Drachinifel
Published 25 May 2019The Flower class, ASW corvettes of the Royal Navy, are today’s subject.
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In The Line, Andrea Mrozek talks about the promises (mostly still unfulfilled) of Quebec’s “universal” childcare service model:
Since last month’s election, many have been asking which promises the Liberals made will prove the most difficult to keep. Put child care at the top of the list: The federal government’s five-year, $30 billion Canada-wide child-care plan is rife with complicating factors. When government officials point to Quebec as the model for the rest of Canada, what that means is a system plagued by lack of access, inequality and poor quality.
When Quebec introduced its low-user fee “universal” system in 1997, the goal was to create a centre-based, publicly-funded system for all children. Fees started at $5 a day, briefly shifting to a fee structure based on income, before settling in at the current daily rate of $8.50.
The rapid reduction in fees in only one part of the child-care sector disrupted the care options parents were using in Quebec. Private providers, who were not to be included in Quebec’s system, “understandably crumbled” after the system began. Unfortunately, the public system never picked up the slack. So the Quebec government then coaxed them back into the business of child-care provision through a system of tax credits.
Consider this: We are told publicly funded child care offered at a fixed low price for parents is the way to go across Canada. Consider further that we are told Quebec is the model for said child-care system. Then consider that between 2003 and 2021, in Quebec, public (“Centres de la petite enfance” or CPE spaces) increased by about 55 per cent, or 35,000 spaces. In the same time period, private, unsubsidized spaces increased by about 4,200 per cent or 68,500 spaces. This growth in private provision is not at all what architects of public child-care provision desire. It has, however, proved unavoidable in Quebec, precisely because provision of public spaces has been so slow. Whether it’s lack of funds, political will or some other combination of factors, Quebec has been unable over two decades to build the system of CPE’s envisioned in the mid 1990s.
None of this is a secret: The Quebec auditor general reported last fall there are “not enough spaces available in subsidized child care to meet the needs of families in Quebec.” There are 98,014 spaces in CPEs but 46,000 on a waiting list for a CPE space, as per the auditor general. Does this sound like a policy success?
Further, the waitlists are now themselves a source of inequity. The same auditor-general report highlights that in Montreal in particular, “the children of low-income families are underrepresented in (CPEs).” Previous studies showed this to be a problem across Quebec. Sociologist Rod Beaujot wrote this in a 2013 paper: “In Quebec, day care is used less by children in vulnerable environments, and the services they use are of lower quality (Giguère and Desrosiers 2011). In contrast, the higher the mother’s education, and the higher the family income, the greater the usage of child-care in the Quebec program (Audet and Gingras 2011.) While the program has provisions for disadvantaged families, it would appear that other provinces are more successful in tailoring programs to families with lower incomes.”
So, it’s another “universal” program that disproportionally benefits the wealthy and well-connected (who tend to be Liberal Party supporters and voters)? Tabarnak! Who could ever have possibly seen this coming? Oh, and the Quebec model the rest of the country is supposedly eager to adopt has literally the worst ratios of adult caregivers to children, and 81% of Quebec parents say “Finding quality child care is a way bigger hassle than it should be for parents today”, which is a higher percentage than it is in any other province.
In The Line, Jen Gerson explains why the Alberta government is consciously taking some of its strategies for dealing with the feds and other provinces from the generations-long success that has been Quebec’s planbook:
Quebec — as the single largest recipient of equalization cash — is often a target of anger in these parts, but I’d encourage any readers from thereabouts not to read too much into this fact. Both Alberta and Quebec suffer from a culture of political grievance that feed off one another. Alberta resents the fiscal balances, often casting Quebec as an ungrateful recipient of the very oil wealth that the latter regards with contempt. And I can only imagine how Quebec must read this; as a signal of its own isolation from Anglo culture more broadly. On both sides, I see politicians who have made a generational art of milking these respective grievances.
So sometimes it’s worthwhile to point this out.
Alberta doesn’t hate Quebec.
The provinces exist on flip sides of the very same coin; they are each others’ dark twins, and Alberta seeks mostly to emulate its French sibling.
Kenney made this point entirely explicitly in the days leading up to the referendum.
“We’re using this to get leverage to basically take a page out of Quebec’s playbook in having successfully dominated the political attention of the federation for the last 40 or 50 years.”
