Quotulatiousness

August 31, 2021

The Line‘s She-lection Bullshit Bulletin No. 2

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

Yes, it’s time to publish some of the silliest political bullshit our “leaders” and their parties are slinging around in the federal “she-lection”:

Let’s start with an interesting one.

We’d recommend watching the whole clip (and we’d also note that there’s a second video clip further down in the thread; technical limitations broke one long clip into two shorter ones). But there’s two piles of dung here, and it’s worth breaking them out separately.

The first is, of course, the patented non-answer to a direct question. Glen McGregor asked Trudeau about our people in Afghanistan who were in that very moment in immediate danger. Trudeau talked about something nice he did in 2015. We understand that this is a campaign, but imagine you or someone you love is stuck Afghanistan in now, and the leader of the country is asked about you/them, and that’s the answer? Really?

The second pile of scat is more nuanced. Check out the part of the clip starting at 1:25. Trudeau says that O’Toole and the Conservatives are “promising to end the very program that brought in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, the very program we’re using to bring in tens of thousands of Afghans fleeing to [safety] in Canada. That doesn’t make sense.”

Well, we mean … it doesn’t make sense because it’s not true.

The Tories are proposing changes to how Canada accepts refugees. Specifically, they want to shift to more heavily rely on privately sponsored refugees, citing research that shows these refugees more easily and more quickly settle into Canada. There would be both government-sponsored and private-sponsored refugees under what the CPC is calling a “joint model” model. This is broken out in the CPC’s campaign platform on page 129.

This seems … pretty reasonable? The Tories are not only promising to maintain current funding levels and numbers of accepted refugees, they just want to structure it differently. Not even very differently, at that: of the 62,000 Syrian refugees that Canada has resettled since Trudeau came to office, half were privately sponsored. The CPC platform also very specifically notes that this wouldn’t apply in “cases of emergency”, which the fall of Afghanistan clearly is. You can criticize that as policy, or even doubt they’ll follow through. Just saying they’ll cancel the program, though, is nonsense.

Of course, Trudeau isn’t the only bullshitter on the campaign trail, so RTWT for the rest of the antics that The Line felt were bullshitty enough to register this week.

August 29, 2021

Justin Trudeau discovers for himself the truth of Harold Macmillan’s dictum on the most difficult thing about being Prime Minister

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

Former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked what was the most difficult thing about his job and is reported to have said, “Events, my dear boy, events.” Justin Trudeau had everything he wanted in the Canadian political situation in early August so he put his early election plans into action … and along came those unpredictable events:

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

What would have happened in the election of 2021 if Afghanistan hadn’t fallen? If the writ had been drawn up just a few weeks before, or a few weeks after August 15, the day Kabul fell to the Taliban?

This is the sort of question political science nerds will debate over weak beer for decades to come. It’s no great mystery why the Liberals went forward with the election even as armed fighters began to stream into the capital city of a country in which Canadians have sacrificed so much time, blood and treasure.

But I can picture the scene in the war room now and the logic is inescapable. The meeting with the governor general had been set, the news leaked, the campaign messaging laid out, the suits pressed and the planes booked. Besides, as we all know: “nobody cares about foreign affairs.” That old cant, repeated, like a charm.

Most of the time, it’s true.

Canadians hadn’t thought about Afghanistan for a decade. We’d all stopped paying any mind to some poor nation on the dark side of the world, that disputed chunk of mountain and desert besieged by misery and war since the time of Alexander the Great.

Nobody cares about such things. Until they do.

And what’s the difference between a foreign affair that we care about, and one that we do not? The answer is not flattering. We are selfish and solipsistic creatures. We care about current events abroad when what’s happening has some connection to ourselves or our interests — or when the news reflects something about ourselves.

I would not be the first pundit to point out the parallel between the fall of Kabul and the death of Alan Kurdi, the three-year old Syrian refugee boy whose body washed ashore after drowning in the Mediterranean Sea in September of 2015, in the midst of the federal election that brought Justin Trudeau to power. That child’s doll-like body, face-down on a beach, destroyed us, and the tragedy was made more pointed with the discovery that his family had been trying to reach Canada. And that his asylum application had been rejected by officials in Stephen Harper’s government.

