Quotulatiousness

October 5, 2021

Chris Alexander – “The truth is that ‘normal’ in the People’s Republic of China, at least since 1959, has never included the rule of law”

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

Writing in The Line, Chris Alexander (former Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) explains why attempts to “return to normal” in Canada’s relationship with mainland China are foredoomed to failure:

Yuen Pau Woo was joined in these arguments by senators Peter Boehm and Peter Harder, both seasoned diplomats, who also urged Canada to suspend its judgement with regard to China’s persecution of the Uighurs. This includes the use of concentration camps and forced labour, as well as the repression of language, culture and religion. These are all blatant acts committed with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, as the 1951 Genocide Convention defines this “odious scourge”.

Throughout this unfortunate saga, Beijing has had a Greek chorus of supporters across Canada — mostly from people with well-remunerated corporate or political backgrounds — for the preposterous notion of a “prisoner exchange” that would get relations with China back to “normal”.

In the end, the Senate’s genocide motion failed by a vote of 29 in favour to 33 opposed, with 13 abstentions. China’s Foreign Ministry praised Woo, Boehm and Harder as “people of vision” who had seen through the “despicable schemes of a few anti-China forces”. The “clumsy trick of attacking China for selfish political gains” and “the hype of ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang is unpopular and doomed to fail”, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson crowed.

Had Woo, a former president and CEO of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, and the “two Peters”, both former deputy ministers of foreign affairs, voted in favour, the Senate’s genocide motion would have passed. Instead all three chose, on an issue directly threatening the identity and lives of millions, to take the position of the Communist Party of China over one unanimously endorsed by Canada’s elected House of Commons — all in the empty hope of getting back to “normal” with Beijing.

The truth is that “normal” in the People’s Republic of China, at least since 1959, has never included the rule of law. From China’s ferocious and brutal invasion of Tibet that same year, through the murderous Great Leap Forward ending in 1962, to the decade-long Cultural Revolution up to Mao’s death in 1976 (and beyond), China has been a legal void. Serious judicial reforms never featured in Deng Xiaoping’s economic relaunch. On the contrary, basic rights were decimated, as Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur and other refugees attest.

According to Freedom House, the current General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping’s relentless push for all-encompassing surveillance and censorship has made China the worst environment in the world for internet freedom for the seventh year running. Compliance with such global gag orders is enforced by the CCP’s Orwellian digital panopticon, the notorious United Front Work Department, which seeks to browbeat, buy, corrupt, blackmail, extort or otherwise leverage people and firms with connections to China in support of Xi’s agenda.

Thanks to United Front subterfuge, some prominent Canadians still take China’s side, even as Beijing’s favourability score in Canadian public opinion plummeted to 14 per cent, mirroring a worldwide nosedive for China’s image driven by the two Michaels’ ordeal and Beijing’s “wolf warrior” belligerence.

October 3, 2021

Trudeau’s no-show on the very first “National Day for Truth and Reconciliation” wasn’t accidental

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

In The Line, an explanation of sorts for the Prime Minister effectively boycotting his own National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to go on a family vacation in British Columbia:

Thursday was Canada’s first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. According to Heritage Canada, it is a day that “honours the lost children and Survivors of residential schools, their families and communities. Public commemoration of the tragic and painful history and ongoing impacts of residential schools is a vital component of the reconciliation process.”

To mark the occasion, ceremonies were held in Indigenous communities across the country. Politicians from every level of government took part. In those provinces where it was not a holiday, schoolchildren wore orange shirts and learned about a shameful part of their country’s past, and came home telling their parents that “every child matters”.

And Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, who lowered the flag on federal buildings and has kept it down ever since, who has made reconciliation the centrepiece of his leadership, went surfing in Tofino. But not before lying about it — his official itinerary had him in private meetings in Ottawa, and it was only after Toronto Sun reporter Bryan Passifiume noticed that a federal jet had taken off from Ottawa and made its way to one of the most gorgeously isolated parts of the country that the PMO admitted that Trudeau wasn’t in Ottawa working the phones, he was in Tofino playing in the waves. When he was tracked down by a team from Global news, he turned his back to the camera and walked sullenly away along the beach.

What are we to make of this behaviour? Social media was full of people calling it an “own goal” or an “unforced error” or a “self-inflicted wound”, and that Trudeau’s officials should have known that this trip was a bad idea, and urged him to put it off by a day or two.

We think these people are getting it wrong. To call this an error in judgment fundamentally misunderstands Justin Trudeau’s psychology and what motivates him. As far as we at The Line can tell, the timing of this trip, the location, and the predictable negative reaction, was very deliberate, and is entirely in keeping with the prime minister’s previous behaviour. To put it bluntly, the prime minister is taking a suck attack.

When the Liberals came to power in 2015, winning a very surprising majority government, it was almost completely due to the perceived magnetism of Justin Trudeau. He charmed Canadians, he charmed the press, and he charmed foreigners; his “because it’s 2015” line made international headlines and made him the figurehead of youthful, global progressive politics. He was the handsome noble young prince here to save us all.

The problem is, when you’re at the top there is only one way to go in politics and that’s down. And so inevitably came the 2019 federal election, in which Liberal fortunes were undermined by two main things: the fallout from the SNC-Lavalin scandal that saw two ministers and his senior adviser resign, and the emergence of a number of photos showing a very grownup, but very immature, Justin Trudeau cavorting around in blackface. After the Liberals were reduced to a minority, with his own reputation heavily, er, stained, Trudeau disappeared in what was clearly an epic sulk. When he re-emerged in the public eye, he’d grown a beard that was clearly designed to Add Gravitas to his public image.