What playbook was he referencing, here?
The answer is obvious; the separation referenda of 1980 and 1995. In fact, the whole logic of Alberta’s referenda last night was predicated on a novel reading of the Quebec Secession Reference, in which a clear majority on a clear question must force the federal government to the negotiating table in good faith. The fact that this reference spoke to a secession question — and not a longstanding quibble over an item within the constitution — is a material difference from a legal point of view, but not a psychological one.
The hope is that this referenda will give us somethin akin to the “leverage” Quebec has enjoyed vs. Ottawa since its failed separation referenda; and the disproportionate financial and cultural incentives that followed in the following decades. Essentially, Alberta is asking for the leverage of a true separatist movement without suffering the risk of actually separating. We are play-acting a little Potemkin secession referendum, here. If it falls to me to point out the show is a little childish and even a touch pathetic, well, so be it.
In Friday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh reports on some St. Catharines, Ontario parents who apparently just woke up from a 40-year long stasis pod:
Adrian Humphreys has a short item in today’s Post about an attempt to petition against a St. Catharines, Ont., public school principal because of her off-hours fondness for Britain’s ancient heavy-metal act Iron Maiden. NP Platformed can only applaud the success of what is clearly a disguised ploy for global publicity: Maiden, now 46 years into a busy life of recording and touring, released its first new studio LP in six years last month.
Then again, it is vaguely possible that the petition was started out of genuine concern by the “parents”, who claimed to have authored it, none of whom have stepped forward to own their objections to principal Sharon Burns. (She is, perhaps wisely, not giving interviews herself.)
If you’re about Burns’s age, you can only marvel at the operations of Father Time. When we and Burns and Iron Maiden’s (mostly intact) classic lineup were all still young, the band was one whose symbols you might draw on a Duo-Tang to annoy and disquiet a prissy teacher. How the tables have turned, as tables will.
Burns’s Instagram account contained photos of her going to concerts and wearing Iron Maiden merchandise of the sort that has made the group incalculable fortunes. Her gear included some references to 1982’s The Number of the Beast, which critical consensus considers to still be the finest of the group’s studio albums.
This was seen by the anonymous petitioners as signalling an allegiance to Satanism, and perhaps it’s natural for a very sheltered parent to have become upset. (The school, as Humphreys explains, has a distant background as a Mennonite Bible school.) But getting angry at Iron Maiden in 2021 feels a little like getting angry at McDonald’s. Even on a surface level, Maiden, a “new wave” metal group that did its most innovative work in the 1970s and ’80s, has been succeeded by several generations of metal groups and entire subcultures that take the violence, noise, crudity and obscenity into realms we old farts never dreamt of.
The province of Alberta is unhappy with the current federal-provincial equalization arrangement. This is not new … it’s been the case off-and-on for most of my life, but this year the province is undertaking a formal referendum on the issue, as Jen Gerson explains in The Line:
Let’s start with all the usual but necessary rigmarole about the Alberta referendum on equalization: a “yes” vote won’t peel equalization from the constitution; even a resounding victory may not actually force the federal government to sit with the province of Alberta to discuss the matter. I mean, it might: this was Ted Morton’s idea, and his argument. That Alberta can force Ottawa and the provinces to engage in some kind of open-hearted exchange by piggybacking on the Quebec Secession Reference is not totally impossible, I guess.
As this Fraser Institute bulletin by Rainer Knopff points out, that reference is specific to questions of, well, secession and probably can’t be re-applied willy nilly to any old provincial grievance. However, Knopff goes on to note that the referendum is necessary to create a provincial legislative resolution on the matter, which would allegedly trigger some kind of duty to negotiate — although certainly no duty to come to an agreement that Alberta would find acceptable.
Most credible individuals begin to handwave furiously when asked to nail the technical legal details about how we’re going to make Ottawa cede a damn thing. Even Morton had to point out that the referendum’s greatest power lies in granting Alberta “moral force” on the question.
In other words, it’s political theatre, and it’s poorly timed political theatre at that.
