Insider Business
Published 12 Jul 2022Dijon mustard has a tangier, sharper, and spicier flavor compared to other types of mustard. It takes its name from the town of Dijon in Burgundy, France, where it originated. But despite its name, the majority of Dijon mustard that is sold all over the world doesn’t come from France. The few jars that do will cost you up to six times more than regular Dijon mustard (or double if we want to compare it to Grey Poupon). So how is real Dijon mustard different? And why is it so expensive?
Editor’s Note: In this video, the translations at 2:10 and 3:16 are incorrect. The rind of the mustard seed is wrongly referred to as “sound of mustard”. The correct translation is mustard bran. Insider regrets the error.
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January 16, 2024
Why Real Dijon Mustard Is So Expensive | So Expensive Food | Business Insider
January 15, 2024
Grave Error
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte calls our attention to an important book on a major Canadian topic … that has been ignored by the Canadian media establishment (as one would expect if it contravenes the official narrative):
Have you read Grave Error? Have you seen it on the shelves in your local bookstore? At the library, perhaps? Did you notice coverage of it in the Globe or hear someone talking about it on CBC?
I’d bet ninety-eight out of a hundred SHuSH readers would answer “no” to all those questions.
The full title of the book is Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools). Its authors are former University of Calgary political scientist and Harper aide Tom Flanagan and Chris Champion, editor of the Dorchester Review. The book takes strong exception to commentary by media, politicians, and Indigenous leaders on the subject of unmarked graves at a former Kamloops Indian Residential School. I first noticed it over the holidays, several weeks after publication, when it was the overall #1 bestseller on Amazon.
It’s not easy to become the top-selling book on Amazon. You’re competing against Colleen Hoover and Prince Harry and the entire world of books, published and self-published. Grave Error was the only Canadian book, fiction or nonfiction, in Amazon’s top fifty when I came across it. It’s rare to see more than two or three Canadian books in Amazon’s top fifty at any given time.
You won’t have noticed Grave Error in your local bookstore because Amazon is the only outlet that’s selling the book. You won’t have seen coverage of it because no mainstream Canadian media outlet has paid attention to it. Nor does any public library stock it. It has not appeared on any conventional bestseller list, although it has to be a Canadian bestseller — Amazon sells well over half of all books in Canada. Most Amazon sales don’t register on our bestseller lists because Amazon doesn’t cooperate with the organizations that produce the lists.
Grave Error is published by True North, a conservative news website and public policy organization. It is run by Candace Malcolm, who founded True North with her husband, Kaz Nejatian, a former Jason Kenney staffer, now COO of Spotify. It’s published a half dozen hits in recent years, several written by Malcolm herself.
January 14, 2024
Tristin Hopper imagines the thoughts of the Toronto Police Service
Every week, Tristin Hopper helps us understand an element of the week’s news by “imagining” the diary entries of the people or organizations involved. This week, it’s the turn of Toronto’s police department:
The Toronto police have not had a good week. After receiving widespread criticism for refusing to disperse an anti-Israel blockade targeting a north Toronto Jewish neighbourhood, video emerged this week of officers delivering coffee and donuts to the blockaders.
And so, only after a cross-section of local politicians and Jewish leaders had expressed bafflement at police inaction, did Toronto police announce plans on Thursday to actually put a stop to protests at the Avenue Road bridge. They even charged one protester with incitement of hatred for allegedly carrying a hate group’s flag at a protest in downtown Toronto.
Monday
I’m sorry — is that the sound of people wanting us to enforce the law? As in, “hey there, sworn peace officer, get in your car, go identify some criminality and use force to stop it?”Are you sure about that, Toronto? You sure you don’t want us to instead try fixing this with a solidarity flag raising? Or maybe this is something that could be diffused with one of those equity roundtables you keep forcing us to attend.
After all, enforcing the law is a messy business. People could get hurt. This isn’t like handing out a traffic ticket or a jaywalking citation: You’re asking us to confront people who may not care that their actions are illegal, and may employ additional illegal methods to dispute that.
