The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 3 May 2021Canadians would distinguish themselves in the Great War, and the words of Canadian John McCrae would come to, perhaps more than any other, encapsulate the sacrifices of the soldiers of that war. The story of one of the most important poems about war ever written deserves to be remembered.
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November 11, 2022
Canada, the Great War, and Flanders Fields
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November 9, 2022
Macaroni & Cheese from 1845
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 8 Nov 2022
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Liberal political fortunes ride “especially women in the suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area” … and those women are angry right now
In The Line, Ashley Csanady has some advice for Justin Trudeau in the lead-up to the next federal election that he really needs to pay attention to:
Poll after poll has told us the Liberals lost white male voters a long time ago, and their electoral fortunes, especially in Quebec and suburban Ontario, rely on women, especially women in the suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area. This isn’t to say dads and other caregivers aren’t angry. Families take many shapes and anyone with small people at home has faced the same indignities over the past nearly three years. However, politically and demographically, it’s the Ontario moms who are going to make or break the next election. And when folks are angry, it doesn’t matter who the incumbent is, they are wont to vote them out.
Nor is it not just about the children’s pain meds.
It’s about the fact we can’t find antibiotic eye drops over-the-counter either (a shortage one pharmacist told me is even worse than the one for pain and fever meds for the wee ones). Another shortage that means we must then turn to an already over-burdened health-care system to get a prescription for a medicine that may or may not be in stock.
Oh, and if that respiratory virus going around turns nasty, we aren’t even certain there will be a hospital bed for our babies when they need it most.
Then there is the infuriatingly slow roll-out of affordable childcare in this province. Parents once again caught between the feds and the province in a battle that may drag out the process so long that many expecting relief will see their kids off to junior kindergarten before it arrives.
Grocery bills are skyrocketing, and while I admit I’m privileged enough to absorb the eye-popping increases, so many families simply cannot. Imagine telling a picky toddler they can’t have their favourite snack because you can’t afford the crackers.
Now, Ontario moms had to deal with yet another disruption to their kids’ schooling, which threw their work lives into chaos once again. More disruptions are possible should bargaining fail again. This just after many women who left the workforce or took a step back from their careers during the pandemic were just getting back into the swing of things.
I made this point — that Ontario moms are angry and much of that anger is directed at political leaders, but I don’t expect it to fall on Ontario Doug Ford — on Twitter a couple weeks back. For this, I was “reminded” — more like chided — that many of these challenges are Mr. Ford’s fault. Or global challenges no logical person could blame the prime minister for. The partisans in my mentions were right on both counts. But here’s what they got wrong:
It doesn’t matter if I’m being “unfair” to Mr. Trudeau, because politics is unfair.
And as for Mr. Ford’s share of the blame, voters punish who’s up next at the ballot box, especially in a crisis. They had a chance to take out their rage on the PCs in June. They didn’t. So who does that leave up next?
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November 8, 2022
The inevitable next act of the media subsidy game – “Before long we will be back for more”
In The Line, Peter Menzies outlines the state of play in the continued efforts of the federal government to pass C-18, a bill that will massively benefit certain media outlets … or convince the “tech giants” to pull out of the Canadian market altogether rather than pay the blackmail:
News Media Canada’s persistent campaigning finally produced its Holy Grail — Bill C-18. All might have been well for Torstar, Postmedia and Le Devoir except that once the flesh was thrown on the bones of the Act, broadcasters that aren’t facing economic peril heard the dinner bell and came running.
The result, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, is that Bill C-18 is expected to produce $329 million in annual revenue for Canadian media (for context, that’s less than the Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun and Calgary Sun were bringing in between them 20 years ago). Of that, $249 million will go to broadcasters, few of whom are on a fiscal ledge and a good many of whom have contributed to the demise of local newspapers. Remarkably, the CBC, already receiving $1 billion in taxpayer funding, will get the most of that cash, followed by CTV (Bell), Rogers, Videotron and others. The newspapers and start ups will have $80 million (a little more than what the Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Sun used to make in combined annual profit) to fight over.
And very few of those previously mentioned startups — run by mostly young and often female innovators — trying to find a sustainable business model for good journalism can expect anything more than a token pay off. No. They will have to go to the little kids table and see what they can find on the children’s menu of subsidies.
It is distressingly obvious that while so many were tricked into believing this was the most progressive Canadian government ever, it is in fact, a slave to the status quo; as staunch a defender of the corporate establishment as the Toronto Club could wish for. With the 21st century and all its opportunities staring it in the face, Justin Trudeau’s government has not only turned its back on innovation, it has put its thumb on the scale in favour of failed business models that long ago ran out of ideas.