He did it because he could do it, and he’d do it again just to show Canadians just how disappointed he is in them and how much harder they will need to work to regain the privilege of his leadership. We could use a man like Bertolt Brecht again…

October 2, 2021

Federal NDP going through the six phases of political campaigns – enthusiasm, disillusionment, panic, the search for the guilty, the punishment of the innocent, and the promotion of the uninvolved

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

The NDP had high, high hopes for the September election, largely pinned on the undoubted popularity of their leader among young voters. As Joshua Hind shows, it didn’t work out at all the way they had hoped:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the NDP leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Only the most die-hard supporters of the New Democratic Party thought the recently-concluded 2021 federal election was winnable in the way 2015 felt very winnable in the early days. Still, the NDP’s showing at the polls — a single-digit increase in popular vote and a single new seat — is undeniably disappointing for a party that spent big to win back seats.

With that disappointment gnawing at them, the NDP and its faithful are bound to want to assign some blame, a process which always starts with the leader. But that’s a uniquely tough proposition for the NDP, who not only has Canada’s Best-Liked Leader™ in Jagmeet Singh, but has also positioned Singh to be the entire personality and profile of the party. In trying to create another singular figure like Jack Layton, the NDP has painted itself into a tight corner.

In project management there’s an old joke about the “Six Phases”. Like the stages of grief, the six phases of project management are the various emotional states into which all large projects — construction, software development, political campaigns — can be divided. They are: enthusiasm, disillusionment, panic, the search for the guilty, the punishment of the innocent, and the promotion of the uninvolved.

It’s easy to see the first three in an election, where enthusiasm, disillusionment and panic often happen all at once. Now in the post-election period, parties must wade into the more fraught final phases.

The search for the guilty started the moment the networks called the election for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, and Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is already under scrutiny. The Greens, for their part, got a head start on punishing the innocent by pinning their party’s staggering immolation exclusively on their (now former) leader, Annamie Paul.

For the NDP, things are more delicate.

Jagmeet Singh, who’s personable, well-spoken and very photogenic, was front and centre in every aspect of the NDP’s campaign. Their bus exclusively featured his name and picture, the first page on their website is simply labelled, “Jagmeet”, and every campaign stop was focused on the leader and his appeal. But the “leader first” tactic that arguably got the most attention was the social media campaign, specifically Singh’s appeal to young voters through TikTok.

Singh is the undisputed Canadian political TikTok champion, with nearly 850,000 followers and videos that regularly rack up millions of likes. His content is charming and apparently quite credible with TikTok users, at times fun, mischievous and pleasantly silly. It’s also clearly the platform Singh likes best. His Instagram account is mostly reposts from Twitter, and his Twitter account, while popular, doesn’t get nearly the response he earns on TikTok. Because it’s so important to Singh, and presumably the NDP, it can also form the basis for appraisals of both, and that creates new challenges.

September 30, 2021

“The nicer the Canadian, the worse the hypocrisy gets”

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line a Canadian veteran of Afghanistan (writing as “Tommy Conway”) explains why Canada’s “nice guy” illusions have made us weaker and unable to succeed at so many of our endeavours:

Canadian Army LAV III convoy near Khadan, Afghanistan, 2010-01-25.
Photo by Staff Sgt. Christine Jones via Wikimedia Commons.

We do not merely have an institutional problem, but a spiritual one. The peoples of the Western democracies have lost their sense of shame. Canadians, in particular, have lost our collective self-respect. We have become “nice guys”, the sort of people who expect to be praised because we can do no harm. We have ceased to be a citizenry that values honour — the kind of people who are capable of doing hard things, and willing to spend a lot of effort doing the right ones.

During the Afghan war, many NATO soldiers lived in very harsh conditions “outside the wire”. In forward patrol bases or on extended missions, water was at a premium, so washing socks was a weekly treat. But for others, Afghanistan meant a lot of time generating PowerPoint decks in bloated headquarters. Go past the walls in Kabul which separated the safe NATO bases from the bustling city, and one could find cafes staffed by friendly Nepalese baristas, air-conditioned gyms, and plentiful cold drinks.

Absurdly, in the American compound at the same Kabul International Airport where desperate evacuees tramped through trenches of human waste and barbed wire to escape the country as the Taliban advanced, the U.S. Air Force maintained a pleasant compound with green grass. Kandahar International Airport was well-known for a much-frequented strip of fast-food outlets, including a Tim Hortons.

These amenities warped the perspective of those with regular access to them. Canadian Army lore is full of tales of confrontations between bedraggled, unshaven troops coming in from patrol being denied access to an iced capp for improper dress. I’ve rarely been so embarrassed as the time I took tea from an Afghan father of three, smiling in the sweltering heat of an Afghan summer, only to return to my relatively comfortable quarters behind safe walls to hear people bitch and moan about the fridge being out of their favourite pop.

It wasn’t just individual troops who lost perspective. Senior leaders made a big deal about receiving two beers on Canada Day, and put extensive measures in place to conceal the festivities from Afghan staff because the presence of alcohol might offend cultural sensibilities. I am not a cultural expert, but I imagine the locals were offended about the well-watered, visibly overfed, air-conditioned people in less than a kilometer from the poverty of the population they were supposed to be protecting. Some of the old-timers, who had served with the Communist army, stated categorically that they liked the Russians more because they shared their vodka — and their hardships.