In our own bureaucratic nightmare, and Harper’s dispassionate response, we saw reflected our own lack of compassion.

What we are confronting now in Kabul is our lack of competence.

August 28, 2021

Flagging enthusiasm

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

In Friday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh considers the suddenly politically relevant position of the Canadian flag:

The other day, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole made mention of the fact that the Canadian flag atop the Peace tower in Ottawa has been flying at half-staff for almost three months and that as prime minister he would put it back up — countermanding the specific order Justin Trudeau gave on May 30. O’Toole’s remark was a brief one dropped in at the end of a longer statement, but he did say we should be proud of our flag, which some people still think of as a Liberal contrivance, and he made the point that being proud of Canada goes hand in hand with wishing to improve it.

I saw this the other day and commented on social media that “I expect the Canadian dying media to be All. Over. This. — Conservative leader Erin O’Toole just called for the Canadian flag to be raised (they’ve been at half-staff officially since the end of May). If the media have their way, this will guarantee a huge majority government for their crush, Justin Trudeau.”

I admit, this was a bit glib, and not all the Canadian media are in the tank for Justin, but (as the old joke about lawyers had it) the 90% give the other 10% a bad name.

First of all, if sticking up for the proper display of the flag counts as wrapping oneself in it, doesn’t using it for gestures of regret (or the dreaded “virtue signalling”) really qualify as the mirror image of this? Trudeau made a point of making sure we knew the lowering of the flag was his own initiative. Liberals have spent a couple of generations working their asses off to constantly remind us that it’s a Liberal flag, which is precisely why conservatives in Ontario towns starting with “B” love the Red Ensign. It is natural to wonder whether, given the apparent Liberal sensitivity about our blood-soaked banner, we won’t get a third national flag before everyone’s finished adapting to the second one. […]

Canada is a place where literal Conservatives can’t “wrap themselves” too tightly in the literal flag: this isn’t the United States, where the positioning and context of the flag in ads or on stage will let you know instantly whether you’re at a Republican or a Democratic event. (The presence of an eagle is always a good clue.) Yet our Liberals have manoeuvred themselves into a position, somehow, in which it is awkward to fly the flag too high.

Can Trudeau now set a date for the raising of the flag to its position of respect and dignity, having plumb forgotten to do so in the first place? And if he is the renewed choice of the Canadian people as prime minister, will he be able to hoist the thing back up? Will this happen the day after the election? The first week? After prolonged consultations with First Nations, perhaps involving a royal commission?

You see, there is an aspect to this that goes beyond politicians battering at one another with flagpoles and other national paraphernalia. O’Toole’s comment didn’t just remind us that we’re Canadians and we should like our flag. It reminded us that we have a government that often seems to have a big problem thinking 30 seconds ahead, let alone six months.

The name “Afghanistan” is becoming a badge of shame for western politicians, and deservedly so

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney points out that while it was probably beyond the capabilities of the Canadian government to evacuate all Afghanis who had assisted Canadian efforts in that country, the actual efforts fell very far short of even “adequate”:

On the second day of the Taliban’s rule in Kabul, the front of Hamid Karzai International Airport was crowded with people trying to travel abroad, but were stopped by Taliban militants, 17 August, 2021.
Public domain image from VOA via Wikimedia Commons.

We have to cut through the fanatics on both sides and be very clear about this: the evacuation was always going to be messy. We were never going to get everyone out. But it is obvious that we did not get out as many people as we should have. It’s clear that we made major errors, including failing to work with veterans and aid groups on the ground; we did not lift bureaucratic hurdles quickly enough. We lost time dithering. That is our shameful failure.

It is not the Canadian government’s fault that our American allies decided to pull out of the conflict. Frankly, I still can’t entirely blame either the Trump or Biden administrations for that decision, although the execution of that decision has been catastrophic.

