Quotulatiousness

June 23, 2022

The government believes that anyone opposed to Bill C-11 is “spreading misinformation”

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

Happily for the Canadian government (if not for Canadian internet users), if Bill C-11 gets passed, they can sic the CRTC on those critics … isn’t that convenient?

Last week, shortly after midnight in Ottawa, the House of Commons Heritage Committee concluded its deliberations on the Online Streaming Act, which will grant a federal regulator authority over the global Internet.

You may think putting the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and its nine government-appointed commissioners in charge of the entire online world is a good thing. Or you may think it’s a bad thing. But I’m guessing we can all agree that Bill C-11, the world’s most extensive internet regulation legislation so far, is a Thing.

And you’d think a thing that big would be deserving of respectful, honest debate and thoughtful review. If there’s something in the legislation that is bad in a way that isn’t intended, you’d want it caught and fixed, right? We are, after all, about to grant authority over 21st-century communications to people in charge of something called The Broadcasting Act. An act that was passed in 1993 to make sure nothing terrible — like people preferring NFL over CFL football or the Oscars over the Genies — results from watching too much American TV. Given that thousands of successful Canadian free enterprise Tik-Tokers and YouTubers fear new rules will disadvantage them in favour of the CRTC’s certified cultural broccoli, you’d think that’d be worth a think.

But you’d be wrong.

[…]

But then Liberal MP Tim Louis of Kitchener took this government’s truth-torquing communications strategy to a breathtaking level of self-righteous fantasy — one that dripped with contempt for all but he and his clan.

He calmly rose in the House of Commons and quietly accused C-11’s critics of deliberately spreading “misinformation” — a chilling threat given the government’s plans to deal with he same in “Online Harms” legislation later this year.

Louis did not even try to say, as did Mendicino’s deputy minister, that there was a misunderstanding of some kind. He did not attempt to make it clear that there are people who — as reasonable people often will — disagree. He did not dismiss the bill’s critics as being overwrought, incorrect and yet honourable. He stood up in the House of Commons and, barefaced, declared that views, lived experiences and legal analyses — including the testimony of CRTC Chair Ian Scott — are “simply untrue”. In other words, it’s all #fakenews.

And we are all liars.

June 19, 2022

Has anyone checked the “Best Before” date on the federal government lately?

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

In the free-to-cheapskates abridged edition of The Line‘s weekly dispatch, the editors wonder if the Trudeau government may have inadvertently entered the end-game phase of its life:

Your Line editors have grown wary of making firm predictions. We’ve been burned a few times before, plus, the last two years have been so wild it’s almost impossible to take seriously any prediction with a time horizon longer than a week or two. All that being said, one of your Line editors did have something of a prediction this week. Honestly maybe something more akin to an intuition or a Spidey sense tingling. But as he watched the news over the last 10 days or so, he found himself wondering: is this it for the Liberals? Is this the start of a death spiral? Is this what we will look back to in years to come as the moment they crossed the point of no return?

The Liberals started to look and feel really burnt out and exhausted this week. Of course they’re burnt out and exhausted. It’s been a hellish two years for everyone, and they were dealing with the Trump circus for years before that. They haven’t usually looked exhausted, though. Even when they have no doubt been running on adrenaline, existential terror, caffeine and digestive bile, they kept running. That’s not sustainable forever, though, and sooner or later, a government slips into the terminal phase of democratic politics. We’ve all seen that before, and we recognize the signs when we see it.

Just think about the stories over the last few days. Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino has come in for widespread criticism, and not just from here at The Line, for his handling of the gun control and Emergencies Act files. Chrystia Freeland, for her part, made a wholly uninspiring appearance before the committee investigating the Emergencies Act, and followed that up with a speech to a Toronto business crowd where she rolled out the Liberal plan to help Canadians cope with inflation. It was nothing but a repackaging of previously announced initiatives, some of which are fine on their merits, but none of which, even in total, will make a dent against inflation. Mélanie Joly’s office, as noted in greater detail in the full, subscribers-only version of the dispatch, has become a complete clown show of absurdity this week. Karina Gould, normally one of Trudeau’s less trouble-making ministers, had to issue a mea culpa over a minor ethics breach. The Liberals rammed Bill C-11, which would regulate internet content, through the House with unseemly speed, and the Senate is pledging to do the thorough review that the House Liberals clearly wished to avoid.

And then there was the sudden evolution of Liberals’ stand on vaccine mandates, and the pandemic more generally. Facing enormous public pressure over delays at the airports, the Liberals first agreed to “suspend” random COVID-19 testing of passengers landing in Canadian airports from international arrivals. This week, they followed that by suspending the vaccine mandate for air and rail travel. In both cases, the government had been overtly defending both of those measures as absolute necessities just hours or days before scrapping — sorry, “suspending” — them. We won’t even try to summarize this better than the National Post‘s Chris Selley did in a recent column, because we won’t do better than his absolute perfection: “By now, the Liberal playbook on untenable pandemic-related policies is clear: They defend each square inch of policy territory like Tony Montana at the top of the staircase until ordered to retreat, at which point they drop their weapons, flee into the night and claim science made them do it.”

Yuuuup.

In a political sense, none of these would amount to all that much in isolation. (Some of them should amount to a whole lot, because they’re legitimate issues, but we know how politics works in this country.) When viewed in their totality, though, all these (and more) stories over the last week or two start to look and feel like a government that has basically exhausted itself and run out of gas. When you consider the fact that, if anything, the situation facing the country is getting worse on many fronts — hello, inflation! — not better, it’s not at all difficult to imagine them struggling to ever really recover from this.