We barely had perspective then, and we sure as hell don’t now.

Predictably, the further from the theatre of operations, the more that perspective was distorted. Somehow, the Canadian public grew “war-weary” over Afghanistan, though it’s difficult to understand what tired them. Between 1939-45, this country sustained a full field army, despite drawing from a population a third of today’s size. Canadians withstood rationing as tens of thousands of their countrymen died overseas, and came out of the war optimistic about the future.

[…]

Compare that to what we suffered in Afghanistan; we sustained a strong battalion group, and maintained a few bloated headquarters — all of this proved to be too much to keep up. Canada slid into a training mission in 2011 and then gave up completely in 2014. During the fighting, the vast majority of the population felt no impact whatsoever. As Tom Nichols paraphrased a U.S. officer in Iraq, “We’re at war, America’s at the mall.” Canada was there with them, complaining about the lines in the food court.

September 29, 2021

The federal Conservatives, post-election

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

As Erin O’Toole ably demonstrated in the September 20th federal election, when you deliberately exclude the SoCons, the libertarians, the gun-owners, the free speech advocates, and the fiscal conservatives, what you have left is a party that doesn’t have a lot to differentiate itself from the Liberals. Ben Woodfinden offers some thoughts on the Conservative Party’s immediate post-election phases:

I don’t want to spend long on this point because I find this kind of Conservative infighting (the tory syndrome), which is often about a combination of both ideology mixed in with personal feuds and rivalries, extremely frustrating. I think O’Toole deserves a second shot for a few reasons. I thought there was a lot to like in the platform, because O’Toole himself performed fairly well during the campaign for the most part, and the Conservatives are on the path to form government. I also think another leadership election is a bad idea and this habit of dumping leaders after single election results is extremely shortsighted. Changes are needed, but I don’t think replacing O’Toole is one of them.

Before some of you send furious responses about how I’ve “sold out” or how O’Toole sold out and therefore needs to go, I absolutely do think that portions of the base have every right to be angry. As I wrote in the Post column, what has angered many is not simply the campaign O’Toole ran, it was that he won the leadership running as a “true blue” and then pivoted to something else.

The Conservative Party is not a party of one. O’Toole needs to show some humility and work to rebuild some trust with these parts of the base (and caucus) who are upset and angry over this. The Conservative Party is very much a coalition of different groups who disagree on all sorts of things. Keeping these groups together is a delicate and at times challenging task. […]

Anyways, to summarize where I stand on this, and I have no plans of getting dragged into this too much – there needs to be some efforts on behalf of O’Toole to restore some trust with the various factions within the party that are unhappy, but I think overall some of the shifts that are being made are worthwhile ones. It would improve the discourse on conservatism in Canada if we moved beyond the red versus blue tory, liberal lite versus true blue framing that serves us poorly. While we need to wait for a full post-mortem and analysis of the results, there also seem to me to have been some positive signs that this realignment/blue collar shift can work. Matt Gurney interviewed an anonymous senior campaign official after the election for TVO, and something the official said intrigued me:

    Gurney: Whoa, hang on. That sounds like something we just shouldn’t blow past! What was the old Conservative coalition, and what happened to it?

    Conservative: [Laughs] Okay, obviously it varies by place, but think of it this way: our three legs were big business and corporate, rural and farmers, and a swing component. That third one was tricky. Mulroney brought the Quebec nationalists. Harper, we got them with ethno-community suburban outreach. But I think the Liberals are beating us on big business, and we need to accept that and pivot to small business, working-class, things like that. We just started doing that, and it’s already working. We did shockingly well in Hamilton. And look at northern Ontario. These places are in play for us now. Northern Ontario is going to get very interesting. But if I’m being honest, the question of who the new Canadian Conservative voter isn’t one we’ve fully answered yet. We’re winning the popular vote, but we still need to grow, and I think that needs more time.

I went and did some digging myself and what this anonymous official is saying here appears to check out, and if you combine this with the gains made in Atlantic Canada I think there are real reasons for optimism on this front. This election could be comparable to what happened with the Conservatives in 2017 in the UK, but in a positive way. Hear me out here. In that election Theresa May came close, but just fell short, on breakthroughs across the board that would have fully inaugurated her as the champion of this realignment conservatism. While it didn’t materialize in 2017, it did in 2019. The progress is there, and I really think Conservatives should give this another shot next chance they get, it really could pay off. The party needs to break through in suburban seats, and I think this “thoughtful populism” as John Ibbitson described it can absolutely do that in the next election.

September 27, 2021

How exactly does dazzle paint work?

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Nautical Study
Published 22 May 2021

In early 1917, a British artist by the name of Norman Wilkinson approached the British admiralty with an ingenious idea that would save countless lives from the German U-boat campaign. His idea: dazzle paint. Complex in concept, but just crazy enough to work.

Thanks for your support!

Music: Emperor’s Waltz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foHeA…

All colorized photos in this video have credits attributed to them if I could find them. If you know who colorized any that are left unattributed, please let me know!

September 26, 2021

“… is there a single area of public policy where Canada has its shit together?”