This was not a decision made in Ottawa, but in Washington, and for entirely American reasons. Further, the Liberals are not to blame for the U.S. government’s massive intelligence failure. We were caught totally flatfooted by the rapid and total collapse of the former Afghan government — what had been expected to take months took days. Canada, a member of both NATO and the Five Eyes, relies heavily on the intelligence gathered by our larger, more powerful ally. I do not fault Liberal party leader Justin Trudeau or his government for being caught unprepared.

So let’s dispense with that nonsense right away. In the big picture, there is not a whole hell of a lot Canadian governments could have done to avoid this crisis.

But we could’ve managed the crisis much better.

Over the last 10 days, we’ve had repeated reports of bottlenecks caused by over-restrictive paperwork requirements. We’ve seen other allies flying helicopters into Kabul to allow them to retrieve their people from sites around the city; Canada has helicopters and the ability to deploy them, but we didn’t follow suit.

Reports indicate that there was a gap of several days in any meaningful Canadian Armed Forces presence on the ground — and that gap set us back in terms of intelligence and planning. Canadian officials reportedly worried about the number of seatbelts on our transport planes even as other allies were loading their aircraft up with as many people as they could (we eventually began cramming evacuees into ours, as well). In several recent pieces here at The Line, Kevin Newman has described the struggle faced by those those trying to escape — people to whom we had had promised safe haven as their lives were now in peril due time they spent helping us during our missions in Afghanistan. There are numerous reports of our government telling these people to show up at gas stations and hotels — only to ghost them.

Facts beyond our control limited how effective we were ever going to be at getting people out, but we did not max out our effectiveness within those constraints. As a result, people will die who did not have to. The gap between the best-possible Canadian response and the actual Canadian response is a gap measured in lives.

I’m always happy to point the finger at Prime Minister Trudeau for his mistakes, but as Matt Gurney writes above, there was little that Trudeau could have done to avert the humanitarian disaster still unfolding around Kabul. The blame for deciding to pull out without adequate (or any) notice to allies or competent logistical and administrative planning lies with Joe Biden, as Conrad Black explains [this was written before the bomb attacks outside the airport in Kabul]:

Biden, in his address last Monday, in his midweek interview with George Stephanopoulos, and in his address on Friday, uttered a series of egregious falsehoods that were quickly exposed. He said there was no expression of discontent from America’s allies. For the first time in history, references to an American president in the British Parliament were met with shouts of “shame”. When Thomas Tugendhat, the chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Relations Committee and a retired colonel who served with distinction in Afghanistan and was decorated by the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division for combat bravery, said that it was shameful for a commander-in-chief who has not served under his own colors to mock the sacrifice of men who have, all parties in the British House agreed. No American president has been so severely or — unfortunately — deservedly insulted.

No American, consuming only mainstream media narratives, would realize that there were three times as many allied forces from assorted NATO countries in Afghanistan as there were Americans, or that they were not consulted before the Americans abruptly departed and brought the roof down on all of them. The Western alliance, as former President Trump emphasized, has its problems. Most of the members were not pulling their weight. Germany, the strongest NATO country after the United States, has almost disarmed and has effectively made itself a Russian energy satellite through the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. But they did not deserve this.

After this horrifying fiasco, where the Americans scuttled and turned tail and left their European allies and Canada to fend for themselves, the NATO members have already indicated that they are in no mood to follow this administration anywhere. No one can blame them. Biden said on Friday that the United States was not sending armored vehicles to collect its citizens and bring them to Kabul airport as the British and French were doing because, he explained, Americans were not being stopped by Taliban checkpoints. Half an hour later, the inarticulate Pentagon spokesman John Kirby squarely contradicted his commander-in-chief, and the official explanation was changed to advise Americans not to try to reach the airport because of the danger.