The bookselling biz in Toronto

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte looks back to those dimly remembered days early in the never-ending pandemic lockdown theatre we’ve all been trapped in since, like, forever:

I was in downtown Toronto one morning this week for the first time in a long time and while there was still lighter traffic and fewer people than in pre-pandemic days, things were bustling. That’s good news for thousands of retail businesses in Toronto’s core, not least Ben McNally’s bookstore.

Grumpy Ben is a favorite of this newsletter, always good for a quote. Way back in SHuSH 10, a reader asked us: “Why do books have prices printed on them? Very few items I purchase have ‘suggested retail prices’ but books and magazines do.” We went to Ben for an answer and, as reported at the time, almost lost our hearing:

    Why do they have prices printed on them? Great question! It makes me fucking nuts. Why shouldn’t I be able to set my own price? I mean, the publisher can have a suggested retail price, fine, but I shouldn’t have to honor it. As a bookseller, I should be able to sell it for what I can get. Some of those books from places like Harvard University Press, I could price the shit out of them. Who else is gonna carry the goddamn things?

I caught up with Ben again at his former Richmond and Bay store […] for SHuSH 53, a few months into lockdown. He was closed to foot traffic but delivering by courier and fulfilling curbside pickup orders. His lease was almost up and he had no option to renew. His landlord was turning his space into a breezeway. He felt fortunate not to have signed on for another ten years given that the retail world was falling down around his ears and I was happy for him from a financial perspective, but that location was easily the most beautiful bookstore in Toronto, and maybe in Canada. It was a real loss when it closed in August of that year. Ben put its gorgeous hardwood fixtures into storage and moved to a temporary location with plans to perhaps open again at a new spot if life ever returned to normal.

It was interesting for me to re-read that conversation. So much was unknowable at the time. Would the virus pass as quickly as SARS, or would it haunt us for years? Would there be a vaccine? Would people return downtown or work from home in perpetuity? Would they ever feel comfortable returning to a bookstore, buying a book off a shelf that some other customer may have handled a few minutes before? Was the future of book retailing home delivery and, if so, would Ben ever need another store? Were book launches and book events, an important part of his business, ever coming back? On a brighter note, would there be great opportunities to snap up prime commercial space on better terms after landlords had suffered for a year or two?

He also revisited the situation of Canada’s only big box book retailer (who long ago gave up on selling many books and now seem to give much more floor space and marketing attention to candles, housewares, decorative cushions and goodness knows what else):

“Indigo Books and Music” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0

In our review of Indigo’s travails in SHuSH 152, I complained, almost as an aside, about the chain’s commitment to selling crap general merchandise. It strikes me that putting blankets and candles on an equal footing with literature leaves the customer with the impression that the retailer believes books are nothing more than housewares or decorative objects. It trivializes them. Most of the feedback I received focused on this point. I’ll let author Judy Stoffman speak for the majority:

    Ken is absolutely right about Indigo having to learn or relearn to be a decent bookseller first instead of selling cushions and cheese boards. Here in Vancouver the store stocks few quality children’s books and no children’s music — staff has never heard of Dennis Lee. They never host a reading or book launch or an interesting talk about books. It’s a continuing source of frustration to readers like myself.

While we had his attention, we asked Ben McNally what he thought of Indigo’s merch strategy. He understood the attraction: “The margins are ok on that stuff. Books, you’re pretty much locked into a 40 per cent margin. You sell sweatshirts or something and you price them at whatever you want. So the margins are there, but long-term, I don’t know. I haven’t been into [an Indigo superstore] in a long time but I’m hearing that their stores are pretty spotty. Not looking healthy.”

Ben sells some gift cards, because people are often buying his books as gifts, but he’s otherwise light on general merchandise: “We’ve always shied away from that stuff because we want people to think that we’re serious about selling books.”

Serious about selling books. Imagine that.

I can see the sense in selling book-adjacent items, but Chapters/Indigo seemed to decide well before the pandemic that they needed to attract a non-reading audience who otherwise would never set foot in their retail stores. In the process, of course, they de-emphasized the advantage that big box stores have over smaller retailers: the width of stock they can offer. If you go into one of the cavernous Chapters or Indigo stores these days — and it’s been over two years since the last time I did — you rarely find much in the book sections beyond the “bestsellers” (taking up vast swathes of shelf space) and suggestions to go to their website if you are looking for something they don’t have on hand. If I have made the effort to go to your store, telling me I’d have been better off firing up a web browser isn’t the best method of luring me back again.

Why Hate Speech Laws Backfire

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

ReasonTV
Published 26 Feb 2022

Here’s a brutal irony about regulating hate speech: Such laws often end up hurting the very people they are supposed to protect.
——————
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason

Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
—————-
That’s one of the central lessons in Jacob Mchangama’s important new book, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. Mchangama heads up the Danish think tank Justitia. He’s worried about a proposal that would make hate speech a crime under European Union (EU) law and give bureaucrats in Brussels sweeping powers to prosecute people spewing venom at religious and ethnic minorities, members of the LGBT+ community, women, and others.

Europe’s history with such laws argues against them. In the 1920s, Germany’s Weimar Republic strictly regulated the press and invoked emergency powers to crack down on Nazi speech. It censored and prosecuted the editor of the anti-Semitic Nazi paper Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher, who used his trial as a platform for spreading his views and his imprisonment as a way of turning himself into a martyr and his cause into a crusade. When the Nazis took power in the early ’30s, Mchangama stresses, they expanded existing laws and precedents to shut down dissent and freedom of assembly.