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

In The Line‘s weekly round-up, they point out a little-noticed Globe and Mail article that illustrates something that should really concern Canadians:

Sometimes the big lessons are in the small things. While everyone was busy jawboning about the federal election returns earlier this week, we were also struck by a barely noticed story in the Globe and Mail reporting that the federal government had awarded a contract to begin replacing the disastrous Phoenix payroll system. Phoenix, you’ll recall, was an IT project designed to harmonize the payroll for the entire federal public service. The 2016 rollout was a disaster, resulting in thousands of employees being paid too much, too little, or not at all. Fixing it has cost billions and has not entirely succeeded, and now it is being replaced entirely.

We were still pondering this news when Alex Usher idly wondered: “Genuine question: is there a single area of public policy where Canada has its shit together?”

Alex isn’t some rando Twitter troll. By day he runs Canada’s premier higher education consultancy. But he’s also one of the country’s most perceptive policy analysts, writes a daily blog about just about anything policy related, and is probably one of the three or four smartest Canadians still on Twitter.

Which is why his question was met with more thoughtful responses than the usual schoolyard heckling that is typical of the platform. Fiscal policy between 1993 and 2015, offered Ken Boessenkool. Andrew Coyne half-heartedly suggested monetary policy. Rachel Curran proposed immigration, prisons, and the coast guard, but was quickly set right by people who knew what they were talking about.

So when Usher followed his question with a long Twitter thread showing just how broken Canada is, with a sophisticated and nuanced take on why that’s the case, there really wasn’t anyone left making a serious argument against him. Everyone knows it is true.

Everyone, that is, except two of the most politically polarized groups in the country, who disagree about everything except the capacities of the government.

On the one hand there are the Build Back Better people, mostly housed in the increasingly unpopular Liberal Party of Canada. These people persist in believing that the federal government is poised to make big decisions, to take big actions, on big issues such as climate change, pandemic preparedness, and dealing with the rise of China. They are prepared to talk big talk, and spend big money, in pursuit of their policy objectives.

On the other, there are the paranoid conspiracists who believe that the government is using the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic to implement all manner of social controls. These include suspicions that the government would use a contact tracing app to engage in mass surveillance, that they are putting a 5G payload into the vaccines, or that this is all part of a big Liberal internationalist plan to set up a world government.

While these seem to be diametrically opposed worldviews, what they share is the deep conviction that the government can actually do something. Indeed, what is charming about the conspiratorial worldview is how much faith it actually has in the authorities.

Confront China? Please. We can’t buy ships, planes or even handguns for our military. Pandemic preparedness? You’re kidding, right? We can’t even hire enough nurses for the health-care system. Set up a world government? Lol who would we hire to work for this government? We can’t even figure out how to pay the public servants we already have on staff.

As usual, the correct counter to conspiracy-minded thinking is not to have faith in government, it’s to be realistic about it. Similarly, the correct response to the build back better crew is not enthusiasm, but realism. And ultimately, the right approach to everything the government proposes is deep, deep, deep cynicism.

One of the major reasons I’ve long favoured smaller government — the smaller the better — is that the bigger any organization gets and the more things it tries to do, the less effective it is at all of them. Governments in the western world generally have gotten so big that they’re incapable of doing almost anything in an effective, competent, and repeatable manner. A hypothetical world government would be even worse (just look at the existing United Nations to see how billions of dollars not only get nothing useful done, but often exacerbate existing problems).

September 24, 2021

Jen Gerson has some helpful advice for the Conservative party

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

Writing in Maclean’s, Jen Gerson suggests to the “conservatives” that they shouldn’t dump their new-ish leader on the basis of the party’s results in the September 20 election:

It’s come to my understanding that there is some considerable consternation about the future of Erin O’Toole, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, on the grounds that he underperformed in this week’s election.

I cannot help but wonder whether those now implacably resolved to booting the man for being inadequately conservative might, perhaps, consider getting a goddamn grip.

Yes, I understand that O’Toole ran his leadership campaign further to the right than his personality would otherwise suggest, in order to win over the Conservative base. And, yes, I understand that the unstated agreement behind this bait-and-switch was that O’Toole needed to show progress in key regions, particularly the 905. Also, yes, I understand that these gains failed to materialize, and that many conservatives feel both betrayed, and more importantly, no closer to government.

This state of affairs may ensure O’Toole’s leadership is unsalvageable.

Certainly, O’Toole and his brain trust seem to have rationally concluded that they could leave western conservatives hanging out to dry so they could chase votes in the GTA — because up until now, those westerners had nowhere else to go. However, the rise of the PPC suggests that they may now have somewhere to go …

Conservatives have a bad habit. They go into an election with reasonable expectations, enjoy some early momentum, and then let the excitement get to their heads. They reset those early expectations to something far less probable, and when the campaign produces exactly the results they predicted at the outset they declare the whole affair a disappointing failure.

I will note here that this complements the Liberal temperament, which interprets entirely lacklustre results as nothing short of a sign from the trumpet-wielding messengers of God blessing their mandate. Only the Liberals would see two successive minority governments with declining popular vote totals as clear-cut evidence that they, the worthy elect, have been chosen without reservation to lead the nation to paradise.

The Conservatives could use a little more of that energy.

These observations are provably true of both parties. The only amendment I could suggest is that the Liberals really do believe they have been granted the right to run Canada by divine providence (which few of them actually dare refer to in conversation) and view any interruption in their God-given right to rule as unnatural and a perversion of the arc of history.