Tuesday
I’m still trying to get my head around this new paradigm. So to refresh: when people break laws, you want us to stop that? The Criminal Code. The Highway Traffic Act. The Controlled Substances Act. You want our officers to read up on contemporary legislation, seek out violators of said legislation, and then apply appropriate sanctions?This is a minefield, frankly. We’re talking raised voices. Mean tweets. People in handcuffs. Unflattering videos. Outraged Toronto Star columns. This is how we board an escalator that may soon make us pine for the days when our only problems were an easily ignored minority demographic having their overpass shut down.
Wednesday
When we’re enforcing these laws, are you absolutely sure you want us to do this without first checking if they’re politically acceptable? I mean, it would obviously streamline everything if roadways were only ever blockaded by white supremacist cannibal pedophiles, but that’s rarely the case.And what if they’re doing an illegal thing that is tangentially related to something you like? I had our legal guy look into it and he said that any laws broken as a result of a public protest are still illegal – the right to protest only covers legal things, it turns out. So bear with me; this could result in a city in which graffiti, blockades and vandalism OF ANY KIND could end up banned. It’s a slippery slope.
January 11, 2024
The Canadian Armed Forces believe “that they – and the country they serve – are irredeemably racist and oppressive”
The official journal of the Canadian Armed Forces has a … woke … view of themselves and the nation:
… the latest edition — which was just posted online — contains little to no mention of strategy, geopolitics or the avalanche of contemporary problems facing the Canadian Armed Forces. There’s not a single reference to the recruiting crisis, which has left vacancies of up to 40 per cent in some departments. No mention of the plummeting maintenance standards that recently prompted the commander of the Royal Canadian Navy to declare that his fleet was in a “storm” with no end in sight. No discussion of why Canada is slashing its military budget even as its peer countries do the exact opposite.
Instead — in a signal of just how far the Canadian Armed Forces has embraced far-left “anti-racist” ideology — the entire issue is devoted to how the Canadian military is a racist, patriarchal den of colonialist oppression that needs to be torn down and remade from scratch.
After devoting extended paragraphs to each cultural infraction, Eichler concludes that the Canadian Armed Forces must be remade via an “anti-oppression framework” of “feminist, decolonial, critical race, queer, critical disability, and critical political economy theories”.
Eichler notes this is “not an easy task, but a necessary one if DND/CAF wants to move the yardstick on culture change.”
Another feature, by York University psychotherapist Tammy George, frames the Canadian Armed Forces as being poisoned by “institutional whiteness”.
“In order for meaningful, sustained culture change to occur, there must be a recognition by the white majority of the way in which whiteness organizes lives,” she writes.
Leigh Spanner, a feminist postdoctoral research fellow, wrote that the CAF’s system of supporting military families was anti-feminist and patriarchal.
Ash Grover, a researcher in “feminist anti-militarism”, argues that the military might have fewer instances of post-traumatic stress disorder if they paid closer attention to “anti-oppressive theory” and how “acts of ‘othering’ can result in responses typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder”.
January 10, 2024
“[T]he prime minister is either three spins into a profound self-destructive spiral: or he really just does not care”
The Line returns from the holidays with a solid betting pool on what the hell Prime Minstrel Justin Trudeau is thinking:
We at The Line have two theories, each championed by its respective editor; the prime minister is either three spins into a profound self-destructive spiral: or he really just does not care.
Theory 1: Trudeau is constitutionally incapable of stepping away from his current role. There are no viable leadership alternatives, and his party has been so centralized into a cult of personality that the Liberals may not not be able to recover from his departure.
At the same time, Trudeau is neither particularly capable as a prime minister, nor does he actually enjoy the role very much. After almost a decade in power, he’s been unable to champion a real vision for the country and he struggles to get anything done — long gone are the days of bold promises, replaced now by time extensions granted by the epically borked NDP. This has left him grasping for legacy policy changes that are largely superficial (and sometimes unconstitutional), if well meaning.
Most of Trudeau’s term has been reactionary, in the value-neutral sense that he has been forced to react to events and crises beyond his control or making, from the election of Trump and COVID, to the Trucker Convoy. Clearly, this job has taken a toll on him and his family and, at least subconsciously, he doesn’t actually want to do it anymore. But he just can’t bring himself to step aside and appear the coward before Pierre Poilievre.
So, essentially, this theory goes — he’s engaging in self sabotage. Consciously or otherwise, he’s replaying his previous poor judgment and ethical lapses because, deep in his heart, he wants to be fired.