Biden said the Afghans wouldn’t fight so they weren’t worth the risk of American lives; but 50,000 Afghan soldiers and scores of thousands of civilians have died in this war. No Americans ha[d] died in Afghanistan in 18 months (in stark contrast to the soaring crime rates in almost all American cities). As Tugendhat told the House of Commons, it is not for the commander-in-chief of this cowardly, shameful, and disastrous flight from American national responsibilities, who has never served in his own armed forces, to disparage those who have died in allied forces for a cause that he has abandoned and doomed.

The one potentially positive aspect of this horrible debacle has been the unarguable revelation that the president is not up to his job.

August 26, 2021

Rigging the rules to exclude Maxime Bernier from the leaders’ debate

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

Jamie Clinton asks why Maxime “Mad Max” Bernier’s People’s Party is being excluded at the same time as the self-destructing Green Party is included by the Leaders’ Debate Commission:

However, before the commission came out with their announcement, the People’s Party had polled at or above four per cent in 13 out of 20 polls. It has only looked worse for the commission since the decision was made. The PPC has averaged five per cent in the six polls done since then. Including one poll that had them at 6.6 per cent, exactly double the floundering Green Party’s numbers.

It is very likely that if the Leaders’ Debates Commission had made their decision a few days later they would have allowed Maxime Bernier to be at the debates. Or, at least, they would have using the criteria they ultimately settled on.

For reference, in the 2008 federal election, Elizabeth May, then leader of the Green party, was allowed to participate in the debates even though her party did not have a seat. And yes, this time the rules are different. But it’s not as if MP’s voted on the debates’ rules or anything. The rules are completely arbitrary decisions that change every election cycle based on the whims of the Leaders’ Debates Commission.

In the 2019 federal election, with a different set of rules, the commission gave Bernier the benefit of the doubt and allowed him to participate in the debates. This time around, that is no longer needed.

Even if the PPC is technically under the four per cent threshold, the fact that they are outpolling both the Green party and Bloc Québécois in an increasing number of polls should be enough. Or at should at least raise the question as to whether or not the Greens and Bloc should remain in the debates.

The Bloc’s position is unique, on the basis of their geographically efficient vote. The Greens are another matter. Often, when an election rolls around, the media and Debates’ Commission go out of their way to distinguish the Green party as a major party. This has been true even when the GPC is polling at and receives under four per cent of the national vote. This happened in 2011 and 2015.

By this consideration, the People’s Party should definitely be allowed at the debates. It seems there are two different sets of rules, one concerning the Greens and the other for the PPC.

Winchester WWII 50 AT rifle

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Aug 2016

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons​

David Marshall Williams was hired by the Winchester company in 1939, and would have a hand in a number of major projects during his 10-year stint with the company, although best known for the M1 Carbine. The Carbine was an offshoot of the Winchester G30 and G30M rifles, which would also evolve into the G30R and Winchester Automatic Rifle. Another offshoot using this same basic mechanism was this undesignated .50 BMG semiautomatic antitank rifle developed by Winchester during World War II.

This rifle, like its developmental precursors, uses a two-lug, Garand type rotating bolt and a Williams gas tappet short stroke action. It has a 10-round detachable box magazine.

Although I have not found a testing report, the gun was apparently tested by the Canadian military and performed quite well. It was never purchased or put into serial production, however, most likely because as an antitank rifle the .50 BMG cartridge was not effective by the end of World War II.

QotD: Toronto, the centre of the universe (according to Torontonians)

Filed under: Cancon, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Toronto is a sucking vortex of stupid due to being the axis about which the world revolves. But you already knew that having become dizzy from your slow orbit so far from the centre of things.

Ghost of a Flea, “And while I am being annoying”, Ghost of a Flea, 2005-05-02.

August 24, 2021

Tracking the bullshit in the ongoing “she-lection”

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

Ever watchful of opportunities, the folks at The Line quickly realized that there was a critical tracking metric going un-reported in the 2021 federal election and They. Are. On. It.

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

At The Line, we’ll be continuing to send out our weekly dispatches for the duration of the campaign. Columnist Jen Gerson will also be doing a weekly recap of major events. We’ll be running articles by other contributors as they come in — not all will be about the election, but many will. And we’re happy to do this. But we felt that something — something we couldn’t quite put our finger on — was missing from our plan. We felt there was more that we could do.