Conservatives ought to have seen this election as the first in a two-election strategy. Fundamentally, the urbanites who hold the key to government don’t trust you, Conservatives. They’re worried about the conspiratorial lunatics in your caucus and your base, and they’re worried about who actually holds the reins of power in your party. Their distrust is fair, and will take time to repair.

If you dump your affable, moderate, centrist leader at the first opportunity because he didn’t crack the 905 on his first try, and you replace him with someone who will chase Maxime Bernier’s vanishing social movement like a labradoodle running after the wheels of a mail truck, you will wind up confirming every extant fear and stereotype this crowd already holds about you and your party.

It’s a trap. Be smarter than that.

The PPC nearly tripling the size of their vote over two years doesn’t quite match the characterization of a “vanishing social movement”, but I’m not who she’s trying to persuade here. It’s often said that modern “conservatives” don’t actually have a plan except to do what Liberals/Democrats want to do — just a little bit slower. O’Toole (and Ontario Tories generally) fits that description quite well.

September 22, 2021

The “She-lection” or the “what was that?” election or the “what was the point?” election

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

In Tuesday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh looks at the sham election we just experienced … differently … here:

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

What to say about a federal election in which nothing happened? Surely last night’s refusal by the Canadian public to budge an inch is more astonishing than almost any other imaginable result could be. Our last two elections were separated by exactly 700 days. During that brief time, Canada experienced a science-fiction disease pandemic with mass death and violent protests, a fairly urgent diplomatic crisis with China, a dramatic change in the U.S. presidency, a foreign-policy disaster in Afghanistan, epic Liberal scandals and constitutional strife. Canadians seem to have lived through all of this and decided that it made no difference, or no net difference, in how they wanted to vote.

Maybe this could be considered a psychological defence reaction to the surprising prospect of an election. Given the incredible result — no consecutive Canadian elections have ever been remotely this close in seat outcome — we can hardly even say “surprising and unwelcome”. Everyone knew who was responsible for calling an election. In Liberal ridings, the response seems to have been gratitude for the opportunity to vote Liberal again so soon.

In conversation with a non-representative sample of Canadian voters outside the Toronto border, it’s rare to find people who admit to voting Liberal, yet clearly enough people did yet again — nearly 20,000 of them in my riding alone. I live in Erin O’Toole’s riding, so the winner wasn’t in a lot of doubt despite him not having any spare time to campaign here. I was pleased to find over 3,600 other Durham voters willing to vote PPC this time around, giving Patricia Conlin about 5.6% of the vote. I’ve generally been a Libertarian voter all these years … at least when there’s been a Libertarian candidate to vote for … but this time around as in 2019 the Libertarians didn’t have anyone running here, so voting PPC was my best option.

The more we watch NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh campaign, the more we think, “Toronto does have an awful lot of people who ought not to be especially eager to run headlong into stuff like wealth taxes and confiscatory rates on capital gains.” The New Democrats seem increasingly determined to cement their all-urban base among youths and convinced leftists with bolshie rhetoric. Are the resentful, hopeless millions they hope to add to these stagnant forces really out there? Was this an election result that reveals a populace disaffected with neoliberal capitalism — of a kind genuinely beset by rent-seeking, cronyism and corruption — and keen on revolutionary change?

Unfortunately, the very failure of the election to yield a different result probably means that every party can treat last night as a rehearsal rather than a test. NP Platformed‘s initial instinct, which we reserve the right to throw out, is that we’ll be back at it with the same cast of characters in another 700 days or so. Everyone failed: what else is there but to follow Beckett’s dictum? “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Other than Maxime Bernier, is there a federal party leader who can point to the results of this election and claim much more than a bare moral victory?

The Extremely Bizarre Engineering Rituals of Canada (And the Fascinating Way They Came to Be)

Filed under: Cancon, Education, History, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Today I Found Out
Published 31 Jul 2021

This video is #sponsored by NordVPN.

Sources:

Andrews, Gordon, Canadian Professional Engineering and Geoscience: Practice and Ethics, Thomson Nelson Canada Ltd, 2005

Kipling, Rudyard, “The Hymn of Breaking Strain”, 1935, http://www.cuug.ab.ca/~branderr/risk_…

2 Esdras 4:5-10, https://thekingjamesversionbible.com/…

Bateman, Chris, The Secrets of Engineering’s Strange and Mysterious Initiation Ritual, TVO, April 24, 2018, https://www.tvo.org/article/the-secre…

“Background: The Calling of an Engineer, The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer”, https://www.ironring.ca/background-en/

Anderson, Bill, “Why Engineering is Purple”, April 16, 2019, https://profbillanderson.com/2019/04/…

September 21, 2021

QotD: Canadian international virtue signalling is not a new thing

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[I]n January, after the tsunami hit, [Canadian prime minister Paul Martin] flew into Sri Lanka to pledge millions and millions and millions in aid. Not like that heartless George W. Bush back at the ranch in Texas. Why, Prime Minister Martin walked along the ravaged coast of Kalumnai and was, reported Canada’s CTV network, “visibly shaken.” President Bush might well have been shaken, but he wasn’t visible, and in the international compassion league, that’s what counts. So Martin boldly committed Canada to giving $425 million to tsunami relief. “Mr. Paul Martin Has Set A Great Example For The Rest Of The World Leaders!” raved the LankaWeb news service.