If that’s a little too much pop psych for you all, the second theory is that Trudeau simply DGAF. He got away with all of those previous fancy holidays. Why not get away with this one? The usual partisans will scream and whine for a few days and we’ll all move on. He’ll get a nice vacation, and if it pleases the ex and makes the kids happy, well, all the better. Trudeau doesn’t care about optics or ethics because he doesn’t have to care; his critics don’t matter, and his supporters have clearly signalled that they are along for the ride no matter what he does.
Both of these theories may be true or wrong, but it will be interesting to ponder as 2024 plays out whether Trudeau’s greatest bane proves to be self-sabotage or indifference.
Your Line editors are opening the betting table now.
The unexpected rise in “Unknown Cause”
Mark Steyn rounds up some interesting details on that long-forgotten-by-the-media pandemic and corresponding heavy-handed government interventions that made things so much worse:
The obvious problem with appeals to authority, at least for anyone more sentient than an earthworm, is that across the western world the last four years have been one giant appeal to authority – and the result of mortgaging the entirety of human existence to the expert class is the rubble all around. Just for starters:
US scientists held secret talks with Covid ‘Batwoman’ amid drive to make coronaviruses more deadly
You don’t say! When would that have been? Oh:
…just before pandemic
Well, there’s a surprise!
A new cache of documents, obtained by Freedom of Information campaigners and seen by The Mail on Sunday, reveal the extent to which the controversial work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was supported, and often funded, by America.
You got that right. Wuhan is the virological equivalent of a CIA black site in Pakistan: it’s where the Deep State goes to do the stuff it can’t do in suburban Virginia.
So how’s that working out for the planet? Way back in 2022, The Mark Steyn Show reported that “Unknown Cause” was now the leading cause of death in Alberta. According to the somewhat lethargic lads at Statistics Canada, taking eighteen month to catch up with yours truly, that same year it was the fourth leading cause of death across the entire country. “Unknown Cause” is rampaging from Nunavut igloos to the Hamas branch office in Montreal: Between 2019 and 2022, it was up almost five hundred per cent.
Does “Unknown Cause” have an awareness-raising ribbon like Aids or breast cancer? Are there any celebs who’d like to headline a gala fundraiser or do an all-star pop anthem?
Apparently not. Gee, it’s almost as if taking too great an interest in “Unknown Cause” can lead to a bad case of cancer of the career. Nevertheless, the official StatsCan numbers are, to put it at its mildest, odd. By the end of 2022, Canada was one of the most jabbed nations on earth, with a Covid vaccination rate of ninety-one per cent, the highest in the G7, by some distance (UK and US both at eighty per cent).
And yet, if these government numbers are to be believed, something very strange happened. In the most jabbed member of the G7, Covid deaths went up. As The Western Standard‘s Joseph Fournier noticed, while almost nobody else did, Covid deaths per annum across the Deathbed Dominion shot up 25 per cent from the days of curfews, and arrests for playing open-air hockey:
2020 15,890
2021 14,466
2022 19,716
So, in Jabba Jabba Central, more people died of Covid in the most recent annual round-up than at the height of the pandemic. In fact, on those numbers, Canada has yet to reach “the height of the pandemic”. Here’s another striking feature – again, direct from Statistics Canada:
During the first year of the pandemic, older Canadians (65 years of age and older) accounted for 94.1% of COVID-19 deaths, while those aged 45 to 64 years accounted for 5.3%. In 2021, while the number of COVID-19 deaths among individuals aged 65 years and older (82.0%) remained high, the proportion of deaths among those aged 45 to 64 years nearly tripled to 15.5%.
So, in the most vaxxed nation of the G7, middle-aged persons account for three times the proportion of Covid deaths than they did at “the height of the pandemic”.
Like I said: odd.
Canadian life expectancy? Down. Oh, just by four months or so. But that’s three times the size of last year’s drop.
Excess mortality? Indeed: In 2019 the age-standardised death rate was 830.5 per 100,000 people. In 2022 it was 972.5. As I’ve pointed out a gazillion times on telly, that’s the opposite of what’s meant to happen post-pandemic: After the Spanish Flu, the mortality rate fell because people who would otherwise have died in 1924 had already died in 1919. That phenomenon is visible in Eastern Europe, but nowhere in the Dominion of Death.