It was our friend over at The Hub, a new media startup, that set us on the right course. The Hub is going to be doing “Policy Pulse”, which they describe as “tracking all the policy announcements from the major parties, with instant analysis from our crew of experts.” Great idea! But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that, you know, that doesn’t quite catch it all. There’s something else that needs to be carefully tracked and analyzed. So we at The Line are proud to bring you our first Bullshit Bulletin, where we’ll note and mock all the incredibly dumb stuff that crops up along the way. This will be an evolving process, and we don’t pretend to see everything, so if you want to send us suggestions, tweet us at @the_lineca, and add #bullshitbulletin, or drop us a note at lineeditor@protonmail.com, with Bullshit Bulletin in the subject field.

And to be clear, all you smart asses out there, no, don’t just tag the entire campaign or every statement made by every member of a party you’re not voting for and write it off as bullshit. There’s degrees of wiggle room and salesmanship and base-mobilizing in every election. We’re not going to worry about that. We’re looking for the egregious examples, and the really weird stuff that comes tumbling out of the partisan mind.

On that note, let’s get started.

Note that although they’re careful to exclude bullshit reports on comments “made by every member of a party you’re not voting for” — which is fair and sensible — they are (one assumes) open to bullshit reports on comments made by members of the party you are planning to vote for … because if it’s enough to set off your partisan-biased bullshit meter when it comes from your “side”, then it’s got to be prime quality bullshit.

August 23, 2021

Canada is extremely good at posturing on the international stage … not so good at performing

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kevin Newman on the continuing failure of the Canadian government and Canadian Armed Forces to protect and retrieve the people in Afghanistan we’ve promised to help:

On the second day of the Taliban’s rule in Kabul, the front of Hamid Karzai International Airport was crowded with people trying to travel abroad, but were stopped by Taliban militants, 17 August, 2021.
Public domain image from VOA via Wikimedia Commons.

It is impossible to piece together, or understand, why no one from Canada would come out of the military protection of the airport to speak to them over the past two days. Because there must have been a whole lot of talking happening on the safe side of the razor wire barrier separating the Afghans from the terminal. Late Friday, a Canadian C-17 carrying more soldiers and a few diplomatic and immigration staff arrived at Kabul’s military air terminal. They had a plan to work with American forces to get some of the gas station people out of the country. There seemed to be renewed confidence expressed in media interviews by Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino that, finally, things would happen.

Instead the Americans started executing rapid-retrieval missions into Kabul to get their own people out, sealed the entrance where Canada’s gas station people were waiting, and co-operation with Canadian forces seemed to disintegrate.

In the meantime, there was a game of numbers to play. With so few Canadian cases on that C-17 ready to return to a third country, the big grey plane was loaded with Afghans that other countries had successfully brought to the airport. A picture and story was fed to political reporters on the campaign trails in Canada declaring broadly that “106 Afghans have been flown out on a Canadian C17” – but National Defence would not reveal if any of those passengers had been Canadian cases.

According to the Globe and Mail‘s Stephen Chase there had been none on the only other Canadian flight of 175 to leave the airport twenty-four hours earlier, even as the government boated of another “success”. For weeks, the Prime Minister and his besieged cabinet had also been talking about 20,000 refugees coming to Canada. That too was misleading in is vagueness, according to Global News’ Mercedes Stephenson, as all but a handful are coming from outside Afghanistan and even then, it’s over many years.

There is zero evidence from multiple Afghan sources around the airport that any of those the Prime Minister boasts they’re “rescuing”, (LGTBQ2, human rights advocates, women and journalists) have come from Kabul or any part of Afghanistan in the past month.

With all that, the government continues to claim a C-17 will come and go each day. But do the math. If even a hundred daily Canadian cases make those flights, (no where near that many have so far), there is no way the vast majority of applicants will make it here before the window closes for evacuations. Canada’s commitment of men and materials in no way matches the need. So, will Immigration officials those with no hope now of rescue and admit that they won’t get out in time? That number is likely in the thousands. They need to develop a more realistic way to survive the Taliban.

