Quotulatiousness

September 22, 2021

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.

September 16, 2021

Who is the typical PPC supporter?

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney grapples with inadequate polling data to determine what the “average” supporter of Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada believes and who they are compared to typical Canadians:

Poll after poll has shown that the People’s Party of Canada, led by former Conservative Maxime Bernier, is surging in popular support. The party, which captured only 1.6 per cent of the vote in 2019, electing zero candidates, is now polling at closer to five or six per cent, or higher. These gains have not come at any obvious loss to any major party (the hapless Green party may be an exception, but there were only so many Green voters in the first place). While there is no doubt that some voters are bolting to the PPC from traditional parties, it seems certain — and polling suggests — that they are also drawing support from the nine million Canadians who were eligible to vote in 2019 but did not.

This is, to put it very mildly, worth watching. In a recent column here, drawing on polling information provided by John Wright, the executive vice president of Maru Public Opinion, we tried to establish what we could about a PPC supporter. They are not particularly remarkable; as noted last week, a typical PPC voter is a typical Canadian. They are fairly evenly distributed across all demographic segments and found in generally similar numbers in the various provinces. The earlier numbers were based on a fairly small sample size — the PPC’s low support on a national level has limited their numbers in any typical national-level poll. Last week, I said that more polling was necessary, to firm up the profile of who a PPC voter is and where they live. Wright has been doing that polling — the sample sizes are still modest, but a representative profile is beginning to emerge … not just of who a PPC voter is, but what they believe.

There is a degree of background context that must be established before we can move onto the numbers. When he presented me with his latest results on Tuesday, Wright noted that polling PPC voters is a particular challenge for his industry. The very concept of “the typical PPC voter” is rapidly shifting. The PPC base of even five weeks ago was a small fringe of grumpy people loosely assembled around a handful of vaguely libertarian policies, some anti-immigration blather and a disillusionment with the political status quo. (A typical PPC billboard encapsulates this unfocused dissatisfaction: “The Other Options Suck.”) Many polling companies track the attitudes of partisans of various affiliations by creating a panel of those partisans and then polling them over and over. Polling companies trying to track the PPC’s sudden rise, if they rely on such an identified panel of PPC voters that will be repeatedly surveyed, are capturing the PPC as it existed before the mid-August influx of new supporters. This is undoubtedly skewing our understanding of what the PPC voter, as they exist right now, believes. Wright has done four waves of polling in the last 10 days to update, as best as possible, our understanding of what the PPC voter believes today. He will continue to poll several times a week for the foreseeable future.

As to that August surge, as discussed in my column here last week, the best way to explain it is to look for something that recently changed — and something has: there are millions of Canadians who are adamantly anti-vax and anti-vaccine mandate/passport. The PPC surge began at the precise moment that vaccine mandates became a major issue in the federal campaign, and provinces began discussing their plans for certificates to verify vaccination status for domestic purposes. Pollsters needed a few weeks to notice the surge and verify it was real.

[…]

Roughly a third of Canadians (35 per cent) agree that the government is stripping away personal liberties; with Conservative and Green voters answering in the affirmative more often than NDP and Liberals. By comparison, 89 per cent of PPC voters believe the government is stripping away their liberty. Almost 90 per cent of PPC voters further agree that their governments are creating “tyranny” over the population. To put that in context, only about 40 per cent of Conservatives feel that way, with the other major parties way behind.

Oh, and here’s a cheerful one to chew over: Wright asked Canadians if they’d agree that “we are on the verge of a revolution in our society to take our freedom back from governments who are limiting it.” That question received 32 per cent support nationally — but an incredible 84 per cent from PPC supporters.

This sounds like the kind of thing we maybe ought to be paying attention to, eh?

I find it fascinating that the PPC appears to be motivating lots of people who haven’t been interested in voting by providing an option for them that isn’t just a red or blue coloured version of pretty much exactly the same policies and goals. I don’t expect the PPC to “break through” in this election, but if they can continue drawing the interest of those Canadians who feel disenfranchised by the Liberals and Conservatives, they can be a significant force for change in our political future.

September 14, 2021

The Line‘s She-lection Bullshit Bulletin No. 4 … don’t bother questioning the timing

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

The latest installment of The Line‘s campaign bullshit tracker looks at the attempts by Liberal partisans to gin up some faux outrage over the timing of former Trudeau cabinet minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s tell-all book:

First of all, we would like to specifically invite our Conservative and Liberal friends to take a few deep calming breaths and settle the fuck down about Jody Wilson-Raybould’s forthcoming book, Indian in the Cabinet, which will be out on Tuesday — but was splashed early in the Globe and Mail. The book will recount, among other things, JWR’s memories of the SNC-Lavalin scandal. The excerpt the Globe ran certainly doesn’t paint Justin Trudeau in a particularly flattering light.