You know how much of that $425 million has been spent so far? Fifty thousand dollars — Canadian. That’s about 40 grand in U.S. dollars. The rest isn’t tied up in [Sri Lankan] bureaucracy, it’s back in Ottawa. But, unlike horrible “unilateralist” America, Canada enjoys a reputation as the perfect global citizen, renowned for its commitment to the U.N. and multilateralism. And on the beaches of Sri Lanka, that and a buck’ll get you a strawberry daiquiri. Canada’s contribution to tsunami relief is objectively useless and rhetorically fraudulent.

Mark Steyn, “Bolton’s sin is telling truth about system”, Chicago Sun-Times, 2005-05-15.

September 20, 2021

Canada was given advance notice of the AUKUS deal … about five minutes notice

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When the news broke about a new western alliance involving Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, the official line — belatedly — was that our allies had kept Canadian officials “in the loop”, about the negotiations. Now that everyone’s attention is on the vote-counting, it can be safely acknowledged that the Canadian government got a heads-up just a few minutes before the formal announcement, as Ted Campbell discusses:

US President Joe Biden with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (onscreen) during the AUKUS announcement.
Image from businesstelegraph.co.uk.

So, Steven Chase and Robert Fife say, in the Globe and Mail, that “The Canadian government was surprised this week by the announcement of a new security pact between the United States, Britain and Australia, one that excluded Canada and is aimed at confronting China’s growing military and political influence in the Indo-Pacific region, according to senior government officials [and] Three officials, representing Canada’s foreign affairs, intelligence and defence departments, told The Globe and Mail that Ottawa was not consulted about the pact, and had no idea the trilateral security announcement was coming until it was made on Wednesday by U.S. President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.”

Not only did our oldest and closest friends and allies kick Canada out of the “inner circle”, they didn’t even bother to tell us that the political and diplomatic kick in the arse was coming, although, the Globe journalists say, the Australian and British defence ministers gave Harjit Sajjan a brief “heads up” just minutes before the announcement. Mr Sajjan’s spokesman said that Canada “had been kept in the loop”, I call BS.

Vice Admiral Mark Norman, someone who knows a lot about what happens at the highest echelons of government in Ottawa said that “if Mr. Trudeau was fully briefed” [on this new AUKUS pact, then] “he doesn’t understand what is going on internationally and he doesn’t understand what the significance of an arrangement like this is as it relates to international security.” I don’t think he had heard a word about this until Minister Sajjan’s senior aids called the PCO and PMO on Wednesday afternoon.

One can easily imagine the conversations on Wednesday and Thursday in some of the corridors of power in Ottawa: “ Biden us!” said one senior official. “No,” said another, even more senior, “this has been coming for a long time. It’s a shock, but it really shouldn’t be a surprise.” “They screwed us,” said a third, “we’ve done nothing to deserve this. It’s just because we aren’t spending as much as Biden and Morrison want on the military and it’s because we’re not sending more ships to Asia, more often.” “No,” the second person said, “it’s because we decided, all of us, you and me, too, to not do whatever it took to arrest the changes in our national strategic outlook.” “How can you say that?” the first speaker said, “We all protested, I wrote a long brief explaining why we needed to step up …” “We’re still here,” the more senior official said. “We didn’t resign and go public as soon as we saw how things were shaping up. Almost no one did.” “No one listens when senior officials or admirals or generals resign,” said the third official, “it wouldn’t have done any good.” “You’re right,” the most senior official answered, “resignations are, normally, not news and they rarely change politicians’ minds … not, anyway, when they’re done one at a time. Back in 2016, when many us started to see, clearly, how things were going we should have resigned en masse ~ and not just we three, but dozens of us from PCO, from Foreign Affairs and from DND and the military. If the senior public service had rebelled, as it should when the government makes destructive policy choice against our advice, then there would have been enormous, even irresistible political pressure. But we didn’t, did we? We all stayed on and wrote a couple of arse-covering briefing notes and went about our business. We are as much to blame for this as are those dimwits in Trudeau’s cabinet and inner circle. We failed Canada.”

Vice Admiral Norman, the article explains, “said the agreement goes far beyond access to U.S. submarine technology [which is Mr Trudeau’s lame excuse for why Canada was kicked out of the inner circle] This is about accessing both current and emerging technologies, from cyber and artificial intelligence, to acoustics and underwater warfare – a whole range of very important strategic capabilities.” Further, “Mr. Norman said Canada has many national interests in the Indo-Pacific – including trade, promoting the rule of law and democracy, and countering China’s aggressive behaviour and posturing – but he suspects close allies do not take Canadian defence commitments seriously [and he added] I don’t think our allies think we are serious when it comes to defence. I think they have concerns not just about our defence expenditures, but also the extent to which our [international] commitments are both lasting and meaningful.” This has been evident since 2015. Justin Trudeau effectively campaigned on doing less in the world. Everyone knew this was coming ~ especially those who voted for the Liberal Party … it is what they wanted. It’s what Canada got.

September 19, 2021

Erin O’Toole suddenly scrambling to try to win back votes from Maxime Bernier’s PPC

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

John Paul Tasker reports for the CBC on Conservative leader Erin O’Toole’s last minute appeal to wavering supporters (that is, people who would prefer actual conservative or even libertarian policies to what O’Toole’s “Conservatives” have on offer):

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said today that conservative-minded voters sick of the Liberal government should park their votes with the Tories rather than turn to the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) in this election.