The mystery in this deadly absurdity is the government’s obsession with paperwork. Even today Canadian officials on the safe side of the airport controlling who might get through were reported by eyewitnesses to be taking an “extremely strict” approach to paperwork verification. Only those granted full Canadian citizenship under the government’s Special Immigration Measure are being told they qualify to leave. That requires a lot more work to process and is perhaps less than a tenth of all the Afghans who are known to have applied and are in various stages of completing multiple forms.

Other countries have also been willing to grant refugee status to their interpreters and families, which doesn’t guarantee citizenship, but is it is a much faster way to process many more people, and it gives Afghans more choices should air rescue be impossible. In a news conference, Mendicino claimed his department’s agent in Kabul has authority to overlook the passport and biometric fingerprint requirements. But the evidence on the ground suggests he is being ignored.

Swastika Raised on Highest Point in Europe – WW2 – 156 – August 21, 1942

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

World War Two
Published 21 Aug 2021

The Axis advance in the Caucasus takes Mt. Elbrus, and the one on Stalingrad continues, and there are several raids of note this week- a Japanese one on Guadalcanal is destroyed, an Allied one on Dieppe is badly savaged, and an American one at Makin Atoll is successful in the short term, but with bad long term ramifications.
(more…)

The dying media’s strange obsession with the Green Party

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

The Green Party gets far more media attention in Canada than their vote totals or influence on goverment policy could possibly justify. Their ongoing attempts to commit media character assassination of their own leader might be the first time in living memory that the party’s antics might — might — justify it. The Line explains some of the dramedy in Greentopia:

“Annamie Paul with Green Party of Canada supporters” by Annamie Paul is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

One of us, just a couple of days ago, was standing around in our increasingly tattered casual wear and making a sandwich with the TV on in the background. A local news channel was showing Green party leader Annamie Paul speaking. So we changed the channel, because the Greens are irrelevant. But the next channel was also showing the same feed. We tried two others. It was all the same goddamned feed. And two of those networks were national. Viewers from coast to coast had a chance to hear, for an extended period, from a woman so thoroughly doomed that she’s not even pretending to run a national campaign. All she can muster is an attempt to win her seat in downtown Toronto.

Look, we don’t know who needs to hear this, but at the national level, the Greens are zeroes. Sorry, not sorry. Frankly, the Greens have long gotten too much attention in Canadian politics, which is a result of a few quirky things all aligning in their favour: Elizabeth May’s admittedly effective relentless self-promotion, the coffer-stuffing effect of the per-vote-wage subsidy, and, the politeness of Canadian media leaders who felt awkward saying no to Lizzie.

This is not to say that there are not serious Greens, nor that the Green party has not put forward some serious policy proposals. There are, and they have. The issue is that under our electoral system, the Greens don’t matter. And their strident complaining about their irrelevancy doesn’t actually make them relevant.

We glanced at recent vote tallies. The Greens generally get around five per cent or so, sometimes a point or two higher, sometimes a point or two lower. That ain’t nothing. But it is not enough to make them a meaningful electoral force in anything but a tiny handful of seats — or in really weird, bizarre vote-splitting scenarios, and those are very rare. We don’t believe there’s some magic level of popular support at which a party deserves serious consideration or not, it all depends on the context. The Bloc doesn’t get a ton of votes, either (though never less than the Greens), but since they only run candidates in Quebec, their efficient vote means they have a pretty consistently good chance of winning enough seats to matter in parliament. The Greens … don’t.

And that is in normal times. These aren’t normal times. Annamie Paul is a perfectly serious, credible person. The fact that her party is trying to back a cement truck over her in full view of 38 million witnesses simply confirms our instinct to ignore the party she leads. Most elections, you could argue that it’s a shame that the Greens don’t have an actual chance. This election, we’re thanking God for it.

