Quotulatiousness

May 31, 2024

The best that can be said about VIA Rail is that its financials aren’t as dire as Canada Post

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

Chris Selley outlines the financial black holes that are the two Crown Corporations — Canada Post and VIA Rail Canada:

VIA Rail 918, a General Electric model P42DC locomotive, at Belleville, Ontario on 23 December 2008.
Photo by Martin Cathrae via Wikimedia Commons.

If you’re unfamiliar with Via’s financials, I’ll advise you to sit down now.

In 2023, the average passenger on The Canadian line [Toronto/Montreal to Vancouver] was subsidized by the taxpayer to the tune of $1,014.77. Revenues on the route were less than half of expenses. And your average Canadian can’t even hope to ride the bastard thing: A bunk bed for the 34 hours and 35 minutes it takes to get from Toronto to Winnipeg still goes for the bargain price of $895.

It’s a cruise ship. Not only are we lavishly subsidizing a cruise ship, but we own the cruise line, and we’re buying it new ships. It’s absolutely bananas. And among those applauding the expenditure is, somehow, the NDP’s transport critic Taylor Bachrach. Where’s simplistic populism when you need it? No money for cruise ships!

Meanwhile, media are being far too indulgent of Via’s alarming and increasing vagueness as to whether it’s committed to “high-frequency rail” on the Toronto-to-Quebec City corridor, or to “high-speed rail”, or to some combination of both. This could not be a bigger or brighter red flag: Beware of Oncoming Boondoggle.

Committing billions of dollars to a new rail corridor between Toronto and Quebec City without a firm idea as to whether it’s “high-frequency” or “high-speed” is a bit like committing billions to a new housing development without knowing whether it’s bungalows or high-rise condos. A train going 300 kilometres per hour, or more (i.e., high-speed rail) needs vastly more protection (fences, eliminating level crossings) than a train going 200 kilometres per hour. It’s not a minor detail or something to be worked out later.

And it’s painfully obvious why Via’s executives are sowing the confusion: Because the high-frequency rail plan that they actually have simply isn’t that compelling. It may offer no time savings at all between Montreal and Toronto — and anyone who tries to tell you a five-hour trip between Montreal and Toronto is a compelling option for business people is either a deluded railfan or works for Via.

“Canada charts path for high-speed trains, but obstacles loom,” a recent Globe and Mail headline declared, completely incorrectly. But casual news consumers can absolutely be forgiven for thinking Via’s working on a Toronto-to-Quebec City version of France’s TGV. Should the high-frequency rail plan ever get built, I can only imagine the kvetching and disappointment that would follow.

May 30, 2024

As everyone knows, it takes at least three years to find a shovel in Canada …

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

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay notes the third anniversary of the “mass graves” moral panic here in the utterly dysfunctional Dominion:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

This week marked the third anniversary of Canada’s strange “unmarked graves” scandal — a morbid social panic that took hold of my country in late May 2021, following unverified claims that the corpses of 215 (presumably murdered) Indigenous children had been located at the site of a former school in Kamloops, British Columbia.

As I’ve already described this saga in several Quillette articles, I will not belabour the specifics (which, by now, have also been covered in the international press, as well as Canada’s National Post and Dorchester Review). Instead, this update will focus on the manner by which Canadian public figures (journalists, in particular) have tried to evade accountability for their original gullibility, as it presents an interesting case study in social psychology on a national scale.

The background here, as anyone who’s followed the story closely will know, is a genuinely shameful aspect of Canadian history — the federally funded, church-run system of residential schools established in the nineteenth century as a means to assimilate the country’s Indigenous population. In many cases, children were forced to attend boarding schools located hundreds of miles from their home reserves. Mortality rates from infectious diseases (especially tuberculosis) were tragically high, and the whole issue was properly referred to an authoritative body known as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which concluded that at least 3,200 children died after enrolling in residential schools. The real number might well be considerably higher.

All of this had been common knowledge in Canada for years by the time Rosanne Casimir, Chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in Kamloops claimed to have discovered the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried on the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

In fact, she’d discovered nothing of the kind. But the Canadian media ran with the claim as if it were the proven truth. A typical headline: “Tk’emlups confirms bodies of 215 children buried at former Kamloops Indian Residential School site“.