Yet there may be a final twist in this tale.
Bill C-18’s particulars are, as Meta/Facebook’s Kevin Chan put it to a Parliamentary committee last week “globally unprecedented”. For all its sins — and for all we know there are a few more skeletons rattling around in its closet — Meta is unlikely to pay up. Sure, it can cover the Canadian shakedown; what it can’t afford though is to pay every other country in the world that makes the same demand. So Meta says it may simply stop serving up news links which, when you think about it, is a better idea in the long run than permanently entrenching its dominant market position
So while the publishers of those blank pages appear to have bullied even the Conservatives into supporting this travesty, they are still left to ponder:
“Imagine if Facebook wasn’t there.”
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Freeland to NATO? Almost certainly not
CDR Salamander explains why, despite her having good qualities that match some of what the job requires, we shouldn’t be betting any money on Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland taking over the role of Secretary General of NATO:
Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland’s speech at the Brookings Institution in October, 2022.
So, via NYT, as a war wages in Eastern Europe and NATO is looking for a new Secretary General, what is the focus?
The behind-the-scenes jockeying for who should succeed Jens Stoltenberg has begun in earnest, with a focus on women.
Here’s the CV:
While the officials cautioned that these are early days, and very often the names that surface first do not survive the bargaining among NATO’s 30 members, they said one prime candidate has surfaced in Washington: Chrystia Freeland, 54, the Canadian-Ukrainian deputy prime minister and finance minister of Canada.
Ms. Freeland, 54, a former journalist (who is married to a reporter for The New York Times), has also been Canada’s foreign minister. Her advantages are considerable: she speaks English, French, Italian, Ukrainian and Russian; she has run complicated ministries; she is good at news conferences and other public appearances; and she would be the first woman and first Canadian ever to run NATO.
The fact that word is on the street that the primary filter here is if someone is XX vs XY would be laughable if not so destructive. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a woman being Secretary General, but that should have nothing to do with the decision. The fact is leading with that as the first criteria, any woman selected as Secretary General this round, would — rightly — always have a shadow over them for this simple fact that they did not get the position on merit — but simply an attempt to signal virtue to … well … fellow members of the woke left in the West, I guess. NATO’s potential enemies will only be encouraged by such an act.
This does nothing for NATO or women — and it degrades both by the process.
That being said, as her name is being floated, let’s look at Freeland. Many US citizens may recognize her from her very undiplomatic interactions with the Trump Administration. It wasn’t just Trump, but something worse that seeps out. Even during the Biden Administration, her not-so-subtle sniffs of standard issue leftist Canadian anti-Americanism crops up on a regular basis. It only gets worse when she deals with Americans to the right of Bernie Sanders.
In NATO, you need someone who is a subtle politician — again with experience working in a vigorous multi-party coalition with highly different views, priorities, and goals. That is why Europeans make such good Secretary Generals. While Canada also has a parliamentary system, it and its parties are VERY different than the European model. Freeland only gets partial credit here.
There is also the issue of temperament. Read the links above. Freeland likes to pick fights, often in public. Worse, she seems to enjoy — again as most standard-issue Canadian leftists do — in making snide comments about the government and people of the alliance’s largest monetary and troop contributing nation — the United States of America.
The Secretary General of NATO has to be someone by temperament and habit seen as a non-partisan person toward the USA so that they can work with American administrations from all political parties. Freeland has significant issues with the American Republican Party in general and American conservatives in particular. That alone should be enough for serious alliance nations from Poland to Great Britain to be against her as a possible candidate. In summary; Freeland does not possess the skills or temperament for the position.
Now is not the time for such frivolity.
The last reason — and the most important reason for me — that Freeland should not be the Secretary General will be recognizable to regular readers here. It has nothing to do with her as a person, but her nation, Canada.
I love Canada and Canadians — but this is not personal, this is business. Serious alliance business. Simply by the numbers, Canada has not earned the position.
Review my post from September if needed, but Canada spends ~1.3% of her GDP on defense. This is WELL below NATO’s 2% minimum. Only Slovenia, Belgium, Spain and Luxembourg spend less.
We are well past being polite to alliance members who refuse to pull their fair share of the burden. Canada simply has not put herself in the position to reward any of her political elite with the position of Secretary General, man or woman.