Speaking to reporters at a campaign stop in London, Ont., O’Toole said his party is the only one in a position to replace the Liberal government and a right-wing vote split could lead to four more years of Justin Trudeau.

“There are actually millions of Canadians who are very frustrated with Mr. Trudeau. If they allow that frustration to do anything other than vote Conservative, they’re voting for Mr. Trudeau,” O’Toole said.

“There are five parties and there are two choices. More of the same with Mr. Trudeau or real change and ethical government with Canada’s Conservatives.”

O’Toole said Trudeau wants Conservative voters to “vote for smaller parties” rather than unify behind O’Toole’s candidacy.

CBC’s poll tracker has the PPC at 6.2% support, which is nearly four times what it was in the last election. Other trackers have the PPC at least a few points more than that, and it might be noteworthy that PPC-leaning voters are probably not be as interested in sharing their preferences with pollsters as supporters of more left-wing parties like the Liberals and Conservatives.

After the last election campaign, a CBC News analysis showed that — even with its rather dismal level of support — the PPC likely cost the Conservatives seven seats in the House of Commons by splitting the vote (six seats went to the Liberals, one to the NDP).

With polls suggesting PPC support is now well above its 2019 level, the party’s impact could be even greater in 2021.

While polls suggest some PPC support is coming from first-time or infrequent voters, there’s no question the PPC is drawing at least some support from former Conservative voters.

[…]

“The Conservative Party is not conservative anymore,” Bernier said today in response to a question about O’Toole’s warnings about a vote split.

“O’Toole has flip-flopped and adopted the Liberal program on the few remaining issues where there were still difference between the two parties, such as the carbon tax, gun bans and COVID passports,” Bernier said in an emailed statement. “Mr. O’Toole will have to live with the consequences of his failing strategy.”

Some of Bernier’s recent momentum is driven by his opposition to pandemic measures. The PPC leader has slammed the proposed federal vaccine mandate as a “draconian” and “immoral” measure.

A communist-party-connected publisher reprinted Justin Trudeau’s 2014 book Common Ground

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

Aha! I thought … yet more scandal! This time with direct pay-offs to Trudeau from his Beijing paymasters! Sadly, for the conspiracy minded among us, it’s not much more significant or scandalous than Barack Obama’s endorsement of Trudeau, as Kenneth Whyte explains:

… the Globe & Mail reported that Justin Trudeau’s 2014 memoir Common Ground was republished in a Chinese edition in 2016.

Doesn’t sound like much of a story, does it? Foreign editions of Canadian books are released all the time.

What’s different in this case, says the Globe, is that the Chinese publisher is Yilin Press of Nanjing, part of the state-owned enterprise Jiangsu Phoenix Publishing and Media, which “takes operational direction from the propaganda department of the Jiangsu provincial communist party committee.”

Why would a propaganda wing of the communist party make such a deal? The Globe quotes foreign policy experts who say that the republication of Trudeau’s book is “a classic ploy” by Beijing to flatter a foreign leader. “They are trying to do anything they can to encourage him to look positive on China and the Chinese state,” according to one of the experts.

Says another: “Clearly, by publishing his biography they wanted to please him. They are the masters of propaganda.”

What do the Chinese hope to get out of courting Trudeau? “Beijing had high hopes it could persuade Canada to sign a free-trade agreement and was seeking Canada’s help in its global campaign Operation Fox Hunt to track down people it called criminals, many of whom were Chinese dissidents,” writes the Globe.

The Globe also finds it notable that the Liberals, at the time, were trotting Trudeau out to private events at the homes of wealthy Chinese-Canadians. The PM would do a little dance and the money would flow:

    Chinese billionaire and Communist Party official Zhang Bin attended a May 19, 2016, fundraiser at the home of Benson Wong, chair of the Chinese Business Chamber of Canada. A few weeks later, Mr. Zhang and his business partner, Niu Gensheng, donated $200,000 to the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and $50,000 to erect a statue of Mr. Trudeau’s father.

So it all looks a bit unseemly.

I poked around and was reliably informed by someone in a position to know that Trudeau and his agent sold worldwide rights to Common Ground to HarperCollins Canada. That means it was up to HarperCollins to publish the book in Canada and also sell rights to its republication in as many foreign markets as possible. Trudeau would get a cut of revenues from those sales.

Except, as he further reveals, Trudeau had long since assigned any profits from the book to a charity, so he’s not being secretly bribed by copious amounts of money from the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda budget (at least, not in this case, hedging just a bit …).

Should the PM, or someone in his office, have asked questions about Yilin Press and its connections to the communist party? Maybe, but it’s not like there was a free-market alternative down the street from Yilin. Every publisher in China is accountable to the communist party in one way or another. To get an ISBN number in the Chinese market, you have to go through the state, not because the state provides the service, but because it monitors all publications. Si Limin, chairman of the China Book Publishing Industry Association, is the former director of the News and Newspapers Department of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television. And so on.

As for the trade deal the Chinese were supposedly eager for Trudeau to sign? It was more the other way around. In 2017, the Liberals tried to convince Beijing to adopt Trudeau-style progressivism in return for free-trade with Canada. They were laughed out of town. The Chinese couldn’t even be bothered to pretend an interest in human rights to get a deal signed.

I have all kinds of problems with the ethical standards of the Liberal party, Trudeau’s personal judgment, those cash for access meetings, and his Chinese policy, but there’s nothing much to see here.