Equalization is a perennial complaint in Alberta, and not one totally without merit. Although the province doesn’t cut Ottawa some kind of novelty-sized equalization cheque at tax time, we are a comparatively wealthy province, which means the province traditionally sends more money to the federal government through its income and business tax remittances than it receives in rebates and services. There is a sense of injustice, here, which notes that equalization-receiving provinces offer services like cheap daycare, and are now racking up rainy day funds as Alberta falls ever deeper into debt. Meanwhile, we can’t seem to get a pipeline built to transport the very product that provides so much of this national bounty and wealth because other provinces oppose them.
I had been a follower of the Canadian national soccer teams back when I was coaching my son and his friends in U-4 through U-16 house league soccer, but while the women’s team is among the world’s best, the men’s team has always lagged a long way behind. In Thursday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh shows that there’s a very big spark of hope in the person of Alphonso Davies of Edmonton:
Alphonso Davies playing for FC Bayern Munich, 28 April, 2019.
Photo by Granada via Wikimedia Commons.
Reaching the [2022 FIFA World Cup] tournament involves finishing in the top four in an eight-country “octagonal” round-robin tournament that include the best sides from our continental soccer federation, CONCACAF. Last night, Canada faced a critical home match in Toronto against a traditional close rival, Panama, who stood just ahead of us in the octagonal table after a shock 1-0 home win against the United States.
This game wasn’t a very big deal even in dedicated sports media, but if you were paying close attention, you knew this was a crucial match for our World Cup hopes, which have quietly begun to build in the last year or two. Panama has a strong side, strong enough to have qualified for the 2018 World Cup finals ahead of us. But some awesome young Canadian talent is coming into full flower, and our country now possesses, by common consensus, CONCACAF’s best player — which is to say, the continent’s best player.
If anyone doubted the credentials of 20-year-old Edmontonian Alphonso Davies before last night, they have been silenced, if not entombed. Canada fell behind one-nil to Panama early in the match, then equalized shortly before half-time. Panama was lucky, at that point, to stand even, and their players knew it.
That’s when Davies, who had already filled a highlight reel with unstoppable dribbles in the first 45 minutes, put Canada ahead with the most astonishing goal ever scored by any man wearing the national colours. [Twitter link] Let us emphasize: you don’t need to be a soccer fan to appreciate this one. Phonzie’s pursuit and robbery of Panama’s Harold Cummings, who had a 35- or 45-metre head start to a harmless ball on the touchline, resembles nothing so much as the targeting and evisceration of an antelope by a cheetah. Davies then humiliated a second defender and wrong-footed Panama keeper Luis Mejia, who certainly would have made a better effort if his soul hadn’t already departed his body.
The match ended 4-1 in Canada’s favour, with Panama visibly discouraged at the failure of brutal rugby tactics facilitated by a typically inept CONCACAF referee. Davies plays his professional football at Euro-giant club Bayern Munich, and his galactico ability is no secret across the pond. Over here, he has already won (half of) a Lou Marsh Trophy as Canadian sportsman of the year. But one doubts, talking to people who don’t follow soccer, that he has the appropriate degree of fame in Canada yet. He is probably not as famous as Penny Oleksiak, or Bianca Andreescu, or whomever’s the seventh defenceman on the Montreal Canadians depth chart.
Two years ago, the possibility that Davies might one day help drag Canada to a World Cup final or two was a foggy hypothetical for the future. Last night he took a giant step, or several hundred of them, toward doing exactly that. Canada still has to follow through in the remaining half of the octagonal, but the outlook is now good. (Many Canadian national sides might have wilted against Panama after falling behind and being presented with rapacious unpenalized violence, but our manager John Herdman has achieved a deserved new level of respect in the past year, too.)
World War Two
Published 14 Oct 2021Resistance against occupation starts rising in the Autumn of 1942. It faces opposition not only from the occupiers, but also from collaborators killing their own countrymen.
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Matt Gurney looks at the federal Conservatives’ efforts in the September election and tries to assess how much the rise of the People’s Party of Canada impacted Conservative fortunes:
O’Toole planned to shift the CPC slightly toward the moderate centre on the assumption that the party’s traditionally lopsided wins in western Canada meant that it could lose a little on the right to flip some close seats in the east. This didn’t work. The Tories did shed support on the right, which might explain some measure of the PPC’s rise, but the CPC didn’t make up enough ground in eastern ridings to flip seats.