But it doesn’t matter.

Seriously, our Conservative friends need to rein it in. The SNC-Lavalin affair was an example of the Liberals at their very worst; so utterly self-assured and self-righteous that any ethical or normative breach can be justified to themselves so completely that they’re genuinely shocked and offended that not everyone else buys the official story. However, alas, there’s no remaining life in this scandal. The very best-case scenario for the Conservatives is that the topic bubbling up again reminds some voters that they don’t love Trudeau, and why. But any big damage this was gonna do to Brand JT, it did literally years ago, and before the last election campaign. There are no remaining undecided voters who’ll swing based on a new book that dishes on a pre-COVID scandal.

But now to our Liberal friends, good Lord, people, chill out. We’ve seen quite a few of you, including some who ought to know better, muttering darkly about the “timing” of JWR’s book, landing as it is right before the election.

The book was announced in March, people. We all knew it was coming — so did the Liberals when they called the election. Was the book’s publication timed for maximum impact? Well, no shit Sherlocks. What, was JWR obligated to delay out of deference to the guy who kicked her out of caucus for defying him? Here’s some sage wisdom for the Libs out there: if you make enemies in politics, those enemies will eventually try to fuck you. It’s real deep stuff, we know. You’re welcome.

Meanwhile, JWR is selling books. This is what book selling is: her publisher accelerated the book’s publication date by a few weeks to land when it would have maximum public interest, and the greatest potential for earned media. JWR gets to stick it it to JT and maximize her sales before hitting the speaking circuit, where the real bucks get made.

Also, so what?

Stop gargling your own bathwater, people. We’ll read the book when it’s out, but it won’t swing the election.

September 13, 2021

“Only the most fanatical Justin Trudeau partisans will begrudge Jody Wilson-Raybould for her moment of revenge”

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

Howard Anglin responds to an early excerpt from former Trudeau cabinet minister Jody Wilson-Raybould:

Jody Wilson-Raybould, 30 January, 2014.
Photo by Erich Saide via Wikimedia Commons.

Reading the first excerpt of her book, I did find myself occasionally cocking an eyebrow at the portrayal of a wide-eyed innocent who somehow awoke to find herself in a den of partisan thieves.

It was, after all, the Liberal Party she had joined — the most ruthless and successful vote-winning machine in Western politics this side of Mexico’s PRI — not the parish altar guild.

But setting aside questions of systemic hypocrisy and looking only at the SNC-Lavalin imbroglio, it is as clear today as it was in 2019 that Wilson-Raybould was right and Trudeau was wrong.

She was right as attorney general to rebuff political pressure to offer SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement — a slap on the wrist that would have seen the engineering and construction company avoid criminal conviction and remain eligible for more federal contracts — and Trudeau and his office were wrong to pressure her to consider it.

Now, she is fully justified in reminding us of that fact. And if the book’s self-righteousness message is belied by the calculated timing of its release, well, she has earned the right to say “I told you so” at the time of her choosing.

As far as the election goes, the most important revelations are about Trudeau’s character.

To constitutional law nerds like me, however, the highlight is Wilson-Raybould’s disagreement with the prime minister over the role of the Attorney Genereal, including her description of a freshly briefed Trudeau expatiating scholastically on the nuances of the Shawcross doctrine before she drily punctures his condescension with the comment: “You have been talking to a lawyer.”

Coming from someone who was until a few weeks earlier “his” lawyer, at least in his capacity as head of government, the comment is doubly ironic.

Wilson-Raybould had, by her account, explained the doctrine and its implications at length to Trudeau, as well as to his principal secretary, Gerry Butts, and the Clerk, neither of whom is a lawyer but both of whom were nevertheless dispatched to try to explain their version of it to her and her lawyer chief of staff.

September 11, 2021

Thursday’s debate was “a grand Kabuki theatre, increasingly divorced from any grounded reality about our fiscal situation, or our ability to deliver on complex programs or problems”

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson offers her observations of the debate on Thursday night among most of the federal party leaders — missing, of course, the participation of the PPC’s Maxime Bernier who was pointedly not invited:

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

No one can be said to have “won” such an exercise. You “win” these “debates” not by proposing the best policies, or offering competing philosophies, or even by presenting the best rhetoric. Rather, a “winner” is determined by who comes off the best to a general public that largely doesn’t follow the minute differences of respective platforms.