Contemporary scholarship suggests that there can be a “backlash effect” when governments shut down speech, leading otherwise moderate people to embrace fringe beliefs. Mchangama points to a 2017 study published in the European Journal of Political Research that concluded extremism in Western Europe was fueled in part by “extensive public repression of radical right actors and opinions.”

In 1965, the United Kingdom passed a law banning “incitement to racial hatred,” but one of the very first people prosecuted under it was a black Briton who called whites “vicious and nasty people” in a speech. More recently, Mchangama notes that radical feminists in England “have been charged with offending LGBT+ people because they insist there are biological differences between the sexes. In France, ‘an LGBT+ rights organization was fined for calling an opponent of same-sex marriage a ‘homophobe.'”

“Once the principle of free speech is abandoned,” warns Mchangama, “any minority can end up being targeted rather than protected by laws against hatred and offense.”

That’s what happened in Canada in the 1990s after the Supreme Court there ruled that words and images that “degrade” women should be banned. The decision was based in part on the legal theories of feminist author Andrea Dworkin, whose books on why pornography should be banned were briefly seized by Canadian customs agents under the laws she helped to inspire.

First Amendment rights are still popular in the United States, with 91 percent of us in a recent survey agreeing that “protecting free speech is an important part of American democracy.” But 60 percent of us also said that the government should prohibit people from sharing a racist or bigoted idea.

Hearing hateful words and ideas outrages and discomforts most of us, but Mchangama’s history of free speech underscores that state suppression can grant those words and ideas more power and influence. And that the best antidote to hate in a free and open society is not to hide from it but to openly—and persuasively—confront it.

Listen to my Reason Interview podcast with Jacob Mchangama at https://reason.com/podcast/2022/02/16….

Written by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Regan Taylor.

June 15, 2022

“Privacy” seems to be an archaic concept that doesn’t matter to the Canadian government

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist wonders why the Canadian government doesn’t seem to care at all about the privacy of Canadians:

“Privacy” by g4ll4is is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Over the past several weeks, there have been several important privacy developments in Canada including troubling privacy practices at well-known organizations such as the CBC and Tim Hortons, a call from business organizations for privacy reform, the nomination of a new privacy commissioner with little privacy experience, and a decision by a Senate committee to effectively overrule the government on border privacy rules. These developments raise the puzzling question of why the federal government – led by Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, and Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez – are so indifferent to privacy, at best treating it as a low priority issue and at worst proposing dangerous measures or seemingly hoping to cash in on weak privacy laws in order to fund other policy priorities.

The privacy alarm bells have been ringing for weeks. For example, the Globe and Mail recently featured an important story on children’s privacy, working with Human Rights Watch and other media organizations to examine the privacy practices of dozens of online education platforms. The preliminary data suggests some major concerns in Canada, most notably with the CBC, whose CBC Kids platform is said to be “one of the most egregious cases in Canada and really all around the world”. The CBC responded that it “complies with relevant Canadian laws and regulations with regard to online privacy, and follows industry practices in audience analytics and privacy protection”. Yet that is the problem: Canada’s privacy laws are universally regarded as outdated and weak, thereby enabling privacy invasive practices with no consequences. Soon after, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada released findings in an investigation involving the Tim Hortons app tracking location data. First identified by then-National Post reporter James McLeod, the commissioner found privacy violations, yet Canadian privacy law does not include penalties for these violations.

Despite the obvious need for privacy reform – outgoing Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien reiterated the necessity for reform in his final speech as commissioner and business groups have made a similar call for privacy reform – the government seems indifferent to the issue. The nomination of Philippe Dufresne as the new privacy commissioner is a case in point. I don’t know Mr. Dufresne and I’m hoping that he proves to be a great commissioner. He certainly said many of the right things in his appearance before committee yesterday. However, the government’s choice is instructive. In choosing someone with no obvious privacy experience, the government sided instead with government managerial experience. Good managerial experience is valuable, but a career spent within government is not a training ground for pushing the policy envelope, pressuring governments to reform the law, and demanding that the private sector comply with it. The Dufresne choice signals that the government may be more comfortable with a well-managed agent of Parliament than with an agent of change.

June 13, 2022

Justin Trudeau’s sadism is visible at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport

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

It’s been more than a decade since the last time I had to travel by air … and even then it was still a far worse experience than it was before 9/11. Canada is among the last few countries to loosen Wuhan Coronavirus restrictions on international travel — along with two of Justin Trudeau’s favourite nations, the cuddly North Korean sole proprietorship and the “admirable” “basic dictatorship” in China. In the free-to-cheapskates weekly round-up of The Line, the editors have recent travel experiences at Canadian airports to discuss:

CBC News report on delays at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, 9 June, 2022.
Screencap from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkgmWWY2SDc

… Why couldn’t your Line editor browse the aisle? Well, because duty free is only for international travellers, and hanging around was forbidden due to “COVID protocols,” the clerk explained.

Now, was your Line editor going to stand around and pick a fight with some underpaid store clerk who was just following the rules? Absolutely not.

But she thought about it.

Look, we understand that not being able to browse is, on the list of first-world problems, really far down, but we had to admit that this stupid little non-incident made us angry. Just stupid, irrationally, bug-eyed angry for a solid minute or two.