However, the election-night results are somewhat deceiving. O’Toole’s strategy was more effective than the final outcome suggests. In Ontario, in particular, the Conservatives materially cut into the Liberals’ advantage in the popular vote, effectively halving it, relative to 2019. This meant that the Liberals were extremely reliant on vote efficiency: a one-per cent swing of voters from the LPC to the CPC could have flipped dozens of seats, setting up a scenario where O’Toole could have been prime minister today. (These flips would not have come from the Greater Toronto Area, interestingly, where the Liberals continue to run up some lopsided victories of their own, but from other parts of Ontario and random seats all across the country. The election was closer than people realize.)
But back to the PPC. Did giving them room to grow on the right end up costing the CPC seats? If so, while that wouldn’t necessarily discredit the notion of moving the CPC toward the centre, it absolutely complicates it. If the Conservatives can’t take their right flank for granted, their lives get a lot more difficult. In a recent feature in the Toronto Star, Althia Raj, who apparently spoke to every insider on the planet, wrote that a preliminary Conservative estimate is that the PPC rise cost them between four and nine seats.
That sounds about right, and it doesn’t sound like much. Indeed, if anything, there’s reason to believe that that is overly generous to the PPC.
[…]
In aggregate terms, the author found that while you could conclude that a handful of ridings were possibly but not certainly lost due to a PPC surge, you couldn’t definitively conclude that any were lost because the Conservatives gave up ground on the right. This gets us to the low-end figure cited by Raj, but looking at this report, I don’t know where the rest could possibly have come from.
Every additional seat would have been good news for O’Toole. And the rise in the PPC vote share is worth studying on its own merits — The Line continues to work with John Wright to firm up our understanding of the PPC, both as a political and social movement.
But as an electoral force that hurt O’Toole in the last election, while we can certainly say it didn’t help, it also didn’t seem to hurt much.
Having met dozens of eager PPC supporters over the last two election campaigns, I have to believe that at most one third of them are former Tory voters … a lot of the people I met were not habitual voters for any party before the PPC came along. At one meeting I attended in 2019, there were more former Libertarian voters than Conservative voters around the table, but neither group was a majority. A lot of them were fans of Maxime Bernier personally — and note that this meeting was literally in the heart of Erin O’Toole’s own riding, a couple of blocks away from his constituency office.
Polyus Studios
Published 2 Apr 2021Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel!
Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudiosUp until the late 1960s the Canadian Navy operated a modern aircraft carrier. It had an angled flight deck, steam catapults, and fighter jets. The jets were comparable to land-based aircraft like the CF-100 but could pack a vicious air-to-air punch with their Sidewinder missiles. They saw a brief service aboard HMCS Bonaventure before being retired without replacement. It was the McDonnell F2H Banshee, Canada’s premiere sea-based jet fighter.
0:00 Introduction
0:29 Canadian Navy aircraft carriers 1945 to 1957
2:13 New Fighter Selection
3:34 Specifications
5:07 Comparison to the CF-100
5:50 Operational Service
8:23 Accidents and RetirementMusic:
Denmark – Portland Cello ProjectResearch Sources:
CASM-Aircraft Histories – HMCS Bonaventure CVL-22 by Robert T. Murray
McDonnell Banshee – Royal Canadian Air Force – http://www.rcaf-arc.forces.gc.ca/en/a…
Magnificent Moments by Vintage Wings of Canada – http://www.vintagewings.ca/VintageNew…
McDonnell Banshee – Shearwater Aviation Museum – http://www.shearwateraviationmuseum.n…
HMCS Bonaventure: Canada’s Last Aircraft Carrier by Kevin Patterson – http://www.sevenyearproject.com/canad…Footage Sources:
HMCS Magnificent (CVL 21) – Majestic Class Light Aircraft Carrier – Camildoc – https://youtu.be/_Zvnz06-MRc
HMCS Bonaventure (CVL 22) – Majestic Class Aircraft Carrier – Camildoc – https://youtu.be/QmFD5bijrok#Banshee #CanadianAerospace #PolyusStudios
As an impoverished cheapskate, I can’t afford to subscribe to The Line‘s full service, but they do allow a sub-set of their work to appear to non-paying subscribers, like this response to a former subscriber who accused them of “anti-Asian racism” in their posts involving the People’s Republic of China:
China’s emergence as a global power is going to be one of the defining stories of the first half of the 21st century. We probably aren’t reading and writing about it enough. Late this week, however, we received a note from a now-former reader, who said that the pieces we had run, and the overall focus on China, reflected anti-Asian racism, and they would not be supporting us going forward.