Deciding how much attention to give a candidate or party is usually pretty easy. Outside Quebec, the big three — Tories, Liberals and NDP — get proper coverage, within the context of local circumstances and the dynamics of individual campaigns (ignoring a CPC also-ran in deepest Toronto isn’t going to break any hearts, nor the sacrificial Liberal in rural Alberta). The gamut of weirdo fringe parties are basically ignored. In Quebec, the Bloc warrants consideration alongside the big three.

What screws all this up, though, are the Greens and the People’s Party. They don’t warrant serious consideration, per se, but they will draw a fair number of voters. What to do with these?

Canadian Army Ranks 1939-1945

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HandGrenadeDivision
Published 6 Sep 2019

A brief video describing the ranks used by the Canadian Army in the Second World War, with an equally brief introduction to the General Staff system.

Further reading and resources regarding the Canadian Army of the Second World War:

Service Publications

https://servicepub.com/

canadiansoldiers.com

http://www.canadiansoldiers.com

Department of National Defence Directorate of History and Heritage

http://www.cmp-cpm.forces.gc.ca/dhh-d…

August 22, 2021

Mounties’ First Revolver: the NWMP Adams MkIII

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 May 2021

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons​

https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…​

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com​

The first handguns issued by the North West Mounted Police (which would later become the modern RCMP) were 330 Adams revolvers, requisitioned by the new police service in March 1874, and shipped over from England. Upon their receipt in July of that year, the Mounties were dismayed to find thoroughly worn out Adams Mk I 5-shot conversions from old percussion revolvers. These were found totally unfit for frontier service, and an appeal was sent back to England for something better.

A replacement shipment arrived in October 1875, and this time they received 326 much better Adams MkIII revolvers (330 were shipped, but 4 were stolen in transit). The MkIII pattern was a purpose-made .450 Adams cartridge revolver, holding six shots with a double action trigger and solid frame. These served very well, and the NWMP ordered more in 1880 — for which they instead received Enfield revolvers, which had replaced the Adams in British military service by that time.

The 326 Adams MkIII revolvers issued by the NWMP were marked by a local gunsmith upon their arrival. The right side of the frames are marked “C M.P.” (presumably Canada Mounted Police) and given a police inventory number just below the barrel (in addition to the serial number above the trigger). These issue numbers were defaced when the guns were sold out of service.

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle Box 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740

August 21, 2021

In this matter Canada apes the US rather than following the great example provided by France

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, France, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Kevin Newman highlights the stark difference between what France has been doing to rescue their own citizens and Afghani civilians with ties to France with the utterly feckless Canadian government’s “effort”:

On the second day of the Taliban’s rule in Kabul, the front of Hamid Karzai International Airport was crowded with people trying to travel abroad, but were stopped by Taliban militants, 17 August, 2021.
Public domain image from VOA via Wikimedia Commons.

Ten buses screamed out of France’s embassy in Kabul early this week, past every Taliban checkpoint along the way, and according to eyewitnesses, zipped confidently through a back-entrance gate and straight onto the chaotic tarmac at Hamid Karzai International Airport. Five hundred exhausted and terrified passengers were then loaded onto a French military aircraft which quickly took off.

And then it happened again on Thursday, four buses this time, under the guard of French special forces. As with the first convoy, Paris newspapers reported the buses carried French nationals stranded in Kabul, and hundreds of Afghans and their families the French embassy had given shelter to since before the Taliban roared into and re-occupied the city. Two ballsy airlifts took them to safety at a French military base in the United Arab Emirates, where hundreds of desperate people were given a hot meal, questioned about their identities and had their documents confirmed. Most were then sent on to Paris, where they received physical and mental-health support as well as cash, clothing, and places to stay as they begin their new lives.

On those same days in Kabul, another country tried to rescue its citizens and hundreds of Afghan interpreters and their families hiding throughout the city. I’ve pieced together what happened to them from texts and video Canadian veterans have been receiving every hour from people they know in Kabul, and I am sharing them with permission. I have verified each of these facts (from the peace of Canada) with multiple sources on the ground.