Why? Because our entire lives have been eaten by a compounding collection of nonsensical COVID rules and restrictions that have added up to make everybody crazy and miserable, and this was just another. Everyone we know now has a story of peaking on COVID hysteria; experiencing a moment so surreal, inhumane and paranoid that it had the effect of fundamentally breaking trust in the judgement of public health and in broader institutional authority. Whether it was the moment they covered the outdoor playgrounds with police tape; the librarian who refused to let the potty-training toddler use the bathroom; the umpteenth school closure; the triple-masked mom screaming hysterically at her ward for touching other kids; to stories of being trapped for hours on end in airplanes or terminals. There was a moment when nearly all of us broke and took someone else’s head off. When we stopped clapping for health-care workers and instead grew quietly resentful, or found ways to silently flout COVID protocols — or abandoned the mainstream altogether and lost ourselves to fringe politics and conspiracy theories.

Upon arrival at one airport, one of your Line editors spotted a kids’ play area containing nothing more than a cartoonish carpet depicting a fun little airport runway. It was still closed. It is, apparently, still too dangerous to let kids burn off steam by pretending to be airplanes for a few minutes.

Even the Liberal backbench has been reported to be demanding that Justin Trudeau make some vague gestures to reduce the arbitrary and unscientific civil liberty restrictions we’ve been living under for what seems like forever … but he seems to like making Canadians miserable where and when he can.

Keeping up unnecessary mandates is not a cost-free political solution. You are teaching your population to distrust you. Yeah, we mean that quite literally: you, Liberals, are also responsible for the declining social cohesion and failing institutional trust that is fuelling populist movements across the country.

We realize that the mandates are small potatoes. But in a way, they’re also really not. Keeping up historic restrictions on Canadians movement, slowing a desperately desired return to normal, purely for political reasons, is only further corroding the social contract between electorate and government. Further, you’re falling into exactly the same trap as the Conservatives — you’re riding the dragon that will eat you, allowing your loudest, fringiest members to dictate policy.

The Liberals seem to be getting this, at least a little bit. Probably because they perceive the political threat this presents to them. On Friday, they announced that random COVID-19 testing of certain arrivals would be suspended, temporarily, until the end of the month. This is intended to reduce backlogs and crowding at our arrival gates, particularly in Toronto. We’ll see how much it helps, but as a political decision, it’s revealing: the Liberals are now alarmed enough to do something, but not to actually just scrap the screening, at least not yet. For now, it’s just a pause.

Lightning fast interceptor turned nuclear strike bomber: the Canadair CF-104 Starfighter

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

Polyus Studios
Published 29 Sep 2020

Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel!
Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudios

This is an UPDATED version of the video. It includes many changes and corrections to the original video. Many thanks to Gary Watson for all his contributions!

Starting in 1959 Canadair began building Canada’s fastest jet at their plant in Montreal. It was designed as a sleek high altitude and high speed interceptor, but was adapted for low level ground strike missions with conventional and nuclear weapons. It was the Canadair CF-104 Starfighter, Canada’s missile with a man in it.

0:00 Introduction
0:33 Historical Context
2:01 Design Choice
4:15 Canadair’s Production Run
6:50 Configuration and Specifications
11:04 Nuclear Strike Role
12:13 Operational History
16:06 Conventional Role
17:53 Retirement and Replacement
19:28 Accidents, Controversy and Legacy
22:56 Conclusion

Music:
“Denmark” – Portland Cello Project

Research Sources:
Canadair CF-104 Starfighter by Harold A. Skaarup (http://silverhawkauthor.com/canadian-…)
Canadair CF-104 Starfighter by Canadian Starfighter Association (http://canadianstarfighterassociation…)
CF-104 Flight Operations by Air Force Museum of Alberta (https://www.rcaf.museum/history/rcaf-…)
Story of the F-104 Starfighter in Norwegian Service by Bjorn Hafsten (http://starfighter.no/hist-en3.html)
Starfighters with Turkey by Joe Baugher (http://www.joebaugher.com/usaf_fighte…)
ASN Aviation Safety Database by Aviation Safety Network (http://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/d…)
Starfighter by David L. Bashow (Fortress Publication, 1990, ISBN: 0-919195-12-1)
Photography credit 6mins10sec: Gary Watson

Footage Sources:
Personal Footage – Gary Watson
Cold War Fighter Pilot – Ken Castle, CD, Flight-Lieutenant (ret’d) – Canada Aviation and Space Museum (https://youtu.be/sEUOFyPLL94)
CF 104 Baden Soellingen 1965 – Gordon Price (https://youtu.be/4UZ9PE58Eq0)
CF104 Germany 1983/4 441 Squadron CAF – Tom Hammond (https://youtu.be/xrqjAKHflCo)
Great Planes Lockheed F-104 Starfighter – Discovery Channel (1996)
Avro Canada CF 100 Canuck – Avro (1956)

#Starfighter #CanadianAerospace #PolyusStudios

June 11, 2022

Spanish Canada: The Nootka Crisis

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Cancon, Europe, History, Pacific, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 10 Jun 2022

In 1789, the Spanish empire prepared to enforce their territorial claims far to the North of what they nominally controlled, and instigated a crisis that threatened to bring the great European powers to war.

Check out our new community for fans and supporters! https://thehistoryguyguild.locals.com/

This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

You can purchase the bow tie worn in this episode at The Tie Bar:
https://www.thetiebar.com/?utm_campai…

All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.