September 17, 2021

Australia, the UK, and the US join in a military alliance … Canada of course is nowhere in sight

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, China, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

News broke the other day about a new three-nation military arrangement clearly aimed at containing Chinese ambitions in the Pacific, involving Australia, Britain, and the United States, to be known as AUKUS (or AUUKUS, depending on the reporting source). These three countries are already tightly linked in the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing network which also includes Canada and New Zealand. As more than one wit noted on Twitter after the announcement, it’s a good thing Canada doesn’t have a Pacific coast or any economic interests in that ocean…

Ted Campbell, who recently emerged from a blogging hiatus to comment on the ongoing federal election, felt this new pact cemented the idea that Canada is “no longer a serious country” in military terms:

It is now abundantly clear that the USA, inter alia, puts Justin Trudeau’s Canada in the same league as (anti-nuclear) New Zealand. Canada is no longer one of the most trusted allies … Australia is; Britain is: India is; Japan is … Canada is NOT.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has, in six short years, moved Canada from one of America’s best friends to, de facto, a Chinese puppet state. He has done this with his own (and his many advisors’) eyes wide open. Canada, Justin Trudeau’s Canada is no longer a serious nation … perhaps we don’t really deserve to be. After all, we (almost 40% of the almost 70% who bothered to vote at all) elected him … then we did it again. Maybe the world is just concluding that we are not serious people who can be relied upon when the going gets tough.

He followed this up with a bit more concern on the sinking Canadian international profile:

Just take a look at those technologies ~ AI, quantum computing, cyber warfare ~ those are all areas vital to Canada’s security and prosperity and what are we focused on? Climate change and Québec’s latest attempts to make Canada into an illiberal state. China spews out more carbon in a week than Canada does in a year. China is aiming to displace America as the global guarantor of peace, security and trade. Do any of the dimwits in the Liberal government understand that? Why in hell is Prime Minister Trudeau attacking Alberta’s (relatively clean) oil industry rather than, for example, concentrating on making Canadian nuclear energy work for us?

A few days ago I said that Canada needs nuclear powered submarines to assert and protect our sovereignty in the waters we claim as our own. No one contradicted me. No one ever raises any serious, well-founded objections to nuclear submarines for Canada. It’s a no brainer. But, look at the last line in the quote above. Who is getting nuclear submarines? Australia … because it is a serious country with adult political leadership.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s regime has sidelines Canada. Our strongest, most traditional allies have abandoned us. We have been sold out … to China.

I use that term “sold out”, intentionally. I do NOT believe that Justin Trudeau is a traitor … for heaven’s sake, he’s not smart enough to betray anything. He’s barely able to memorize his lines. But a lot of people have invested a lot in China ~ the Desmarais family (of Power Corporation fame) and former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Bob Rae, Canada’s Ambassador to the UN, for example, are all closely tied together and even more closely tied to the Canada-China trade file. I assert that the “China lobby” in Canada is very, very powerful, very, very rich and extraordinarily well connected to Canada’s political leadership ~ Liberal and Conservative, alike. I further assert that it, not Justin Trudeau and Marc Garneau and the mandarins in Ottawa, drives Canada’s foreign, trade and fiscal policies. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is NOT a traitor … but he is puppet and people whose vital interests are centred on China, not Canada, pull the strings.

Why is Canada excluded from the AUKUS pact?

One reason Canada isn’t involved is certainly the distraction of the federal election, and there would have been no way that Justin Trudeau would have wanted to answer questions on the campaign trail about anything geostrategic or military, and he especially doesn’t want Canadians looking closely at his servile deference to the Chinese government. Of course, given that he’s literally bribed the major newspaper chains and TV networks with “subsidies” right before the election was called, he might well have been safe from any hint of an awkward question from his unofficial PR branches in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Over at the Thin Pinstriped Line, Sir Humphrey looks at the military and technical implications of the new alliance:

The Royal Australian Navy is likely to become the next nation to join the nuclear submarine operators club. This is the key headline emerging from the surprise tri-lateral announcement on Wed 15 September by the Prime Ministers of Australia and the UK, and the President of the United States.

The move, forming a new “three eyes” club known as AUKUS is a genuinely significant development intended to provide a significant uplift in capability in the Indo-Pacific region. For the first time in nearly 70 years, the US has agreed to share some of its most sensitive technology with a third party, to help Australia become a “naval power underway on nuclear power”.

There are several ramifications of this decision, that will be felt for many years to come. The first is that from an American perspective, this is a good opportunity to take steps to increase burden sharing in the Pacific.

[…]

From a wider diplomatic perspective, there are three distinct groupings to consider. Firstly, the remaining 5-EYES members (Canada and New Zealand). Its unlikely that this will do much damage to 5-EYES – for example New Zealand would never have been approached as the acquisition of a nuclear submarine would be vastly beyond the budget, or needs, of the small but incredibly professional Royal New Zealand Navy.

Canada may be feeling slightly raw about this – particularly those with long memories who recall the 1980s and the doomed plan to acquire nuclear submarines for the RCN. But who knows, in terms of timelines these vessels may be entering service in the same timeframe as Canada seeks to replace the Upholder/Victoria class – it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they may seek to join in later on.

Given 5-EYES is more than just an Indo-Pacific focus, it would be wrong to read much into this as a statement on the future of that Alliance. Rather it is better to see this as a subgrouping of a very successful international alliance.

HMCS Victoria
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

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