Look, it’s your money, folks. We want more and more of you to subscribe all the time. But we certainly respect your right to decline, or to unsubscribe if you don’t like the offerings. However, we do have a word of reply to those who would suggest that publishing articles about China is racist: get bent.
There is indeed anti-Asian racism out there. We have seen a lot of disturbing signs of it during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Asians of any description have been subjected to harassment and even random acts of violence. In the United States, some of the more fiery anti-Chinese rhetoric favoured by the former president also undoubtedly contributed to that wave, and that has spilled over here. Further, the problem of anti-Asian racism of course isn’t new. We have a long history of anti-Asian discrimination in North America. This must be acknowledged. Anti-Asian hate was real before Trump and COVID, and it’ll remain long after both are finished.
But writing critically about the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese armed forces, the policies of the Chinese government, the actions of the Chinese government, and the increasingly overt meddling in the affairs of other nations by Chinese intelligence operations, does not reflect any discredit upon Asian-Canadians, or any Asian in general. The policies of the Chinese government are exactly that: policies of a government. Criticizing policies and governments is not just acceptable, it’s absolutely necessary.
Indeed, we noted with grim amusement during a recent conversation with a colleague, who is comfortably nestled within the left-leaning progressive side of Canada’s political spectrum, that progressives in particular ought to be 100 per cent comfortable criticizing Chinese government policy. After all, progressives have been loudly and correctly noting for generations that there is a difference between rank antisemitism and warranted criticism of Israeli government policy. We find it fascinating that some of the very same people who would be horrified to be accused of antisemitism for criticizing Israel get tongue-tied when the Chinese government starts throwing religious minority women into rape camps.
We suspect some of it is simply rooted in the rampant identitarian obsessions of Western political discourse. People who criticize white supremacist Western imperialism a dozen times before breakfast might find it intellectually discombobulating to acknowledge that Western liberal democracies are not the only big baddies on the global stage. We’ve witnessed the many mental gymnastics that have been deployed to minimize or wish away credible reports of genocide and concentration camps, as if they were merely a Western fantasy being used to concoct a pretext for war. This is an ahistoric argument, by the way. The West has not been angling for war with one of its most lucrative suppliers and customers, quite the opposite. Until recently, we’ve operated under a Fukuyama delusion: the ironclad belief that China would moderate and liberalize as it grew more prosperous. This was predicated on the arrogant assumption that the liberal democratic West was the end state of history and that China would eventually meet us here, thus allowing peace and profit for all. That optimism hasn’t panned out, and many Western countries — Canada among them — have spent the last few years trying to reconcile our economic interdependence with our collective “oh shit” epiphany.
Atun-Shei Films
Published 9 Oct 2021Happy Leif Erikson Day! Some time after Thorvald Erikson’s disastrous voyage to the mysterious lands west of Greenland, a wealthy Icelander named Thorfinn Karlsefni financed and led an expedition of his own, with the goal of establishing a permanent Norse settlement in Vinland. Karlsefni and his crew would spend three summers in the New World, where they would have to deal with internal division, hostile Native Americans, and (according to some) the wrath of demonic mythological creatures.
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#LeifErikson #Vinland #History
Original Music by Dillon DeRosa ► http://dillonderosa.com/
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Twitter ► https://twitter.com/atun_shei~REFERENCES~
[1] Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson. The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America (1965). Penguin Books, Page 7-43
[2] Birgitta Wallace. “Karlsefni” (2006). The Canadian Encyclopedia [https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.c..].
[3] Lorraine Boissonault. “L’Anse Aux Meadows and the Viking Discovery of North America” (2005). JSTOR Daily https://daily.jstor.org/anse-aux-mead…
Barbara Kay makes the case for Montreal to re-evaluate its position within Quebec as the Quebec government pushes toward even more legal efforts to reduce the English-speaking community to a second- or even third-class citizenship:
Oct. 7 brought an end to consultations on Quebec’s Bill 96, which amends the 1977 Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) and — unilaterally, never before attempted by a province — the Constitution Act of 1867. A few anglophone institutions were invited to the hearings, but their inclusion was pro forma. Bill 96 will pass through use of the notwithstanding clause.