Last year I mentioned en passant to my friend Naomi Wolf that the Covid vaccines were beginning to remind me of the scandals of her old chum Bill Clinton: one such can do a politician in, but, if you have (as Slick Willy did) a multitude of ’em, who can follow it all? If Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca just caused, say, myocarditis, maybe people would find it easier to focus on. Instead, it causes myocarditis in men and infertility in women and, if you manage to dodge the latter, the mRNA shows up in newborn babies; it brings on Guillain–Barré syndrome and Ramsay Hunt syndrome and lightning-speed turbo-cancers. Alternatively, you could get a dose of the SADS and drop dead on stage or on the footie pitch, or at home watching the telly. It’s a lot to keep track of.
Or maybe, as in Alberta, you just die of … whatever. And nobody cares to find out.
January 9, 2024
Matt Gurney on what he learned from Geddy Lee
The Line went into holiday mode during the Christmas season and into the first week of the new year. To fill in, the editors invited contributions on things the contributors were grateful for. Matt Gurney included his own piece, encouraged by Geddy Lee’s recent book My Effin’ Life (which I haven’t read, but hope to at some point):
Most Line readers probably know that I am an unrepentant Trekkie. Many of you will not know, but will not be surprised to discover, that I’m also a huge fan of Canadian rock band Rush. (These two things do often seem to go together, I’ve noted.) Last year, Rush bassist and lead singer Geddy Lee published a memoir, playfully titled My Effin’ Life.
Lee began to work on the memoir during the pandemic lockdowns, when we all suddenly found ourselves with a lot of time on our hands. Lee has been very open, both in his memoir and in his public comments, about the sad series of life events that led him to decide to begin writing his memoir in the first place.
The first, of course, was the effective end of Rush, back in 2015. Lee was eager to continue making music and touring. Rush lyricist and drummer Neil Peart, afflicted with some health issues and worried he could no longer perform at the standard he expected of himself, was eager to retire and spend more time with his new, young family. (Rush fans will know the awful story of what happened to Peart’s first family; it’s not necessary to recap it here, but I have absolutely kept it in mind when counting my own blessings.) Lee has been honest about being frustrated and even bitter about the end of Rush’s active career, but the news got worse, when, early in what was supposed to be the second act of Peart’s family life, the drummer was diagnosed with a cruel, terminal cancer. He died in 2020, almost four years ago to this day, after a long, private struggle, a struggle that Lee did his part to keep private. As if that wasn’t enough, not long after the death of his long-time friend and bandmate, Lee lost his mother, Mary Weinrib, a Holocaust survivor and a huge and active presence in Lee’s life until the very end. Weinrib died in 2021.
That’s a lot of loss packed into a short period, and the timing was awful. As COVID hit North America and began to rack up its victims, Lee, like so many of us, retreated inside his own home. While there, he had many ghosts and sorrows to keep him company, and it clearly weighed on him. So he began writing.
And what resulted was, perhaps to the surprise of even Lee, a happy memoir. A story of gratitude and laughter. A memoir full of funny stories, jokes, and things for which he was thankful.
As 2023 was drawing to a close, my father gifted me a ticket to a book reading at Toronto’s Massey Hall, featuring none other than Geddy Lee. The special surprise interviewer and cohost for the evening — though not really that much of a surprise — was Lee’s surviving Rush bandmate and friend of decades, guitarist Alex Lifeson. The two men, both now 70, sat down on the stage and spent the next couple of hours swapping stories, jokes and memories, happy and sad. They strongly hinted, but did not promise, that some version of Rush may reunite and perform again.
And that would be great. I would spend an unwise amount of money to go see that. But it wasn’t my excitement about possible opportunities to see some version of my favourite band perform again that began changing my perspective on 2023. It was just seeing the two of them on that stage. I’m sure these guys have had to deal with all the creeping aches and pains and a need for new contact lens prescriptions that I catalogued above. And I can guarantee you that they’ve both endured more personal loss than I have. But what I saw that evening was simply two old buddies, with 30 years on me, sitting on a stage and having a blast. And I realized that to these guys, something that happened when they were 40 would have seemed like a long time ago. Because they’d lived a lot since then.