By that measure, no one really won Thursday’s debate, but Trudeau especially did not win it. I imagine that one of the problems of being raised as a spectacle of wealth, privilege and popularity is that it doesn’t quite prepare you for the moment when the worm turns, when people learn to dislike you for all the right reasons; when you are no longer given the proper deference and respect you feel is owed to you.

Trudeau came off as defensive, and flustered, taking hit after hit from other party leaders on topics ranging from his record, reconciliation and, especially, his self-interested decision to call a party in the first place. That he lacks a credible answer to why we’re holding this election at all three weeks into this campaign is a deep failure, one large and deep enough to consume his prospects of forming a majority government — and his hold on the party leadership along with it.

Annamie Paul offered the best performance of the night by far, and demonstrated that the Green party as a whole is unworthy of her. Whatever private internal dramas that may be unfolding, in public that party condemns itself to obscurity by refusing to get behind a woman who is, by every measure, impressive.

Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet made himself into an idealized avatar of a whiny and aggrieved Quebec nationalism that puts Alberta to shame. It takes a real special lack of self-awareness to imagine that Quebecers have had it rougher in this country than Indigenous people. Or that Blanchet, by virtue of his French ancestry, has suffered from greater oppression than, say, Annamie Paul. One day, the rest of Canada is going to stop humouring these insulated, thin-skinned delusions — but not before Quebec’s seat count declines relative to the rest of the population’s. In the meantime, Blanchet’s ability to beam pure DGAF energy into the English debates at least made him seem like a human, albeit a delusional and unpleasant one.

By this measure, Erin O’Toole “won” the debate by not losing it. I can’t remember a single thing he actually said, and in such a setting this can only work to his favour.

I mean, what is there to say? On actual substantive policy issues, I couldn’t escape the sense of watching a grand Kabuki theatre, increasingly divorced from any grounded reality about our fiscal situation, or our ability to deliver on complex programs or problems.

September 10, 2021

By Gandhi’s reckoning, the PPC is entering stage three (“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, …”)

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney says that the dying media will have to start taking Maxime Bernier and the PPC much more seriously if the recent “blips” in the polls turn out to be accurate:

To riff off the old song, there’s something happening here, though what it is ain’t exactly clear. Like it or not, we’re going to have to start paying attention to the People’s Party of Canada and its leader, Maxime Bernier. If polls are to be believed, they’re having a great election.

The PPC hasn’t warranted much attention before. It has largely served as a vanity vehicle for Bernier, who probably can’t believe he’s been able to keep himself out of an ordinary job this long. The party is a mixture of populist outreach and pie-in-the-sky pseudo-libertarianism. It has proposed a smattering of policies, but none of them are much more than a talking point or meme. They are often summed up as a “far-right” party — or at least further right than the Conservative Party of Canada — but it feels overly generous to place them firmly anywhere in particular on the political spectrum. Their organizing principle has seemed to be anger with the status quo, and a feeling of alienation from the majority consensus on most political views.

The PPC took just under 300,000 votes in the 2019 election, or 1.6 per cent of ballots cast. It was a rounding error on a fringe, and seemed set to stay that way. This, combined with a history of dogwhistle racism, is why journalists and political analysts paid it little attention (and that includes yours truly).

Something seems to be happening, though. The party has climbed in the polls, with some showing they’ve climbed by a lot. There are important caveats: Some of this can be written off as within-the-margins-of-error blips in the numbers. Perhaps there is some methodological quirk that is causing polling companies to overestimate the PPC’s standing. Maybe frustrated people are parking their vote there for a time but will come back to one of the traditional parties when actually making their x on a ballot.

So yeah. There’s all kinds of ways to rationalize this into a nothingburger, if you’re so inclined, but the fact remains there is a trend, consistent across different polls, from different companies, and over an extended period of time. It really does seem as though the party is set to double, triple or maybe even quadruple its support, relative to the last election. The latest Ekos poll has them at nine per cent. That’s an outlier on the high side, but if they came even close to that, the PPC would eclipse the Green Party of Canada’s best-ever showing. By a lot.

My friend John Wright is a pollster with decades of experience, and the executive vice president at Maru Public Opinion. He called me this weekend to tell me that something was up with the PPC’s numbers — I’d already realized the same, at least on an intuitive level, but he had the numbers to back it up. His numbers are broadly similar to what’s showing up in other polls. I asked him what he could tell me about the typical PPC voter, and he said there isn’t a ton of information about them, but pulled what data he could find.