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November 6, 2022
The ArriveCAN farce as the poster child for Canada’s vastly diminished state capacity
In The Line, Andrew Potter considers the expensive, ineffective ArriveCAN app the government tried to impose on international travellers as a symptom of Canada’s decreasing state capacity:
There is perhaps no clearer poster child for the current crisis of state capacity than the ArriveCAN app, which was a bad policy initiative, poorly implemented, at great cost, and whose ultimate effect was not to keep Canadians safe and healthy, but rather to annoy users and generate a great deal of hostility towards the government.
The question of state capacity (or more frequently, its absence) became an issue of popular concern during the COVID-19 pandemic when governments, both in Canada and elsewhere, struggled to accomplish basic tasks of pandemic management. Whether it was sourcing enough PPE for the health-care system, scaling up testing or contact tracing, securing the borders, properly staffing long-term-care facilities, taking care of temporary foreign workers, and so on … the authorities struggled to get their act together. This is a well-documented story.
But this all came at a time when we had already started a national conversation about whether Canada had become a place where it was impossible for government to get anything done. Pipelines were the big issue, but we seemed to have turned into a country where crumbling infrastructure and slow and ineffective public services had become simply accepted as a fact of life. “State capacity” just put a name to something that had been in the air for a long while.
And so the pandemic served to both exacerbate and accelerate the concern over state capacity, for two main reasons. First, it raised the stakes. Before the pandemic, the failure of state capacity manifested itself as a slow-motion and genteel sort of generalized decline. With the arrival of COVID-19, it quickly became a matter of life and death. But second, the gusher of money the government printed during the pandemic helped put a point on the problem: the problem didn’t originate in a lack of funds. Indeed, what transpired during the pandemic was a bit of a spin on the old Woody Allen joke about the restaurant with terrible food and such small portions: There was so much government, and so much of it was bad.
So what is state capacity anyway? And why is it so important?
As I’ve said many times, the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything. More government is worse government … and I’m not even being a pedantic libertarian here, I’m talking objectively about the outcomes of pretty much every new government action.
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November 4, 2022
Ontario parents brace for yet more school disruption as CUPE threatens a Friday walkout
Matt Gurney, writing in Toronto Life, recounts a fairly typical Ontario parent’s concerns at the latest stand-off between the Ontario government and the non-teaching educational workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE):
It’s one thing to watch the news as a journalist and wonder how to cover it. Over the last week or so, though, I’ve just been another parent wondering if my young kids are going to be out of school for an extended period. Again.
It’s all very familiar by now, of course. Can I shuffle my deadlines? Should we get rotating playdates going with neighbours so we can have some quiet in the house when we have an important Zoom call? Do we still have the number of that tutor we used during Covid, and should we call her again if this drags on? Anyway, there’s always the grandparents, right?
This is stress we don’t need — a kick in an already tender spot. I remind myself that, all things considered, others have it way worse: people on shift work, single parents, parents of kids with special needs, those for whom a missed shift means a missed rent payment or a skipped meal. But, even among the affluent and privileged, the frustration, the sense of weariness at more of this, is strong.
[…]
Let me repeat that: my son, now in the third grade, has never had a normal year of school. Preschool and JK? Sure. But then Covid struck mid-senior-kindergarten, in a year already disrupted by job actions from teachers during contract negotiations with the province. (Once the pandemic began, deals were quickly reached.) Schools closed and didn’t reopen. The next year, his first grade, was a complete fiasco, with schools opening and closing as the virus surged and waned. The second grade was better but still had a lot of shifting rules and a relatively brief shutdown after Christmas. This year was the first shot for my son to know a normal school year.
And there are thousands of other kids like him out there, each with a parent (or two) who worries that their child has already lost too much.
Don’t discount the guilt parents feel. We spent years telling our kids, “No, you can’t do this.” Denying them birthday parties, family trips, sports and activities, even just playdates. If you aren’t a parent and don’t understand why people might get so passionate about whether their kids stay in a classroom, don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s all about the lesson plan or just a desire to ship them off so that the house is quiet for a few hours. Those both matter, but the bigger concern for many is that we’re tired of saying no to our kids. We’re tired of telling them that they can’t do things. We’re tired of having things taken away from them.
We knew that measures to limit the spread of Covid were important. We went along, for the most part. We waited. We got our jabs. Many of us got our kids jabbed. In exchange, we want normalcy back. Not for us but for them.
The Ford government’s treatment of CUPE is undeniably heavy handed — probably on purpose, to send a signal to other unions. It’s also unnecessarily nasty. Ford could have struck a better deal with education workers, like imposing a short-term contract with a higher wage boost to help them ride out inflation, as I proposed weeks ago. That might have eased the concerns of parents out there who, though worried about their kids, don’t like Ford or what he’s doing.