Find The History Guy at:
New community: https://thehistoryguyguild.locals.com/
Please send suggestions for future episodes: Suggestions@TheHistoryGuy.net

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

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Script by JCG

#history #thehistoryguy #Canada

As federal minister of public safety, it’s Marco Mendicino’s job to lie to Canadians

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

At least, the headline is my interpretation of Matt Gurney‘s somewhat more cautious and measured assessment of the minister’s recent performance:

To celebrate World Press Freedom Day last month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said some wonderful things about the importance of truth.

“In the age of disinformation and misinformation,” the statement read, “independent, fact-based reporting is vital. We must all come together to support the work of journalists and double down in the fight against disinformation.”

Stirring stuff. But does the prime minister, his government and the Liberals’ many supporters think any of that actually applies to them?

Marco Mendicino is the federal minister of public safety — a tough job in challenging times. But I’ve come to the unsettling conclusion that Minister Mendicino is not being honest with Canadians.

On the issue of gun control, I’m sorry to say he’s simply lying.

Last week here at The Line, I analyzed the Liberals’ proposed Bill C-21, a package of gun-control measures. My views on this file differ sharply from the government’s. But I’d have hoped that we could at least agree that honesty should be central to the government’s proposals and publicity.

No dice. Last weekend, on CTV’s Question Period, the minister said this: “Bill C-21 doesn’t target law-abiding gun owners, it targets handgun violence, it targets organized crime … I have enormous respect for law-abiding gun owners …”

Well, let’s just go have a gander at the minister’s own webpage, eh? The Public Safety Ministry summarized the proposed legal and regulatory changes. There are 13 specific proposed changes to the Firearms Act. Two are “internal” to the government itself and don’t directly bear on gun owners, law-abiding or otherwise. One targets firearms-related marketing, another is exemptions for “elite sports shooters”. The remaining nine are entirely aimed at the “law-abiding gun owners” the minister insists aren’t being targeted. The page also notes that the government will also be changing regulations (separately from the proposed bill) relating to the safe storage of firearms and ammunition magazine limits … again, aimed entirely and solely at law-abiding gun owners. Indeed, along with some entirely process-focused Criminal Code proposals, there’s only one — one — proposed change that actually focuses on gun smuggling, which is widely believed by law enforcement to be the primary driver of firearms homicides in Canada. (Other planned changes are too vague to be properly analyzed in this context, but could plausibly be aimed at smuggling or blackmarket sales.)

But do the math. One clear mention of smuggling, at least 11 that only affect licensed owners. Denying this is dishonest, full stop.

Let’s be clear: the minister is entirely within his rights to argue that the proposed measures targeting lawful owners are necessary, appropriate and reasonable. These are legitimate debates. What is not up for debate is that the majority of these proposals exclusively target and/or affect law-abiding gun owners. There’s no ambiguity here. The meaning and purpose of C-21 is clear.

June 7, 2022

D Day: The First Canadian Parachute Battalion and the Battle for the Village of Varaville

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 6 Jun 2022

There are so many stories of heroism involved in the massive Operation Overlord, among them the extraordinary story of the little-known first Canadian Parachute Battalion. The lightly armed Canadians were among the first allied soldiers to hit the ground in France on D-Day.

Check out our new community for fans and supporters! https://thehistoryguyguild.locals.com/

This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

You can purchase the bow tie worn in this episode at The Tie Bar:
https://www.thetiebar.com/?utm_campai…

All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.

Find The History Guy at:
New community!: https://thehistoryguyguild.locals.com/
Please send suggestions for future episodes: Suggestions@TheHistoryGuy.net

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

Awesome The History Guy merchandise is available at:
teespring.com/stores/the-history-guy

Script by THG

#history #thehistoryguy #DDay

June 6, 2022

Very convenient – “Only the cabinet can invoke the Emergencies Act, and if only the cabinet can be privy to the information that informs that decision, only the cabinet can judge whether the cabinet got it right”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the free-to-cheapskates portion of The Line‘s weekly dispatch, the editors discuss the lack of evidence that the federal government was actually justified in its invokation of the Emergencies Act in February to break up the Freedom Convoy 2022 protests in Ottawa:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Your Line editors always understood that the situation in Ottawa (and at the borders) was indeed a crisis. We never doubted that. It was a very serious challenge that required a very serious response. But we have never seen the case for invoking the Emergencies Act. Under the law, which is very clear, a public-order emergency can only be invoked when the emergency cannot be met under existing laws. We really don’t know what, if anything, convinced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet that we had reached that point.

We have always been reasonable about this. The government may well be in possession of classified information that is not publicly known that convinced them, in good faith, that that condition had been met.

The problem is, they’re asking us to take it on their say-so. The position of the federal government thus far, as regards the inquiries and parliamentary reviews that are automatically triggered by invoking the act, is that they will not necessarily disclose all of the information that was known to the cabinet, and they may treat internal discussions as protected by cabinet confidentiality. This is setting up a perfect little loop of zero accountability. Only the cabinet can invoke the Emergencies Act, and if only the cabinet can be privy to the information that informs that decision, only the cabinet can judge whether the cabinet got it right.

You see the problem, right? As noted above, maybe they know something we don’t, and acted reasonably. Or maybe, under enormous political pressure, the PM whipped out the Emergencies Act to show us how big it is. That would be entirely within his character.

Do we think that’s what happened? We don’t know. Can we rule it out? No.

One of the only things the feds have yet said about their decision to invoke the Emergencies Act was that they did it because the police said it was necessary. But [former Ottawa Police Chief Peter] Sloly now says he never asked for it. The interim chief who succeeded him has said the same. The RCMP has said they did not ask for it. Who does that leave?

Maybe it was the OPP. Maybe it was one of the police agencies that patrols parliament itself. We don’t know. They just want us to take their word for it.