“[P]olitical violence is never ever acceptable in the United States political system”
Mark Steyn gets the message:
~I’m glad to see I wasn’t the only one who got a mordant laugh out of this line in Joe Biden’s Feast of the Insurrection sermon:
So “political violence is never ever acceptable in the United States political system. Never, never, never. It has no place in a democracy. None.”
An odd thing to say about a “political system” in which Lieutenant Michael Byrd was able to kill Ashli Babbitt in cold blood as his Capitol Police colleagues were able to do likewise to another defenceless woman, Mariam Carey. I would hope to be wrong, but I would be surprised if America gets through this year without more “political violence” — because one side seems to be fomenting it as a pretext for intensifying what Mr Kelly calls their “monopoly” on it.
That monopoly is part of a broader problem in the United States: the abolition of equality before the law. If you can avoid getting dispatched as swiftly as Ms Babbitt, you will nevertheless have what remains of your life ruined by detention without trial, solitary confinement, double-digit years of prison with no possibility of parole … Americans have gotten the message. Do you recall, after the Canadian truckers’ heroic Covid protests inspired the world, there was talk of a similar American Freedom Convoy?
Oh, you don’t remember? Me neither. That’s because it all fizzled out, as its proponents figured that the dirty stinkin’ rotten corrupt US Department of Justice would just treat it as January 6th on wheels.
~Of course, it didn’t work out too great for the Canadian truckers, either: Frozen bank accounts, protracted prosecution … Small potatoes by US DOJ standards, and Lieutenant Byrd wasn’t around to shoot them dead, but it has certainly been fierce and targeted by Canadian standards. Why? Because in Ottawa the “traffic disruption impacted residents’ lives in many ways”.
On the other hand, “pro-Palestinian” groups are currently disrupting traffic in Toronto. For over a week they’ve shut down the Avenue Road bridge over the 401. Why?
Well, it’s a key artery into Toronto’s and Canada’s most Jewish neighbourhood. But, relax: they’re not anti-Jew, they’re just anti-Zionist. After all, many of these Jews in Armour Heights and Bathurst Manor are out every night bombing Gaza daycare centres. It’s part of the same expansive definition of “pro-Palestinian” that has seen International Delicatessen Foods attacked because it has the same acronym as the Israeli Defence Force. But don’t worry, they’re not anti-Semites, just acro-Semites. If I were the famous Japanese tea master Takeno Jōō, I would hire additional security. But fortunately he died in 1555 …
Yet, as I said, it all comes down to equality before the law. The Canadian truckers handed out coffee and doughnuts to locals and are still in the dock two years on. Whereas on the blockaded Avenue Road overpass the Toronto Police deliver coffee and doughnuts to the pro-Hamas lads:
Roll up the Jews to win! In the old days, the German coppers pleaded that they were just obeying orders, but, as Kate MacMillan points out, the Toronto constables are just taking orders. Did you hear the way that fellow put it? “The police are now becoming our little messengers.”
January 7, 2024
Every Type of Railcar Explained in 15 Minutes
Practical Engineering
Published 19 Sept 2023How many of these cars have you spotted before?
Trains are one of the most fascinating engineered systems in the world, and they’re out there, right in the open for anyone to have a look! Once you start paying attention, it’s pretty satisfying to look for all the different types of railcars that show up on the tracks.
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January 4, 2024
The Halifax Naval Museum – A Hidden Treasure
Drachinifel
Published 15 Sept 2023Today we look take a quick tour through Canada’s naval history as exemplified by the RCN Naval Museum in Halifax, Canada.
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January 2, 2024
Nobody will like the new rules
Chris Bray points out just how bad the “new rules” are going to be … and not just for the Bad Orange Man:
The danger is that you concede an argument about a personality or an event, then find at some future point that you’ve accepted new systems and structures that are far more broadly applicable than you noticed at the moment you accepted the new rules. Everyone of every political persuasion should see the weapon on the table, because it’s going to be pointed at you and yours: libertarians, anti-war leftists, populists, paleocons, others too weird to name. Outliers. If your votes and your views fall outside an extremely narrow band of corporate-state “centrism”, what follows is about you.
So.
Bill Mitchell, a media figure and DeSantis supporter, doesn’t see the big deal:
The problem is that Trump is “super toxic”, so whatever. Orange Man is bad, so the things you do to Orange Man are unobjectionable. Of course you can take him off the ballot — he’s a jerk. That’s, like, the Constitution.