I think Jen Gerson has it right here:
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November 2, 2022
Bill C-18’s scheme to force payment for online links threatens freedom of expression
Michael Geist considers the ways that the federal government’s Bill C-18 will suppress online freedom of expression in Canada:
“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The study into the Online News Act continues this week as the government and Bill C-18 supporters continue to insist that the bill does not involve payment for links. These claims are deceptive and plainly wrong from even a cursory reading of the bill. Simply put, there is no bigger concern with this bill. This post explains why link payments are in, why the government knows they are in, and why the approach creates serious risks to the free flow of information online and freedom of expression in Canada.
[…]
Why is the government suspending the fair dealing rights of Internet platforms in the bill? Because it knows that the platforms don’t typically use the news in a manner that would be compensable. For example, the platforms may link to the news, feature a headline with the link or sometimes offer a one-or-two sentence summary or quote from the article. These uses are generally permitted under Canada’s fair dealing copyright law rules and do not require a licence or compensation. In other words, claiming that links might qualify for compensation requires setting aside the platforms’ copyright rights which places Canada in breach of its obligations under the Berne Convention, the international treaty that governs copyright law.
The government’s intervention into the final arbitration process is further evidence that it recognizes the weakness of the argument for payments for links. Bill C-18 mandates final offer arbitration, which encourages the parties to provide their very best final offer as part of the process since the arbitrator must select one or the other. Yet Section 39 gives the arbitration panel the right to reject an offer on several policy grounds. Why would such a provision be necessary in a final arbitration system that encourages submitting your best offer? It is only necessary if you fear one side will examine the evidence and proffer a low offer on the grounds that it does not believe that there has been a demonstration of compensable value. That is a real possibility in this case given that there should be no need to compensate for links and there is little else of value. In light of that risk, the government gives the arbitration panel the power to reject offers that do not meet the government’s policy objectives.
[…]
Aside from the obvious unfairness, the broader implications of this policy are even more troubling. Once government decides that some platforms must pay to permit their users to engage in certain expression, the same principle can be applied to other policy objectives. For example, the Canadian organization Journalists for Human Rights has argued that misinformation is akin to information pollution and that platforms should pay a fee for hosting such expression much like the Bill C-18 model. The same policies can also be expanded to other areas deemed worthy of government support. Think health information or educational materials are important and that those sectors could use some additional support? Why not require payments for those links from platforms. Indeed, once the principle is established that links may require payment, the entire foundation for sharing information online is placed at risk and the essential equality of freedom of expression compromised.
To be clear, supporting journalism is important. But Bill C-18’s dangerous approach ascribes value to links where there isn’t any, regulates which platforms must pay in order to permit expression from their users, and dictates which sources are entitled to compensation. This is an unprecedented government intervention into the media and freedom of expression. If the government believes that Facebook and Google should be paying more into Canada, tax them and use the funds for journalism support. If that isn’t enough, create a fund for participation in the news system with mandated contributions similar to the Cancon broadcast world. That may not be ideal, but it would at least keep the system arms length, remove the qualification issues, and reduce the market intervention.
I suspect the government fears that Canadians would easily recognize the risks associated with mandated payments for links and fundamental unfairness with the system envisioned by Bill C-18. It is why it has misled on the inclusion of link payments, rejected the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s estimates on who benefits, and sought to frame Facebook’s concerns as a threat, when the real threat lies in the bill itself. But despite those efforts, make no mistake: Bill C-18 is a law about forcing some platforms to pay for links. It gives the government the power to regulate who pays and which expression is worthy of payment. In doing so, it creates a threat to freedom of expression for all Canadians.
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October 29, 2022
The Canadian government, despite committing billions to replace old equipment, is still not serious about the Canadian Armed Forces
In The Line, Matt Gurney explains why — despite big-ticket items getting a few headlines — the Canadian Armed Forces need far more than what any government has been willing to provide since the start of the Cold War:
Objectively speaking, there has been progress. Canada has committed billions to replacing the CF-18 fighter jets with F-35s — 88 of them. (That’s still way too small an air fleet for a country our literal size — it’s not a lot of planes for such a big place, folks — but it’s something.) Billions more have been committed to modernizing NORAD’s early warning systems. And, miracle of miracles, we finally got around to replacing the goddamned Second World War-era pistols!
These are real, tangible things. These things matter. They will leave the Canadian Armed Forces better off, our soldiers better protected and our continent more secure. This is good news.
It’s also the bare minimum.