The typical PPC supporter, based on polls as recent as last month, is … pretty normal, actually, at least demographically. They are fairly evenly distributed across every segment of Canadian society. No province has a wildly high or low number of PPC supporters (Alberta was a bit higher than the others, but only a very small bit, and with an overall small sample size). They are found fairly consistently across all age groups and economic and educational classes. The only really notable divergence in Wright’s numbers was on gender lines — men are twice as likely to support the PPC as women.

September 8, 2021

The Line‘s She-lection Bullshit Bulletin No. 3 … scary black fully semi-automatic assault machinegun edition

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

The folks at The Line continue their good work in pointing out some of the bullshittiest bullshit the politicians spew on the campaign trail. This week has been all about politicians promising to crack down even harder on the hunters and sport shooters who keep driving their pickup trucks (plastered with Trump bumper stickers, of course) into downtown Toronto to shoot their scary black fully semi-automatic AK-15 or AR-47 assault machineguns with chainsaw bayonets at innocent gang-bangers at 3 in the morning:

It is hard to know where to even begin picking through the bullshit that Canadians have had dumped atop their heads this week on the gun-control file. Both the Liberals and Conservatives hurled their share, but the worst offenders were by far the incumbents who claimed to ban “military-style assault weapons”.

Let’s start with this: Canadian law categorizes guns into three categories depending on their technical specifications: length, ammunition calibre, mode of operation, and the like. The categories are licensed and regulated differently. It can get pretty complicated. Despite their near-constant use, the terms “assault rifle”, “assault weapon” or the even-scarier sounding “military style assault weapon/rifle” have no specific or universally recognized meaning, including under Canadian law and firearms regulations. They aren’t part of or used by the categorization system.

This is essential to understand: because the terms have no specific and universally held meaning, these campaign-ready phrases can be appended to pretty much any type of rifle, whatever its actual legal category under our law. And that’s how we all found ourselves aspirating bullshit this week.

Most gun experts would generally classify an assault rifle/weapon as a rifle that fires medium-powered (or higher) ammunition and is capable of a “full auto” mode — that is, the weapon will continue firing as long as the trigger is held down. This results in a rapid volley of bullets at a cost of diminished accuracy (the recoil makes the firearm difficult to hold on target). These firearms typically have their ammunition kept in detachable magazines of 20 or 30 rounds each. When a magazine is emptied, it can be replaced by a practiced user in moments.

These sorts of weapons have been banned in Canada since the 1970s.

In 2020, the Liberals used an executive order — an Order in Council — to change the classification of several broad categories of until-then legal rifles, with the effect of preventing sales and further restricting most lawful uses for owners. None of these firearms were assault rifles/weapons by any reasonable standard. All are capable of semi-auto operation only, meaning one round is fired for each pull of the trigger. Under Canadian law, the magazines are limited to five rounds (there are some rare exceptions but five is the law).

Sigh. Still with us?

So the Liberals chose firearms linked to tragic events in Canada or abroad, like the AR-15, deemed these “assault weapons” and then banned them. But there was nothing meaningful or rational about this ban; it was was entirely a matter of political messaging. Numerous other rifles — firing the exact same ammunition from the exact same size of magazine at the exact same semi-automatic pace — remain legal and for sale to any licensed would-be purchaser. This isn’t an oversight. It’s just that the Liberals’ political goals were met by simply banning rifles linked to tragedies and ignoring the rest.

That’s the key thing to understand about what the Liberals did — it was always bullshit policy. But it sounds good to Canadian voters who don’t know fuck-all about guns. In that way, it’s meeting the Liberals’ needs.

Conservative leader Erin O’Toole quickly abandoned his party’s pledge to revoke the Liberals’ 2020 order-in-council once someone noticed and called attention to it. This should not be a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to O’Toole in the past … he’s what we used to call a “Red Tory” — really just a Liberal wearing a blue suit.

September 5, 2021

The official science advisors themselves are making it much harder to “trust the science”

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

In the very last “Weekly Dispatch” from The Line that I’ll be able to read and share (because those posts are going behind the paywall from next week onward), the difficulty in “trusting the science” is made very clear indeed:

A friend of The Line who lives in Ontario sent us a delightfully snippy little text this week attached to the Ontario Science Table’s latest COVID-19 modelling efforts.

“Do you have any idea what would happen if I walked into a meeting with a range from 500-9000, and expected people to take me seriously?” she wrote. “I want to believe you scientists, but you are making it impossible to have any faith in your work.”

She’s right. A range this wide is both useless and unfalsifiable. No government can look at this graph and decide what the best course of action ought to be, and no individual can look at this data and make reasonable decisions about how to go about his or her life. If you want to see catastrophic health-care collapse, it’s there at the top end, and if you want to see “pandemic is over” signal, it’s there near the bottom.