But the constant background music for me in these discussions is that the government of Canada construed a peaceful protest against vaccine mandates as a national emergency, on par with a foreign invasion, and started freezing bank accounts and mobilizing force for mass arrests. A “Western democracy”, hearing dissent, started turning off the dissenters’ money, which means that government took away the ability of peaceful protesters to pay for things like housing and food. The patience of the global political class for disagreement is narrowing, fast and hard. (Cf. e.g. Ardern, Jacinda.)
So see what’s happening in the United States, and see where it points. On January 6, thousands of protesters turned into maybe hundreds of rioters; many people at the Capitol were peaceful and calm, while some weren’t. Almost none were armed, none used guns, and the question of law enforcement infiltration, provocation, and entrapment remains open.
But no one published a manifesto calling for the violent overthrow of the United States government, and the crowd didn’t line up at the Capitol with rifles and homemade bombs to launch waves of armed attacks on Congress. Compare: here’s Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground declaring war on the United States, and announcing on the radio that “our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution”. Find me that moment on January 6, the explicit declaration of armed revolution aimed at the destruction of the federal government. No one has been charged under the Insurrection Act because no one has violated the Insurrection Act. The “insurrection” is a political construction, not a legal case.
So a riot can be an “insurrection”, in the complete absence of insurrection charges and convictions, if Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D-Longhouse) feels like an insurrection happened. She can “rule” on that.
Lone officials can unilaterally declare that American citizens are ineligible for participation in elections, because the activities of [insert name of bad people here] can be politically construed as insurrectionist — in the absence of due process and a jury trial.
December 29, 2023
Rubaboo – Pemmican Stew of Canadian Mounties
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 12 Sept 2023
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December 28, 2023
“Lich and Barber … now hold the record for the longest “mischief” trial in Canadian history”
“Autonomous Truck(er)s” describes the “Lawfare Archipelago” as Justin Trudeau’s government persecutes Tamara Lich and Chris Barber for their part in organizing the Freedom Convoy movement in 2022:
It has been almost two years since Canada’s Freedom Convoy took the country, and the world, by storm. In what has been hailed around the globe as the most popular protest anywhere against the international Covid Regime, represented in Canada by the venal and vindictive Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Truckers of the Freedom Convoy still occupy a place as heroes to millions.
Everyone remembers how the Freedom Convoy was crushed by Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Measures Act, and how bank accounts were frozen, credit cards, insurance, the entire financial lives of hundreds of people that were completely shut down. The police crackdown on peaceful protesters, smashing of windows and other vandalism committed against the protesters vehicles, trampling people with horses, the beatings, the arrests; an overwhelmingly disproportionate and wholly unnecessary asymmetric response.
In December of 2023, however, a number of those truckers and their supporters are still facing adversity and punishment, including potential jail time, with ongoing court cases, and in the situation with The Coutts 4, a trial which hasn’t even started yet.
These cases are illustrative of the corruption of the Canadian political system, the media, the courts and ‘justice system’, and the subversion of some of the founding pillars of western civilization.
Canada is no longer a free country by any stretch of the imagination.
Part 1 : Tamara Lich and Chris Barber
On Thursday, November 30, just a few weeks ago, I traveled to Ottawa to take part in an interview for a documentary film being made by former CBC journalist and now freelance podcaster Trish Wood, whose working title is The Trials of Tamara Lich. Trish had stumbled upon my writings and podcasts here at Substack, and invited me on her show to discuss the situation with the Coutts men being held as political prisoners. Impressed with my work on that, as well as my history in trucking and perspectives on the deeper meaning behind the Freedom Convoy, she wanted me to appear in this documentary; I was honored to be asked and happy to oblige.
As of this writing, the trial is on Christmas break, and may, possibly resume in March 2024. It should be noted that for the primary charges that Lich and Barber are facing, in their roles as organizers of the Ottawa portion of The Convoy, a 100% peaceful protest whose only acts of violence or property damage came at the hands of the police, they now hold the record for the longest ‘mischief’ trial in Canadian history.
Given the actions of our government, perhaps it is they who should be the accused.