Even these big spending announcements, and even the itty bitty pistol one, don’t actually add capabilities to the Canadian military. They replace existing ones. They maintain our capabilities. Sure, we can quibble about “maintain” or “replace” — the F-35 will give Canada a stealth capacity it has never had before, and all that jazz. Fine. Fair. But it isn’t really adding to the overall list of missions we are capable of conducting. It’s fleshing out capabilities that, due to advanced age and wear-and-tear for our critical equipment, were starting to exist only on paper. The government deserves credit for this, but only a really small amount of credit. Getting the urgently necessary basics done, many years after they should have been handled, is good, but it’s not worth a pat on the back. It is the bare minimum the country deserved and that the military needed to function, so that’s how far I’ll go in my praise: congratulations, Liberals, on responding to a massive change in our geopolitical order by accomplishing the bare minimum that was already overdue.
If that sounds scathing, here’s the worst part: that’s me being sincere. Thanks for the bare minimum! I wasn’t sure we’d get even that
So yeah. Good, but … you see the problem here, no? In a new era of global instability and geopolitical turmoil, the Canadian response, thus far, has been to get caught up to where we should have been 10 years ago. At the latest. And it’s far from clear that, if not for Russia kicking off the largest conflict we’ve seen in Europe since 1945, we’d have even bothered to do these necessary, long-overdue things.
And this is all shaping up to be just the latest iteration of a little game both Liberals and Conservatives like to play with the Canadian Armed Forces (and, come to think of it, most policy files). They’ll point to specific investments or particular accomplishments when defending their record. And the investment and accomplishment may well be excellent indeed! But they won’t speak to the full, broader picture. And the full, broader picture of the Canadian Armed Forces is grim, and some new F-35s and 9mm pistols isn’t going to change that.
There was a little story last month you might have seen. After Hurricane Fiona wrecked big parts of several Atlantic provinces, the feds sent in the military. This is right and proper. The troops would have made a welcome sight in those communities, of course. What you might not have noticed, though, was that Nova Scotia had to go public with its desire for more troops. It asked for a thousand. It got 500. It kept asking for more. It got the 500. And most of those 500 were troops already stationed in Nova Scotia; only about 200 were actually sent in from elsewhere. The government never really commented on this, but it’s not hard to suss out the problem: the military couldn’t scrape together any more troops.
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October 26, 2022
When mere accusation functions as a “guilty” verdict
I don’t follow hockey at all, so I hadn’t heard anything about the case of Jake Virtanen and the Vancouver Canucks after Virtanen was accused (but found not guilty) of sexual assault. Janice Fiamengo provides an outline of the case:
NHL forward Jake Virtanen’s once-promising career with the Vancouver Canucks was torpedoed by a rape allegation, and even after he was acquitted in a court of law, detractors have demanded he be shunned as a sexual predator.
In the summer of 2021, Virtanen was first suspended and then bought out by the Canucks after a woman alleged that he had sexually assaulted her in his hotel room in September of 2017. The woman had accompanied Virtanen to his room after a night of partying. She claimed that after she repeatedly refused his sexual overtures, he forced himself on her; Virtanen said the sex had been consensual.
The fact that the complainant stayed the night with her alleged rapist and then waited nearly four years to tell anyone or report to police may have played a role in the jury’s decision, in July of 2022, to find Virtanen not guilty. It was a He said/She said story that simply did not prove guilt.
Feminist advocates, however, couldn’t care less about the verdict, and many hockey commentators seem to feel the same way.
Mary Jane James, CEO of the Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton, was adamant in interview with Canada’s state broadcaster that the allegation mattered far more than the verdict, and that no team in the NHL should touch Virtanen. Referring to the decision by the Edmonton Oilers to sign Virtanen to a 2-month tryout last month, James accused Oilers’ leadership of “taking the verdict at face value, regardless of what the allegations were”. It didn’t seem to matter to James that our entire justice system relies on the acceptance of verdicts over unproven allegations.
In James’ expressed opinion, any man accused of a “very, very serious” sexual crime (and what sexual crime would she not consider serious?) should be presumed guilty. Hockey teams, she insisted, need to send a message that “We are not going to associate with anyone who has this history” (i.e., of being accused).
It is an extraordinarily crude statement of contempt for the cherished principles of western jurisprudence — and would presumably not apply to Mary James herself if she were ever tried and acquitted — but it corresponds fairly closely with the thrust of recent feminist activism: Accused men should be made pariahs, and so should anyone who refuses to participate in their shunning.