There were no buses, soldiers or escorts for these terrified people. Thursday they received a short text from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). They were instructed (in English only) to urgently head to the airport on their own, try to find a way through multiple Taliban checkpoints searching for them, and then if they survived that kilometres-long trip, figure out a way through thousands of desperate Afghans trying to flee. They were told by IRCC to carry documents to identify themselves to a gate agent, but because those same documents would be used to identify them by the Taliban, it was up to them to decide whether to carry them. With that, IRCC wiped its hands of responsibility. No direction on where to avoid Taliban checkpoints, no specific gates to head to (there are eight), and no Canadians on site to help. In fact there hadn’t been any Canadian officials in Kabul for a week, and when a few arrived hours after that text blast, reporters said they had travelled on an American military flight because their Canadian C-17 needed servicing somewhere else.

Needless to say, no one got through the airport, so they returned to their safe houses — wondering if their last flight to freedom had left without them.

It hadn’t. It never existed. Later that night another set of blasts went out again telling Afghans to move on their own to the airport. This time they were told to shout “Canada” and hope a soldier would hear them and help them through the airport gates. Taliban guards could hear them as well there, which would ensure that the target on their backs they had been trying to hide came completely into focus.

Indigo in the red

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

In the latest edition of his SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte looks at the dire financial situation of Canada’s big box bookstore chain:

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

Indigo just released its first-quarter financial results, covering the period April-June 2021, which can be compared to its pre-pandemic results from the same quarter in 2019.

Back then, Indigo had revenues of $193 million and no profit. Seventy percent of its revenue, or $136 million, came from the firm’s eighty-nine Chapters and Indigo superstores. Only $25 million came from its 115 smaller stores (Coles and Indigo Spirit), and another $29 million from online sales at chapters.indigo.ca. Not only did the company book no profit, but all three of those revenue channels were down from the previous year, with online sales falling the most (15%).

This is to say that Indigo, in financial terms, was immunocompromised before COVID-19 hit.

The decline in digital sales was especially alarming. It seemed that CEO Heather Reisman was giving up on the web, an impression reinforced by her frequent renovations of in-store environments and her not terribly successful launch of a so-called cultural department store […] in New Jersey, Indigo’s first international gambit. She was all about bricks and mortar.

One also got the sense that Heather was giving up on books. She was building up the candles and blankets side of the business — it represented almost 40% of 2019’s total revenue. She also launched Thoughtfull.co, an effort to graze on Hallmark grass, and another step away from the book business.

I’d certainly despaired of finding much in the way of actual books at Chapters or Indigo stores … more and more of the floorspace that used to be devoted to books had been given over to housewares, candles, hostess gift items, decorative throw cushions and other such non-book items. Even before the Wuhan Coronavirus shut down the western world, it had been at least a year since the last time I’d found anything worth buying in one of their stores.

Two years and several pandemic waves later, Indigo is down to 88 superstores and 88 small-format stores, a net reduction of twenty-eight. I don’t know the significance of 88. Maybe the company’s new retail guru — Indigo always has a new retail guru — is a pianist, or Chinese, or a white supremacist.

The remaining stores are now open to foot traffic, and the company is wrangling with its various landlords over how much rent it should pay for the pandemic months when most of its outlets were closed. Indigo received almost $3 million in federal emergency rent subsidies, and almost $4 million in payroll subsidies, which seems like a lot but isn’t for a company as big as Indigo. As we noted in an earlier post, Heather also received a $25 million “liquidity enhancement”, or bailout, from billionaire husband Gerry Schwartz.

Which brings us to the present. Revenues for Indigo’s most recent quarter are $172 million (down $21 million from two years ago), and it lost $15 million (before depreciation, amortization, etc.).

Indigo doesn’t release enough detail on its operations to give us a clear idea of how the company lost only $15 million when its revenue fell $21 million, but costs were down across the board, probably reflecting the closed stores, reduced staffing levels, and fewer books on the shelves, among other savings.

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