Chris “Big Red” Barber, a trucker from Saskatchewan who specializes in hauling oversize agricultural equipment, became one of the faces of the Freedom Convoy through his frequent TikTok videos, sharing news about the protest to his many followers online.
It is these TikTok videos that appear to be the bulk of the evidence the Crown has against Mr Barber, though sharing information on a publicly available platform seems the kind of “crime” one would expect to be prosecuted in the country where TikTok is headquartered, The People’s “Republic” of China. The basic dictatorship, we should recall, that is “admired” by Prime Minister Trudeau.
Quelle surprise, coming from Cuba’s most infamous son.
The deeply unsurprising lack of evidence on the part of the Crown is one reason why this case continues nearly two years later; Trudeau, and the Laurentian Elite by whom he was groomed for glory, cannot accept that they went way out over their skis in the gross mismanagement of Covid, and their utterly disgusting treatment of the Freedom Convoy.
An example must be made of Barber and Lich, who are both facing ten years in prison should the Crown get the convictions they desire. “Copping a Tenner”, as they used to call a trip to one of Stalin’s Gulag Camps, is quite a cost to satiate Trudeau’s latent authoritarian proclivities and his narcissistic vanity. One wonders if this is not also an effort to prove to his real constituency, the forces of global corporatism and control exemplified by WEF leader Klaus Schwab, that Trudeau will preserve the image of the brand.
The Liberals may be bad at “deliverology”, but they’re world-beaters at pouring money into black holes
Tristin Hopper explains the apparent paradox that the federal government is spending money faster than it can be printed, yet the things the government is responsible for are perennially underfunded:
From back when The Onion was allowed to be funny – https://youtu.be/JnX-D4kkPOQ
This may surprise the average Canadian given that so much of the government is noticeably threadbare and underfunded. Canadians are dying in hospital waiting rooms due to unprecedented shortages in health care. The navy’s so strapped for cash that it can only deploy one offshore patrol vessel at a time. The RCMP’s federal policing is so under-resourced that Parliamentarians are now calling it a threat to national security. And even $600 billion in cumulative debt hasn’t been enough for the Liberals to honour their 2015 campaign promise to ensure universal clean water on First Nations reserves.
It’s popular to blame all this on some easy-to-identify example of government profligacy, such as Ukraine aid, free hotel rooms for refugee claimants or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s noted penchant to rack up outsized travel bills. But Canada’s fiscal problems are well beyond anything like that. At the current rate of spending, the cumulative $2.4 billion in military aid that Canada has sent to Ukraine represents less than a month’s worth of new debt.
So where’s all the money going? Below, a cursory guide to how Canada is able to spend so much while seemingly obtaining so little.
Debt servicing just got way more expensive
First, an easy one: The Trudeau government borrowed an obscene amount during the COVID-19 pandemic, and with rising interest rates the treasury is getting hammered with debt-servicing costs.
As recently as 2021, interest charges on federal debt cost $20.3 billion per year. In the current fiscal year, it’s probably going to blow past $46.5 billion. Ottawa now spends about as much on debt management as it does on health care transfers to the provinces.
The phenomenon of pricier debt is not limited to Canada: Virtually every government in the world ran up record-breaking debts during COVID and are now facing the consequences. But if Canada is different, it’s that our rate of pandemic debt accumulation was at least $200 billion higher than it needed to be. And in justifying all this extra spending at the time, Trudeau argued that it was a good time to take out extra debt since “interest rates are at historic lows”.
The corporate welfare is just unbelievable
Canada has a long history of government signing over grants and bailouts to politically connected corporations. As far back as 1972, then NDP Leader David Lewis famously championed the cause of stopping Canada’s “corporate welfare bums”.
But the Trudeau government has taken corporate welfare to new heights. It was only a few years ago that Bombardier was the undisputed champion in collecting federal grants, bailouts and interest-free loans. Over 50 years, according to an analysis by the Montreal Economic Institute, Bombardier received a cumulative “$4 billion in public funds”.
In just the last calendar year, the Trudeau government has signed two subsidy agreements that would dwarf that $4-billion figure several times over. In the spring, both Stellantis and Volkswagen agreed to build EV plants in Ontario in exchange for federal subsidy packages that could cost as much as $18.8 billion (plus another $9 billion from the Ontario government).