If you don’t live in Canada, it will be hard to appreciate the national hysteria that resulted. In the press, Canada was officially anointed a nation of baby killers. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lowered the flag on public buildings for five months. Dozens of churches were burned by arsonists in apparent acts of retribution. The word “genocide” was thrown around in casual parlance as if we were Nazi Germany or Rwanda in 1994. The Canadian Press called the discovery of these ostensible unmarked graves the 2021 “Story of the Year.”

Then the days passed, the national festival of self-laceration abated somewhat, and it began dawning on some of us that — um, wait a minute — no evidence of graves had actually been presented yet. That evidence was on its way, right?

The Liberal Party of Canada, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Trudeau, Inc.

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

In The Line, Stefan Klietsch ponders the idea that a lot of the problems the Trudeau Liberals are encountering in the run-up to the next federal election are direct or indirect effects of the constitutional changes Trudeau pushed through at the first party general meeting after he became Prime Minister:

With the ongoing and persistent slump of Justin Trudeau’s party in the polls, some observers have looked back at what caused the Sunny Ways team to lose its lustre in their years of governing. Some would point to the prime minister’s harassment of Judy-Wilson Raybould in the SNC-Lavalin scandal, an episode in which the prime minister clearly lost the battle for public opinion. One personal grievance of mine is the cynical promise that the prime minister had made of the 2015 election being the last such election under the existing electoral system. Others just point to post-pandemic economic conditions, especially higher interest rates.

But looking back to the very beginning of the Trudeau era, the Liberal leader arguably planted the seeds of his inevitable downfall quite quickly after winning his majority in the 2015 election. I speak here of the constitutional package that Trudeau pushed the Liberal Party of Canada to adopt at its 2016 Biannual General Meeting.

It is a recurring theme in Canadian politics that party leaders who form government tend to become more distant and isolated from their grassroots. But whereas most prime ministers and premiers would be content to delegate management of constitutional party debates to their submissive sycophants, a sitting prime minister took it upon himself to invest his personal brand in an appeal to the party’s convention floor to pass an omnibus “modernizing” constitutional package. Since the prime minister did not again participate in the party’s constitutional debates after 2016, he evidently got everything that he wanted all in one go, and with minimal resistance.

Trudeau’s cynicism here is worthy of mockery. Imagine thinking to yourself, “Just months ago, the rejuvenated grassroots institutions of the Liberal party swept me to power and ended the decade of Liberal decline. Better fix what ain’t broke!” The changes, which included slashing of the influence of Electoral District Associations and of policy conventions, were obviously not intended as some grand exercise in democracy empowerment, but rather were intended to protect an incumbent government from any inconvenient messages and influences from a potentially unruly party grassroots.

Yet it was the same independent party grassroots that had helped bring Trudeau to power in the first place. In the 2015 campaign the Liberals had run on what columnist Andrew Coyne called a “daring” platform, a platform crafted with more input and insight than can be offered by only pollsters and political operatives. The then Liberal platform was obviously a factor in the Liberals’ poaching of supporters from the NDP, which had at times held a lead in the polls. From cannabis legalization to electoral reform to the Canada Child Benefit, where did all the big new Liberal ideas come from? The party grassroots and institutions, of course.

May 29, 2024

Ontario’s long and winding (and subsidy-strewn) road to beer in convenience stores

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

Apparently I’ll have a little bit more to celebrate on my birthday this year as the Ontario government’s glacially slow-to-change alcohol sales rules are being liberalized as of September 5th to allow all the province’s convenience stores to begin selling beer and wine:

“The Beer Store” by Like_the_Grand_Canyon is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Premier Doug Ford promised Ontarians beer in corner stores, supermarkets and big-box stores, and by God he has delivered. As of Sept. 5, all Ontario convenience stores meeting eligibility criteria will be allowed to sell beer, wine, cider and pre-mixed drinks. As of Oct. 31, the privilege will be extended to all grocery and big-box stores. The province says it expects as many as 8,500 new booze-procurement sites to come online under the new regime. By Ontario standards, it’s absolutely revolutionary.

The new regime is also, of course, hilariously complicated. And absurdly, offensively expensive.