We’re sorry, but we don’t. The Emergencies Act is far too powerful to ever be invoked by a government on the basis of, “Trust us”. That’s not how things work in a democracy. And it should alarm all Canadians that the Liberals seem not to realize this, or are at least hoping that you don’t.

June 4, 2022

Ontario’s election – “This was a weird campaign during a weird moment in history. Adjust your hot-takes accordingly, friends.”

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

From the Ontario election wrap-up post from the editors of The Line:

Newly re-elected Ontario Premier Doug Ford, seen here at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York, Canada.
Photo via Wikimedia.

Doug Ford and the Ontario Progressive Conservatives obviously feel pretty good this Friday. They really did about as well as they could possibly have hoped to do. Still, we urge our readers and all the analysts and pundits out there not to overreact to Ford’s victory. He’s not a political genius, he’s not some sort of colossus standing astride our politics, and he is not the man who must be immediately beamed into the federal Conservative leadership so that he can slay Trudeau’s government and win 200 seats.

Doug? He’s just a guy who got lucky last night. (Politically, we mean. Get your minds out of the gutter.)

We’re not taking anything away from Ford, or his campaign leadership, or all the people who worked hard for the PCs over the last month. They did a lot of smart things, they did them well, and they are reaping the benefits. It was an effective campaign. It rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, but your Line editors suspect it rubbed people the wrong way precisely because it was an effective campaign. Keeping Ford out of sight, avoiding a lot of questions, keeping things low-key … these weren’t accidents. These were deliberate decisions. You have to start any analysis of the PC campaign by granting that. Yeah, it was well conceived and well executed. A hat tip to the people behind it.

But the point that we want to make, and it shouldn’t take away from anything said above, is that the Progressive Conservatives maxed out the luck-o-meter. If this election had been a year ago, coming off the government’s catastrophic handling of Ontario’s third wave, it probably would have been Doug Ford resigning last night. The government caught an enormous break because factors well beyond its control shifted the public’s focus off its greatest vulnerability, the management of the pandemic, and put it solidly on economic and cost-of-living issues that the PCs are much, much more comfortable talking about.

So yeah, the PCs had a good campaign, but you couldn’t buy that kind of luck. None of it happened in Ontario or even Canada. This was a global trend. After two years of pandemic, people are tired and they’re getting worried about other things. The timing for Ford could not have been better. So we absolutely give full credit to his campaign for a good job, but we also insist on acknowledging the huge role of luck and timing. We don’t know if it’s better to be lucky than good. But we certainly know it’s nice to be both at once.

We raise this as a note of caution before the punditry gets too carried away. This election is undoubtedly a huge victory for the Tories. But it is also a really, really weird election. The circumstances of it are very unique. The combination of low turnout, pandemic fatigue, Ford’s personal political brand in Ontario, bizarrely lacklustre campaigns by the opposition, and a confluence of global trends that all netted out in Ford’s favour don’t tell us anything about the state of the conservative coalition in Canada, who would make a good federal leader, or what’s going to happen at the next federal election. This was a weird campaign during a weird moment in history. Adjust your hot-takes accordingly, friends.

Campaigning from your basement worked very well for Joe Biden, and now it’s done the job for Doug Ford. It probably wouldn’t work for Justin Trudeau — if he’s not performing for the camera, it’s not clear whether he actually exists. Ford certainly benefitted from the small attention his opponents on the right — the New Blue and Ontario parties — although minor parties have pretty much always been a non-factor in Ontario politics. They were summoned into existance by the way Ford and the Progressive Conservatives governed during the pandemic … almost indistinguishable from the federal Liberals under Justin Trudeau. The PCs seemed to rely on their “progressive” urges at the expense of anything remotely “conservative”.

Moving on to the other two major parties … it’s not pretty:

Preliminary riding-by-riding results from the 2022 Ontario election.
Blue – Progressive Conservative, Orange – New Democratic Party, Red – Liberal Party, Green – Green Party

Okay, let’s do the NDP first. The NDP is probably feeling pretty good today. We get it. Even a week or two ago polls were suggesting they were about to lose their hold on official opposition to the Liberals. That would’ve been a disaster for the party. There’s no way around that. They’ve avoided that fate. The NDP has remained in second, although they lost a bunch of seats to the PCs (see above). In the days to come, the party is going to have to take a few cold showers, give their heads a vigorous shake, and realize that warm feeling they’re enjoying right now isn’t the afterglow of victory, it’s the fading adrenaline rush of a near-death experience. Avoiding annihilation shouldn’t be good enough. But that’s all they did.

Andrea Horwath, long-time leader of the party, has already announced that she is stepping down. And rightly so. The Line has some fondness for Andrea. God knows we’ve had the opportunity to get to know her during her tenure as provincial NDP leader, which basically overlaps entirely with our entire careers in journalism. She is a decent person with a better sense of humour than often comes across in public, and she has nothing to be ashamed about. She has taken the party as far as she can, and it’s time for someone else to take over and deal with what might be a changing environment — one that is not obviously changing in the NDP’s favour (again, see above).

[…]

Writing critically about the Liberal campaign today feels a little bit like flogging a dead horse, and then shooting it a bunch of times, and then setting it on fire, and then hunting down all of its little horsey relatives and shooting all of them too. And then peeing on them. But still. It was a really bad campaign by the Liberals. The leader was bad. We’re sorry, but he was. If Steven Del Duca ever encountered charisma we suspect his body would reject it like a donated kidney. The party’s campaign platform was a weird mishmash of stuff that sounded vaguely on point for 2022, but also often read like something copied and pasted directly out of Ontario Liberal campaign platforms going back as far as the 1990s.