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October 25, 2022
Canadian Armed Forces recruiting crisis may be “more serious” than we’ve been told so far
Rachel Gilmore on the state of recruiting for the Canadian Armed Forces:
As the Canadian Armed Forces grapples with how to boost recruitment amid growing global dangers, a former chief of the defence staff is warning that the situation might be even worse than the top brass are letting on.
Current Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre has warned in recent weeks that, due to recruitment issues, Canada does not have the military “that we need” to tackle future threats — and that readiness within the CAF is “going down”.
“In reality, I believe the case is much more serious than what Wayne has articulated,” said retired Gen. Rick Hillier, speaking in an interview with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson.
The Canadian Armed Forces is supposed to be adding about 5,000 troops to regular and reserve forces, to meet a growing list of demands, but are instead short more than 10,000 trained members – meaning about one in 10 positions are currently vacant.
However, Hillier says the number that he’s hearing suggest the military is down “far greater than 10 per cent”.
“Instead of being at 70,000 people, the Canadian Forces are operating probably somewhere at about 45,000 people — and out of that, there are a significant percentage of them who are not operationally deployable or capable,” Hillier said.
“So the capability of the Canadian Forces, what we rely upon to look after us in Canada and then to represent us and protect our interests around the world and to take our values with them, that part that can do that is minuscule right now, and we need to change it.”
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October 23, 2022
“It’s starting to be noteworthy how often people in government record their important conversations”
From the kindness of his heart, Paul Wells decided to make this column available to cheapskate non-paying subscribers like me because he feels it needs to be seen by a wider audience. The topic is the ongoing inquiry into the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act and it’s certainly promising to stay entertaining for a while (unlike the vast majority of such inquiries):
A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
The goal of it all is to permit Rouleau to decide whether the Emergencies Act was used properly when it was invoked, for the first time in its 34-year existence, by the Trudeau government to end the mess in Ottawa’s Centretown. But it’s also a deep dive into conflicting ideas of police doctrine, the best look we’ve had at the stressed and dysfunctional city administration in Ottawa. And while we haven’t yet heard much about the Trudeau government’s processes, that’s coming. The prime minister and seven of his senior cabinet ministers, with their deputies, will testify soon.
Nobody can keep up with it. For Ottawa reporters it’s as though we’ve dragged ourselves for a decade through a desert of talking points and euphemisms into an oasis of unbelievable information bounty. The temptation is to gorge. I took Wednesday off, only to learn that Diane Deans, the city councillor who was heading the Ottawa Police Service Board when the mess began, secretly recorded the call in which she informed Mayor Jim Watson that she’d gone ahead and negotiated the hiring of an interim police chief Watson had never heard of. […]
Aaron Sorkin couldn’t have written it better. Deans tells Watson she’s found a new police chief for him in the middle of the worst public-security crises of their lives. He tells her it’s a terrible plan. She asks whether he’ll vote to remove her from her post and he won’t say, which of course is the same as saying. They talk about what to do next, in a way that leaves room for each to have an understanding of what they agreed that’s incompatible with the other’s. It’s gold. The consensus on Thursday among Parliament Hill people I talked to who’d heard the tape was that conversations like this happen all the time in workplaces across the capital, as of course they happen around the world. It’s just that usually in governments, as in most large organizations, any sign of their existence is buried under lakes of Novocaine.
It’s starting to be noteworthy how often people in government record their important conversations. Almost as though people were increasingly worried they might be lied about. When Jody Wilson-Raybould did such a thing three years ago, it was possible for her ex-colleagues to clutch their pearls and protest that such a thing just isn’t done. But after months of claims and assertions about what RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki told the RCMP detachment in Nova Scotia, nine days after the worst mass murder in Canadian history, it’s handy to have a recording, isn’t it.
By this emerging standard, Patricia Ferguson is old-fashioned. As far as we know she didn’t record her meetings. But she did break open a notebook methodically, like clockwork, to write detailed longhand notes after her conversations. Those notes are hard to reconcile with the portrait Deans painted in her testimony a day earlier, of Peter Sloly as a lone good man, standing up for proper policing in the face of heckling and even racism from the city’s old guard.
In Ferguson’s version, it sounds like Ottawa’s cops were all reasonably good but they were cracking and colliding under immense pressure.
Ferguson described an Ottawa Police Service already worn down by the beginning of this year. There had been retirements, resignations, a high-level suspension and a suicide before and during the COVID lockdowns, followed by Black Lives Matter protests with the attendant internal soul-searching and external scrutiny every North American police corps faced.
And then the convoy hit. And then it stayed. This last was more of a surprise than it should have been.