The bill affirms Quebec is a nation, with French as its “common” as well as its only official language, adding several new “fundamental language rights” for French. It effectively creates both a Canadian and Quebec Charter-free zone in a wide range of interactions between individuals and the state. Even before passage, use of the P-word (“province”) has become politically charged, and quietly redacted from public usage by Bill 96 dissidents.
The impact of Bill 96 on anglophones could be momentous. One amendment, which restricts access to English health and social services to those with education-eligibility certificates, could negatively affect upwards of 500,000 anglophone Quebecers. It speaks volumes that the Minister of the French Language will take responsibility for outcomes delivery in that sector away from the Minister of Health and Social Services. Bill 96 will also negatively affect young francophones by capping their numbers at English cegeps [Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel or “General and Vocational College”].
The previous expansions of French language rights in Quebec — and corresponding contractions of English language rights in the province — drove waves of emigration to other provinces, helping Toronto surpass Montreal as Canada’s largest city and economic powerhouse. In the middle of a pandemic, it’s much harder for those who are feeling oppressed to leave Quebec, but there may be another possibility:
Montreal as a city-state, or at least a special autonomous region — a status the Cree nation of northern Quebec has enjoyed for decades — was first raised as a serious idea eight years ago. In 2013 the Parti Québécois proposed language Bill 14, as draconian as Bill 96, which died when premier Pauline Marois’s minority government couldn’t enlist enough collegial support for its passage. Nevertheless, the attempt galvanized alarm sufficient to inspire a transiently influential city-state movement.
A 2014 Ipsos poll on the subject commissioned by that group elicited these key takeaways from Montrealers: Montreal is a distinct society within Quebec (90 per cent); to stop its decline, Montreal needs to take drastic steps to improve its performance (91 per cent); and Montreal deserves special status within Quebec because it is a world-class, cosmopolitan city (74 per cent). Those numbers would likely be as high or higher today.
[…]
We need a Bloc Montréal to represent Montreal/Greater Montreal’s “distinct society” at the Quebec National Assembly in Quebec City. The pivotal moment of the 1995 referendum campaign was the revelation — one that had never before occurred to the separatists — that “if Canada is divisible, then Quebec is divisible”. That was a sobering and clarifying moment. And Montreal has a greater need for augmented representation in Quebec City than Quebec has in Ottawa. After all, Quebec profits handsomely from its affiliation with Canada, while the opposite is true of Montreal and Quebec City.
In the latest NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh discusses the apparently ongoing non-binding election for Alberta’s next Senate seat:
Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S. Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.
The prestige of Trudeau’s Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments must be maintained at all hazards, which is why the Prime Minister’s Office undertook, a little surprisingly, to provide our Ryan Tumilty with an official response to Alberta’s Senate election. The board, says the voice of the PMO, “evaluates candidates based on public, merit-based criteria”; it was not deemed necessary to finish the sentence with “… unlike the demented, bloodthirsty populace of Alberta, who will presumably just vote for the candidate who can devour the most tar sand at a COVID party.”
For our part, NP Platformed has always been a tad frustrated that smaller political groupings don’t welcome Alberta Senate elections as a chance for a low-stakes, low-cost electoral push toward the limelight. Now that federal and provincial Conservative parties are united, for the moment, 2021’s Senate election has not been accompanied even by the quiet campaigning or the minuscule media attention that the first four elections involved. It is probably to be expected that the three Conservative Party of Canada candidates on the Senate ballot will accumulate enough semi-automatic votes to be nominated.
The Liberals and New Democrats, on an official level, stayed further away from the Senate election process than ever. Duncan Kinney, a totally-independent-from-the-NDP left-wing journalist and fellow of the Broadbent Institute, is appearing on the ballot as part of a sort of none-of-the-above campaign. His entire platform is “this Senate election is illegitimate and stupid, but wouldn’t it be amusing if I won anyhow?” (We’ll take the bait: yes, it would!)
And the People’s party has taken the opportunity to pick three official nominees. If you ask us, the Mad Max party absolutely ought to have hung onto some of what it spent on the federal election and devoted the funds to making a big splash in this one. The TV networks and newspapers would ululate with helpful rage if some PPC creature topped the Senate ballot. Heck, Maxime Bernier has always been able to personally attract big crowds in Alberta. If he had planned ahead and squatted here for six months to meet the residency requirement, he could have run in the Senate election himself.