Some of the problems the campaign experienced had easy explanations. The party’s 2018 performance was so terrible they lost official party status, and the access to budgets and staff in the legislature that goes along with that status. The party has been trying to rebuild with at least one hand tied behind its back ever since. The campaign team was quite lean, and as a series of ejected candidates show, it was not able to properly vet the full slate of candidates it ran. You can understand how the lack of personnel and money contributed to those problems. But what we can’t understand is why the campaign insisted on making so many weird decisions. Handguns and abortion as campaign issues? In a provincial campaign? Talking up free transit rides, which will only appeal in the deepest downtown cores, where all they could do was hurt the NDP? A mid-campaign pledge to make COVID-19 vaccinations mandatory for school children, which was then never really mentioned again?

The NDP ran a bad campaign, but the Liberals just seemed to be totally disjointed, as if there wasn’t any agreement among the party leadership on what the platform should be so random unrelated items got floated as trial balloons on almost a daily basis, with no follow-up on most of them. Perhaps the party couldn’t afford the cost of proper in-depth pre-election polling or perhaps this was the party leadership’s belated buyer’s remorse over the leader they’d elected.

Bill C-18 might as well be called the “Keep legacy media alive at all costs, even if nobody wants it anymore” act

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

The Line‘s Jen Gerson lays out the case against the federal government’s plans for permanent corporate welfare for the big Canadian legacy media organizations:

How Jen Gerson might visualize Torstar and Postmedia during the lobbying effort for Bill C-18.
“Zombie nuns” by Michael Cavén is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This week, The Line signed on to a campaign put together by a coalition of independent media publishers calling for amendments to the panda trash fodder piece of legislation known as C-18. To be fair, I mostly signed on; my co-founder Matt Gurney had some reservations, and I figured it would be best to hash them out in full here.

The bill is a hot mess created by a clearly well-intentioned government that appears to have been bamboozled by a group of media industry lobbyists helmed by organizations like Postmedia and Torstar — companies that despite extraordinary history and resources have largely failed to sustainably transition to a digital media environment. These large outlets are now using the last of their dying power and influence to champion legislation that will force big technology companies like Facebook and Google to compensate them for linking to their content.

This is a straightforward case of regulatory capture, the very thing we would condemn in any other industry; big media companies are using their credibility and political power to pressure the government into forcing “Big Tech” to sustain their dying business models — the very “Big Tech” that they’ve spent years deriding and defaming in their very own newspapers and outlets.

This whole process is corrupt. I don’t say that lightly. Perhaps inevitably, I’ve grown totally disillusioned with the industry to which I have devoted all of my adult life. We used to consider journalism a calling or a vocation — manipulative terms that justified the low pay, harassment, and sometimes abusive management. How can the church of journalism and its holy mandate to preserve democracy continue to take itself seriously when the very catechism of the craft are nowhere present in its own self-created lobbying arm, New Media Canada?

I think the leaders of this initiative have convinced themselves that the business model they enjoyed in the ’80s and ’90s is so totally central to the survival of democracy and liberal values that they’ve committed to keeping it afloat by any means necessary regardless of the ethical and philosophical cost. In doing so, I believe that they’re only ensuring their own failure.

By driving legislation in this way, they are not proving their worth to the broader public. Rather, they are conceding that what they produce has so little value that they need to evolve into parasites of the state. It demonstrates that commitment to democracy and accountability is secondary to their primary functions; running a business. They have stockholders to please and interest on loans to pay. Big loans.

Meanwhile, the legacy media they have managed is little more than a zombie in nun’s drag. It is in a state of terminal decline, and keeping it alive poisons the earth for the generations to come after.

June 3, 2022

Why the people who don’t freak out politically are the ones politicians pay the least attention to

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

In the free-to-cheapskates portion of this Paul Wells essay, he shows why it’s the weirdos, the whackos, and the cheerleaders who get political parties to pander to them and the hair-not-on-fire, steady-as-they-go, non-freaking-out normies who get ignored:

This graph is the best illustration of Canadian politics I’ve seen this year. It comes from Greg Lyle, the pollster who runs Innovative Research Group. He published it in February when downtown Ottawa was full of trucks. It takes some explaining, but we have time today.

On the left are results from a poll Lyle did in 2020. Rail blockades and protests had flared up across Canada, in support of Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs who opposed the Coastal GasLink pipeline project. One of the questions Lyle asked in 2020 was, Do you agree or disagree that “If the government agrees to meet with the protestors, they are signaling that anyone can block railways to get what they want”?

On the right are results from a poll Lyle did two years later, in March of this year. Agree/disagree, “If the government agrees to meet with the protestors, they are signaling that anyone can block downtown spaces to get what they want”?

[…]

In addition to NDP, Liberal and Conservative supporters, Lyle tracked opinions of people who support other parties. That’s the yellow line above. It’s nearly useless, a jumble of Green, People’s Party, Bloc Québécois and who knows what else.

But he also tracked responses of people who didn’t express support for any political party. That group’s responses didn’t swing at all between 2020 and 2022. That’s the black line above. Does meeting protesters encourage protests? Sure, on balance, a bit, these non-aligned voters said in 2020 (net +7%). People like them said the same thing in 2022 (net +8). Call this group the people who don’t freak out.