The late stories out of Wednesday’s testimony were from Pat Morris, an Ontario Provincial Police superintendent in charge of intelligence-gathering. He dumped a bunch of old OPP “Project Hendon” reports, a term of art for the force’s intelligence-gathering operations, onto the commission server. Those reports were sent regularly to the Ottawa police as the various truck convoys approached the capital. Ferguson testified that she didn’t become aware of them until just before the trucks arrived. Which is too bad. What the OPP had found was a very large group of protesters from all over. They did not pose an organized threat of violence, though the Hendon reports acknowledged that confrontation can always escalate and that “lone wolf” extremists could well be tempted to join the crowd. But all the trucks represented a huge problem anyway, because they had rapidly growing funding — and no plans to go home at any point.
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October 20, 2022
Canadian firearms law – as deliberately opaque and confusing as the human mind can concoct
In The Line, Tim Thurley peels back the covers and provides a glimpse of the inanities, stupidities, and political opportunism that shape Canadian firearms legislation:
A typical arrangement of guns seized by Toronto Police back in 2012. Most of these weapons would be in the “restricted” or “prohibited” categories under the Firearms Act, and pretty much by definition not typically available to the majority of Canadians.
Canadians often assume our government is doing its best. Not the politicians, sure, but there is a broad assumption that at least the bureaucrats tirelessly working behind the scenes to implement political decisions must have a grasp on the facts and exhibit some consistency in decision-making. In few places is there a larger discrepancy between this perception and the grimmer reality than in how the government classifies firearms.
I’ve long had an interest in firearms policy. Those familiar with it will know how onerous the Access to Information process is and wonder why I partake on my own time and dime; I can answer only that a graduate M.Sc. thesis on legislative impacts on firearm homicide and time working in politics and government have made me a glutton for punishment. More seriously, it’s a fascinating field, and I have some insight into political and policy processes. And as any specialist in a hot-button policy area knows, there is nothing more frustrating than seeing bad policy enacted in your field again, and again, and again.
Firearms are classified into three categories under the Firearms Act: non-restricted, restricted, and prohibited. All three require a separate level of licence, obtained with escalating difficulty after multiple courses and checks. (Prohibited licences are no longer issued to the regular public, but some Canadians hold them as part of a grandfathering in of prior licence holders.) Each category is primarily determined by firearm design. A simple overview: restricted firearms are some rifles and most pistols, prohibited firearms are shorter-barrelled pistols or fully automatic (or converted to another mechanism therefrom), and non-restricted firearms are anything else meeting the legal definition of a firearm, typically meaning typical hunting rifles and shotguns.
That’s a simplified version, but that’s the system.
In theory.
In practice, as my requested documents confirmed, firearm classification in Canada is an opaque and byzantine nightmare. A messy plethora of firearms which meet the functional criteria for being non-restricted, subject to the least stringent oversight and controls, are prescribed by regulation as either restricted or prohibited, and therefore subject to more controls or outright banned. Since functional differences are accounted for by law and did not apply in these cases, the deviations must have another explanation.
In short, politics.
Take the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks. Despite the unlicensed murderer smuggling his firearms from the United States, the Liberals took the opportunity to issue an executive Order-in-Council that banned a bunch of legally owned Canadian guns mostly because it was an easy wedge for the next election. The facts of the case were irrelevant, as was the fact that the banned firearms were responsible for a minuscule fraction of Canadian homicides. The government did not even bother writing the ban by how the firearms functioned, which while unhelpful from a homicide-reduction perspective, would have at least been a coherent position. The order, among other things, simply identified a few well-known guns by name and banned those.
This is where the concept of “variants” matters. When a firearm is designated by regulation as restricted or prohibited, the designation includes all variants of the firearm, which then receive the same classification. This makes sense. Ridiculous as classifying firearms by name over function already is, it would be yet more ridiculous if a mere renaming by a manufacturer, for instance, was sufficient to evade a legal classification.
Most ridiculous of all is that the public does not and cannot know what constitutes a “variant”. The Firearms Act does not define it. The Canadian government does not define it. Nor do its agencies, even the one responsible for determining variants: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The Mossberg Blaze 47 saga is illustrative of this problem. It is uncontroversial to assume that a precise mechanical copy of an original Russian AK-47 with a different name and slight design changes is still an AK-47. But when Mossberg, the manufacturer, slapped a plastic frame bearing some resemblance to Kalashnikov’s famous design on its Blaze rifle — a cheap, non-restricted, rimfire rifle suitable for, at worst, a particularly aggressive colony of rabbits — that new gun, dubbed the Blaze 47, somehow transformed from an unthreatening small-game rifle to a dangerous AK-47 variant prohibited under Former Prohibited Weapons Order No. 13.