His proxies probably won’t get anywhere, but we’ll see. There really is an opportunity for a bit of chaos here, since anyone who can break into the top three on this ballot would become an Alberta “senator-in-waiting”. Some of the independent candidates, including former Slave Lake mayor Karina Pillay and former Alberta finance minister Doug Horner, have name recognition that could count for a lot in a low-turnout vote.
In The Line, Jaclyn Victor discusses Canada’s longstanding military freeloading habits and how Chinese interest in the Arctic are only the latest concerns pushing the government to start taking national sovereignty seriously:
Arctic Offshore Patrol Ship HMCS Harry DeWolf shortly after launch in 2018. The ship was commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy in June, 2021.
If the West has learned anything about China in recent years, it’s that its leaders will stop at nothing to advance their interests, and will often do so in unpredictable ways. For Canada, the most obvious lesson here was the brazen hostage diplomacy that saw “the two Michaels”, Kovrig and Spavor, imprisoned for nearly three years in retaliation for Canada’s detention of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. But there’s another area in which China is flexing its muscles that is much closer to home: the Arctic.
Despite being nearly 1,500 kms from the Arctic Circle, China claims to be a “near-Arctic” state. This alone might not be concerning if it weren’t also for China’s efforts to increase its Arctic presence while simultaneously undermining that of legitimate Arctic states. Although Canada staunchly claims to have sovereignty over the Northwest Passage, China hasn’t accepted this, yet has (concerningly) demonstrated an increased interest in the Arctic. Canada’s periodic military exercises and lack of assertion in the North are clearly not effective in dissuading Chinese interest in the region. As the world recognizes the importance of the Arctic we must do more if we want to maintain our influence.
From claims that Trudeau has personal ties to the Chinese Communist Party to the general belief that he has no backbone in Chinese foreign policy matters, it is clear that many Canadians are less than confident in our prime minister’s ability to defend Canadian interests when up against Xi Jinping. Perhaps the most relevant example of this is the release of the Two Michaels after nearly three years in Chinese captivity — a momentous occasion that filled many Canadians with a renewed hope — but only happened thanks to support from President Biden. And what about China’s alleged election interference, which was aimed at supporting the Trudeau Liberals at the expense of the more hawkish Erin O’Toole? Simply put, China wouldn’t want Trudeau in power if they thought he’d put a damper on their interests.
Our allies, unfortunately, also recognize that our inaction is no match for China’s “coercive diplomacy” and military preparedness. Canada could have contributed to, and hugely benefited from, the recently signed AUKUS pact. The agreement was largely intended to provide Australia with nuclear submarines to fend off Chinese aggression, but it also committed the partners to collaborate on AI and other technologies. Canada seems to have been deliberately excluded. We’re skilled in many of the information-sharing focus areas specified in the agreement, and we clearly need increased submarine capabilities in order to help maintain the Arctic sovereignty we claim to have. On top of this, many of our closest allies have outright denied Canadian claims to the NWP, leaving us with limited defence partnerships as they relate to the Arctic.
In the meantime, China has been establishing itself in the Arctic in an effort to get a foothold. In 2018, China’s Arctic Policy was published — the first of its kind for an Asian state. The policy, which discusses Chinese interest in Arctic resource extraction, brings light to Chinese efforts to develop industry in the region. China currently controls about 90 per cent of the global trade of rare minerals, and they want to maintain this dominance. As Arctic ice melts and additional resources become accessible, one can bet that China will want a piece of the pie. China already has a robust starting point for strategic investments, with US $19 billion invested in Canadian Arctic mining projects. Until the NWP (or “golden waterway” as it’s been called) becomes ice-free in the summers, China will likely continue seeking additional investment opportunities to increase its hold and resulting influence. Once the strait inevitably becomes easy to transit, China will already have a legitimate reason to do so.
Linked from Small Dead Animals, Jonathan Kay took to the twits to summarize why this particular Justin Trudeau flake-out seems to have impacted his reputation so much more than all the other flake-outs he’s pulled over the years (screencapped for those who find Threadreader links objectionable):
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