and his staff are degrading political debate”.
Maher is an even-handed journalist, and his column should not be written off as the scribblings of a Liberal partisan. What his column misses is how the term “expert” has been abused, and the degree to which “experts” have thoroughly discredited themselves in recent years.
Poilievre’s criticisms of the “experts” would not resonate if they lived up to the title bestowed upon them.
For example, the Doug Ford government’s decision to close 10 safe injection sites after implementing a ban on such facilities located near schools and child-care centres. The closures were lamented by “experts” trotted out by the CBC as putting peoples’ lives at risk.
The safe injection sites slated to be shut down are near schools and daycares, and there is demonstrable proof that crime rises near these sites wherever they are located.
Derek Finkle recently wrote that the critiques of the closures levelled by selected “experts” failed to note how community members had been threatened with rape, arson, and murder since the injection site in his Toronto neighbourhood had been opened.
These are reasonable grounds for a government to reconsider whether they should allow drug-use, supervised or not, to proliferate in neighbourhoods where families reside.
For all their alleged expertise, many “experts” seem unwilling to actually investigate what is happening on the ground, and often give plainly bad advice altogether, and this goes back decades.
The “experts” failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis, they said the risk to Canadians from the coronavirus was low in early 2020, and they failed to prevent runaway inflation after the worst of it had subsided.
Was it not the “experts” who asserted that arming and funding of Ukraine prior to Vladimir Putin’s invasion in 2022 was a bad idea? After the invasion began, was it not the “experts” who confidently predicted Putin’s army would conquer the whole of Ukraine in a matter of days, and not be bogged down in a years-long conflict that would reshape global trade?
The truth is that we live in a worse-off world because of the advice and predictions of “experts”.
August 22, 2024
“Say my pronouns, peasant!”
Andrew Doyle doubts that the push for bespoke personal pronouns will have any lasting impact on the language and how it is used despite all the political capital invested to coerce people to adopt them:
For all the demands of activists that “they” and “them” should be normalised as singular pronouns, very few members of the public have adapted their speech patterns accordingly. Even when the print media started following this odd new craze after Sam Smith declared himself to be “non-binary” in September 2019, the trend simply didn’t catch on.
This is hardly surprising. For one thing, most of the articles that adhere to this creed end up being both syntactically and stylistically incoherent. Take the following excerpt from a review of Judith Butler’s latest book in The Atlantic:
In essence, Butler accuses gender-crits of “phantasmatic” anxieties. They dismiss, with that invocation of a “phantasm”, apprehension about the presence of trans women in women’s single-sex spaces…
At first glance, “they” could appear to be referring to the “gender-crits”, but in this case it refers to Butler. A reader unfamiliar with the subject will inevitably find this confusing. Throughout the article, one is forced to reset one’s reading instincts – cultivated through a lifetime of universally-shared linguistic conventions – and even though the meaning eventually becomes clear, the prose is irredeemably maladroit. In other words, those who accept these new rules must first surrender their capacity to write well.
Of course, we all know that “they” is commonly used in the singular sense in cases of unknown identity. So we might say “Someone has left their car keys here” because we cannot be sure of the sex of the stranger in question. This causes no confusion at all because the sentence automatically conveys the uncertainty. Such colloquial exceptions aside, “they” is simply not used as a singular pronoun among the general population.
While identitarian activists love to dismiss Shakespeare as an irrelevant dead white male, they are happy to invoke him to support their attempts to impose their own modifications to the English language. In almost all articles on the singular “they”, one will find a reference somewhere to Shakespeare. “For decades, transgender rights advocates have noted that literary giants Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, and Geoffrey Chaucer all used singular they in their writing”, states one writer. “Shakespeare used the singular they, and so should you”, claims another. In the Washington Post, a professor of English writes that “Shakespeare and Austen both used singular “they” … just as many English speakers do now”.
It’s difficult to see how this argument is in any way compelling. Nobody is claiming that language does not evolve. The point is rather that the singular “they” has not caught on in modern usage, in spite of activists’ demands that it should. Are gender identity ideologues really urging us to adopt sixteenth-century language in the name of progress? I have yet to see any of them favouring “thou” as a familiar form of address. They tend to prefer “y’all”, and if this was ever used by Shakespeare I must have missed it.
Abandoned Manitoba 2: Port Nelson, Manitoba’s Forgotten Seaport on Hudson Bay
Manitoba Historical Society
Published May 6, 2024The Abandoned Manitoba 2 video series by Graham Street, Shaun Cameron, and Gordon Goldsborough visits ghost towns, vacant buildings, and other historic sites from Manitoba’s past. Join us as we explore back roads to places that tell great stories about how things used to be, and how we have ended up where we are today.
In this video, we tour an abandoned seaport at the mouth of the Nelson River on Hudson Bay. Construction started in 1912 and stopped before the work was completed. It never resumed. Instead, all attention moved to Churchill where, in 1929, a deep water seaport opened. We explore the crumbling remains at Port Nelson, including an artificial island a half mile offshore, a rotting 17-span railway bridge, and a broken dredge.