The amazing transformation of a simple .22LR plinker into a facsimile of a dangerous “black fully semi-automatic murder machine”.
These head-scratching decisions have confused firearm owners and manufacturers, who wasted decades trying to understand how the government decides to classify their guns. It all seemed very random.
Surprise! It is!
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October 15, 2022
Freeland does a good job of “talking the talk”, but the government is doing anything but “walking the walk”
In The Line, Matt Gurney reluctantly agrees that at least some of what Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland covered in her recent speech to the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC was logical, sensible and well-crafted. What he finds mind-croggling is the chasm between what Freeland talks about and what the government she’s deputy leader of is actually doing:
Screencap from the CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland’s speech this week.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland went to Washington this week, to give a speech at the Brookings Institution. It is a very interesting speech. Truly — it’s interesting. You should read it.
Is it a good speech, though?
In some ways, yes. You could even go so far as to say it’s a very good speech. Freeland lays out a stark but convincing critique of more than 30 years of Western foreign policy and economic assumptions, and offers some worthwhile Canadian initiatives that seek to address what we got wrong. We were wrong to believe that history had ended, Freeland said, and must now accept that we’re going to have to fight for the world we want to live in, and to win hearts and minds. We can’t just sit around and wait for the arc of history to bend things our way — we must work consciously and deliberately with our allies to make the Western alliance stronger, richer and safer, better able to withstand the hostility of our enemies and win over the undecideds of the world.
That’s the good stuff. There is, however, some bad news.
[…]
Freeland’s speech is full of little examples like this, where the value of her ideas collides bodily with the reality of her government’s competency problems. She is saying the right things. She is also saying the things that her government could already have been doing, but either hasn’t wanted to or isn’t capable of actually pulling off.
So we’re going to spend some domestic political capital to help draw the democratic allies together, eh? That sounds great. But what if they want to sell us some cheese or fancy butter? Are we going to spend some domestic political capital on that, or nah? Freeland says we must “deepen and expand” NATO and our other alliances, which also sounds super, but we’re already seeing signs that our allies are increasingly cutting us out of the loop and forming new Canada-free forums because we simply aren’t interested in deepening or expanding anything, and don’t add anything but an extra meal tab when we show up for the family photo. Freeland says that adapting to our changing world order is “one of our most urgent tasks”. Okay! Again, that sounds fantastic, but are we going to do a defence policy review? A foreign policy review? Are we going to spearhead any new initiatives? Are we going to build out our military, expand our diplomatic corps, and invoke that famous convening power in a way that tangibly helps? Or is this one of those things where the urgency is in the saying aloud before a well-heeled crowd, but not so much in the doing?
Indeed, this goes well beyond what I’d call this government’s meta-failure: a strong preference for saying the right things in place of doing the right things, but still expecting full credit for said things, as if they’d actually pulled it off. That problem is bad enough, but on top of that is layered the very real concerns I and many others have about our state capacity. Even if we chose to spend political capital to get things done, and then tried really hard to succeed, could we? I know it’s a bit of a deep cut now, but I wonder if everything Freeland wants to do will be charitably deemed “underway with challenges” by the time the war in Europe enters its second year, or fifth, or tenth.
There’s a line in Freeland’s speech that really jumped out at me. Early on, she’s talking about the assumptions many of us in the West had about the “end of history” — the proclaimed permanent triumph of democracy and capitalism after the end of the Cold War. “It is easy to mock the hubris and the naiveté which animated that era”, she said.
She’s right! Here’s the thing, though: it’s equally easy to mock the hubris and naiveté of a Canadian deputy PM who flies to Washington to lay out a vision of allied solidarity and hard work that her own government has yet to demonstrate the slightest interest in putting into action. Her government’s own record undercuts her (truly) very fine words. Canada could be leading by example here. Instead, Freeland is giving a speech about the things we ought to be doing, and could already be doing, but aren’t. The D.C. audience may not know enough of her government’s record to mock the hubris and naiveté; we Canadians have no such luxury of ignorance.
I’ll say this for Freeland: I believe she is sincere. I believe she means what she says, I believe she has thought about these issues long and hard, and despite my previously acknowledged quibbles, it is a damn good speech. The problem, in this case, isn’t the message, or even the messenger. The problem is who the messenger works for.
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An Israeli LMG, Part I: The .303 Dror
Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Jun 2022
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