The Science Table might as well just put a giant ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ on the x/y axis and call it in. These guys have no goddamn clue what is going to happen, and they’d be better off just admitting as much.

The Public Health Agency of Canada’s modelling was equally pointless. It’s predicting another literal off-the-chart case spike by October; 15,000 cases per day, which is almost a third higher than the peak daily case rate of the second wave. Somehow, this will happen despite the fact that more than 70 per cent of the eligible population is now fully vaccinated.

We at The Line are looking forward to October. The fall will bring with crunchy leaves, warm lattes, and the ability to compare these models to reality; but in the meantime, we have to ask, what the hell is the purpose of these things?

If public-health types are trying to scare people into getting vaccinated and maintaining distance, we’re sorry to break this to you, but that’s not going to work anymore. Those who can be scared into changing their behaviour have done so already. And those who refuse to be scared are going to look at another set of unfalsifiable modelling predictions and roll their eyes.

We cannot say this enough: COVID-19 is now an endemic disease. We’re stuck with it. It’s not going away. We are going to experience another wave of cases. Hospitalizations and ICU admissions will rise. Our mortality rate will also increase — although these latter metrics will rise at nowhere near the rate as previous waves thanks to vaccines. Delta will pass. Then another variant will pop up. And another after that. We can’t let ourselves be trapped on a Ferris wheel of restrictions and easing every time case numbers go up and down for a disease that may be with us for years. Eventually, we have to make our peace with the suck, return to some semblance of normal, and figure out how to live our lives in a sustainable and healthy way — albeit with this new way to get sick and die in them.

We have an 83 per cent first-dose vaccination rate among those who are eligible; vaccine mandates, passports, $100 gift cards, may, at best, add a few points to that total. We have reached the point where we are grasping at increasingly divisive policies to make ever more incremental gains — in short, the law of diminishing returns is beginning to kick in, as it always does. If our current vaccination, mortality, and hospitalization rates are is not good enough to call time on this pandemic then what, exactly, is the exit strategy? And just from a pure communications perspective, how does releasing another round of bonkers off-the-charts modelling serve that end?

September 3, 2021

“Watching our feminist prime minister uncomfortably defend and explain away decidedly unfeminist behaviour has become an evergreen moment for our nation”

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

The NP Platformed newsletter is in the hands of Kathryn Marshall while Colby Cosh is on vacation, and she offers yet another golden moment of hypocrisy on the part of Justin Trudeau:

Standing in the fenced-in corner of a backyard during a press conference this Tuesday, Justin Trudeau was cornered in more ways than one.

Faced with questions from the media as to why he was allowing an incumbent Liberal candidate who had been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment to run for his party, an exasperated Trudeau was once again faced with his hypocrisy when it comes to his feminist credentials.

Only the day before, Trudeau was touting the Liberals “zero-tolerance” policy for sexual harassment. Of course, that was in the context of a Conservative candidate who had been accused of sexual misconduct. Notably, that candidate was very swiftly given the boot by leader Erin O’Toole, which was the correct response.

Now Trudeau finds himself in the exact same position that the Conservative leader was in. Following a CBC report, it has come to light that one of the Liberal candidates, two-term MP Raj Saini, has been the subject of numerous sexual harassment allegations from a number of staff going all the way back to 2015. I have no idea if these allegations are true, but they are deeply disturbing and should be taken seriously. As reported by the CBC, there are seven different sources who “described four different cases where Saini allegedly made unwanted sexual advances or inappropriate comments.” One of the allegations involves a former staff member who filed a human rights complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and tried to end her own life.

It should be a ludicrously easy call for Trudeau. The Liberal party has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment, right? Obviously, Saini needs to go and an individual who is facing allegations of this nature is in no position to be running for public office, period.

Except for one small hiccup. The allegations have come to public light after the candidate cut-off date for the election, which was Monday. So if Trudeau gets rid of Saini, it means they can’t replace him with someone else, and the result is no Liberal candidate on the ballot in a safe Liberal seat. Call me cynical, but if I had to guess, I would say this likely has something to do with the fact that overnight, the Liberal’s “zero-tolerance” policy appears to have evaporated into thin air.

August 31, 2021

Spy Affair that Started the Cold War

Filed under: Cancon, History, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Cold War
Published 3 Aug 2019

Our series on the history of the Cold War period continues with a documentary on Gouzenko affair — a spy thriller that provoked the beginning of the Cold War.

Consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thecoldwar

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