And that new $18.8 billion liability on the books doesn’t even account for the massive ramp-up in the corporate welfare everywhere else. To name just a couple: In 2021, Air Canada got a $5.4 billion loan package. And the Trudeau-founded Strategic Innovation Fund gets about $1.5 billion per year in handouts to green energy companies.
December 26, 2023
Canada is the unchallenged international champion of “the gesture” and “the pose”, yet always manages to be out of the room when the bill needs to be paid
Sorry for being several days behind on this, but Matt Gurney‘s message — while necessary and timely — does not have a “best-before” or an expiration date … it’s going to be valid for a long time to come:
On the military front, Canada has actually made some meaningful investments since that speech was given. We have announced deals for new transport and refuelling jets — desperately needed and long overdue. We more recently announced a plan to sole-source new surveillance planes, also desperately needed and long overdue. We also, just this week, announced that we are procuring a fleet of large, long-ranged, armed surveillance drones, to patrol our remote air and sea frontiers, after a mere two decades of mulling it over.
There ends the good news, sadly. Most of these procurements are many years away from actually being in service. And even once we have them, as good as the new equipment will be, the biggest problem for the military today is a crippling personnel shortage. The military is, to be blunt, a disaster. Far worse than is generally known. I’ve been covering military and defence issues for longer than I care to recount, and I can tell you plainly, dear readers, that the level of panicked leaking and lamenting coming out of the Canadian Armed Forces is like nothing I’ve ever seen. We don’t have the troops, sailors and aircrew to meet even basic obligations. Training is falling behind. The in-service availability of equipment and vehicles is appallingly low for lack of trained maintenance personnel and money for spare parts and equipment.
This is showing up in operations. The army doesn’t have enough soldiers to meet every commitment. The air force has cut back on operations. The navy’s top admiral is openly speaking, in public, about the crisis in his service.
We at The Line often talk about the Canadian love of talking about inputs instead of outputs. It’s easier to say “Our government has committed X dollars over Y years to address Societal Problem Z” than it is to actually ever have to answer to the public about why Z is somehow still getting worse. New procurements are an input; the desired output is a functional Canadian Armed Forces, capable of meeting its domestic obligations, honouring our treaty commitments and also being prepared for any unexpected contingencies. We do not have that military today. We cannot have that military for years. It would take massive investments and sustained effort to begin fixing this problem.
That is not happening. Hell, we took Anita Anand, one of Justin Trudeau’s better ministers and replaced her with Blair, a man for whom that has never been said. I can tell you with certainty that our allies, and our senior military commanders, had no trouble reading between those lines. Trudeau thought the military mattered, briefly, but then he stopped thinking that, and here we are.
So, 14 months out from Freeland’s speech and on the military front, well … Merry Christmas, or something?
But wait! There’s more!
Freeland’s speech also talked about other ways Canada could support its allies, and democracies in general. Some of it was vague and aspirational — hard to measure or follow-up on. But she was specific about two things: providing our threatened allies and the democracies broadly with a stable, democratic and reliable source of critical strategic resources. Energy, for example. And minerals.
Fourteen months later, how are we doing on those fronts?
I’m not an expert in either area, but I know experts in both. Andrew Leach is an energy and environmental economist at the University of Alberta (I literally copied that bio right off his webpage there). He is also, simply put, one of the smartest guys on the energy file in this country. I called him this week and found him grading papers, which is probably why he was so willing to talk with me. I explained to him what I was doing with the Brookings speech, and asked him if there was anything he could point to over the last 14 months as signs that we’d gotten serious and were doing as Freeland had said we would and must.
Nope!
“By any metric, it’s worse today,” Leach said. Two months ago, he noted, the Supreme Court ruled against the Trudeau government’s energy policies. “Now, there are no clear processes to get approvals for anything,” he added, except, somewhat ironically, pipelines, whose approvals process wasn’t included in the court ruling. I asked him if this was something the Trudeau government had done to itself, or if it was a victim of happenstance, and he said that some of the legislation they were dealing with dated back to the Harper era — before their time — but that in general, the Trudeau government hadn’t handled this well. “They messed up. They assumed they had powers they didn’t have, and didn’t make the arguments for those powers. They didn’t think about the framing. They had to earn that. They didn’t.”