Now. Who gets heard in our politics? It goes without saying that the people in political parties, including the people in governments formed by political parties, are partisan. Liberals will tend to be on that upward-sloping red line in our graph. But what’s more important is that these days, only the people on the steeply-sloping partisan lines pay for our politics.

Since 2011, individual donors are the only source of funds for Canadian federal political parties. Corporate and union donations were eliminated in 2006. Public per-vote subsidies were eliminated in 2011. Today the only way I can pay my political party’s bills is if I can persuade lots of people like you to give me many small sums of money. And the people on that nice, even-keel, non-sloping black line in our graph? The people who don’t view every sparrow that falls as a little morality play about their heroes and the villains they face? Those people will never give anyone a dime. It’s the people who mood-swing wildly — who think our gang is great and their gang is the demon — who can be provoked into donating, again and again, until they max out for the year, and then again starting in January.

Irving Gerstein, the Conservative Party’s chief fundraiser under Stephen Harper, explained all of this in a 2013 column by Ken Whyte that stands as one of the most important documents for understanding our times: “Message creates momentum creates money.” Parties that reside permanently on the sloping lines of a Greg Lyle poll — that think, talk and act like their most fervent supporters — are able to separate those people from their money. Parties that exit the slope for the level meadows of moderation go nowhere.

June 1, 2022

Trudeau’s new gun control plans will do nothing to reduce criminal use of firearms … and he doesn’t care

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The proposed new rules will impose costs on legal gun owners and restrict their access to certain firearms, and almost certainly do nothing at all to reduce the headline-grabbing crimes that supposedly prompted the new rules in the first place:

A 2018 Toronto Police Services publicity photo of guns seized in a recent operation.

In my 15 years or so of writing about firearms policy, here’s been a constant problem: gun policy is complicated, the broader public doesn’t know much about it, and it’s hard (impossible?) to make any coherent arguments without laying out the context, both of the specific proposals and the broader background. Working through what was announced yesterday, and how this clarifies a worrying shift in how the Liberals approach gun control, is going to be a bit of a process.

Get comfy.

As of Tuesday morning, we are short a lot of details, because the Liberals chose to make their high-publicity announcement before they provided any technical briefings. (We’ll come back to that later.) At first glance, it seems that lot of what the Liberals announced is stuff they’d either already committed to do or, in fact, already exists. (The Liberals?! Re-announcing stuff? Well, I never!) There is currently confusion about the ammunition magazine capacity limit — most non-gunnies won’t know the difference between an internal magazine and a detachable one, but it’s a huge difference, and the proposed legislation is unhelpfully vague. So stay tuned. But the actual centrepiece of the proposal, I have to admit, made me burst out laughing. On Twitter, I called it “peak Liberal”. It really is a pretty perfect example of what’s wrong with how the Liberals govern, but why they’re great at politics.

One of the jokes about Justin Trudeau when he entered politics was that he’d be much better suited to playing the role of political leader on TV than he would in real life. Several years later, the joke is on the Canadian voter because that’s turned out to be exactly the case: Trudeau loves posturing and pontificating for the cameras, and early in his first term as prime minister he became notorious for “unplanned” photo ops (despite being constantly accompanied by at least one staff photographer/videographer everywhere he went). I think this is one of the reasons the Liberals have been justly mocked for constantly re-announcing policies and programs — it looks good on camera.

The big reveal was a “freeze” on handgun sales in Canada, and their importation. Existing owners can keep theirs. It’s not clear exactly when this will go in effect, so I imagine gun stores across the land are going to set sales records in the next few days. Once in place, the sale or transfer of a handgun — from either a store to an individual or between individuals — will be eliminated. Again, “frozen”, as the Liberals call it.

At the most basic level, new government policies are intended to solve a problem: you see something that’s wrong with the status quo, and you try to enact a policy to improve it. Parties tend to wrap their policies in lots of rhetorical flourishes, but if you tune out what the politicians are saying and look at what they’re doing, you can get a decent sense of what their actual goal is. And there’s been an interesting shift in what the Liberals have been doing with gun control these last few years. Monday’s announcement is perhaps the ultimate example of this yet, the purest form of the new normal we’ve yet seen.

The Liberals are making a series of announcements that won’t actually change, at all, how safe Canadians are from gun violence. The announcements do get a lot of attention, though. Because, clearly, getting the attention is itself the goal. The public-safety talking points are just the PR frosting on top of what is an entirely political exercise. Why else make the announcement before you give the press the technical briefings? The sequence tells you all you need to know.

Trudeau’s general governing style might best be described as “provocatively performative”. If you think of him just portraying what he thinks a Prime Minister should look like, much of his performance makes more sense. As I joked on social media the other day “It’s about time Trudeau took decisive steps to crush these MAGA-hatted, gun-toting, pickup-truck-driving rednecks who keep coming into Toronto and gunning down innocent drug dealers, pimps, and aspiring rap artists who were just turning their lives around! ” It’s a theatrical performance on the political stage … but unfortunately ordinary Canadians are going to be forced to put up with his playing up to the urban and suburban voting galleries.

Note that while the government is puffing its collective chest for this “tough on guns” announcement, they are also pushing a bill in Parliament that would reduce or eliminate many “mandatory minimum penalties” for things like smuggling firearms into the country. This is apparently intended to address the “overincarceration rate” of First Nations and other “marginalized Canadians”. So, on the one hand, they’re planning to penalize legal gun owners and on the other hand, they’ll reduce the penalties that can be imposed on criminals who smuggle illegal weapons into the country. That only makes sense if it’s all a theatrical performance.

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