It is fair to describe the new regime as somewhat more competitive, and certainly more convenient. In addition to offering potentially thousands of new locations, supermarkets (including the roughly 450 already licensed) will be able to offer volume discounts on beer — i.e., a 24-pack will cost less per bottle than a six-pack. This was a privilege hitherto reserved for The Beer Store, the American-, Belgian- and Japanese-owned conglomerate that dominated beer sales in Ontario from the end of Prohibition until fairly recently.

Private retailers will even be able to set their own prices, which until now has been considered blasphemy.

It is not fair to describe the new regime, as the government does, as an “open” market.

Near as I can tell, Ontario will by 2026 have the following retail environments in place:

  • The Beer Store. Smelly, surly, and the best-available value. Only beer — no cider or mixed drinks. It’s in the name.
  • LCBO locations. Government-run liquor stores retain their near-absolute monopoly on hard liquor sales, in addition to selling beer (especially craft beer, in which The Beer Store’s owners aren’t so interested), wine and everything else.
  • LCBO- and/or The Beer Store-branded “agency stores” in rural areas, which sell everything the LCBO does, but operate inside of convenience stores, small supermarkets and other local businesses, and are staffed by non-government employees.
  • The existing supermarkets licensed to sell beer, cider and wine (and in rare cases all three!), plus scores of new outlets — the new 8,500 new locations.

The Beer Store maintains a monopoly (in urban areas) on wholesale for bars and restaurants and on refunding cans and bottles, although its new “master framework agreement” (MFA) doesn’t even oblige it to maintain its current number of locations — which in urban areas have been dwindling rapidly. I’m a 17-minute walk from my nearest Beer Store. The house I grew up in, in the heart of midtown Toronto, is a 45-minute walk. I’m not schlepping a leaky garbage bag full of empty cans either distance.

Why Germany Lost the Battle of the Atlantic

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

Real Time History
Published Feb 2, 2024

In March 1943, German U-boats are on the attack – they sink 108 Allied vessels that month alone. Some Allied officials fear a German victory in the Atlantic is imminent. If the Allies lose the Atlantic, Britain loses its lifeline – and maybe even the war. But by May 1943, it will be the U-boats limping home in defeat. So how, in just two months, did the U-boats go from hunters to hunted?
(more…)

May 28, 2024

Trudeau is at his very best in tackling imaginary problems

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

Tristin Hopper calls attention to just how much of the federal government’s attention is focused on problems that don’t actually exist, except in the Prime Minister’s vivid imagination, like the notorious “hidden agenda” of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives to turn Canada into the world of The Handmaid’s Tale by banning abortion (and undoubtedly forcing women to wear the distinctive red-dress-and-bonnet uniforms, too):

In Trudeau’s fevered imagination, this is what the Tories want Canadian women to be wearing in future.

The Trudeau government has initiated another round of warning that Canadian abortion access is at risk.

“Women’s rights, reproductive rights, and equality are non-negotiable,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared at a recent speech, as Liberal Party social media accounts broadcast accusations that their opponents endanger a “woman’s right to choose”.

This would all make perfect sense in the United States, which has indeed seen a wave of new state-level laws effectively banning abortion outright.

But the Liberals are talking about Canada, a country that has no abortion laws whatsoever, and no political inclination to create any.

Polls show an incredible 80 per cent of Canadians supporting a “woman’s right to an abortion”. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn’t once touch abortion during his nine-year tenure.

As noted, Canada literally has no legal language dealing with the whole abortion issue … and therefore any Conservative government would have to create a new law to even begin to address an issue that a super-majority of Canadians are already against “fixing”. Conservatives can be incredibly dumb at times, but that would be stupidity of a very high order indeed.

Then, there’s Trudeau’s determination to link Poilievre with Diagonal, er, Dialagon, er, Dialysis, I mean “Diagolon”, which is apparently some super-powerful secretive extreme right-wing conspiracy to … do something diagonal-ish? I dunno. I’d never heard of ’em until Trudeau started trying to tie Poilievre to them:

Earlier this month, the Liberal’s main attack against the Conservatives was that they were in thrall to Diagolon, a supposed white supremacist militia with designs on destroying Canada from within.

“What has not been answered by the leader of the Opposition is why he chooses to continue to court extreme right nationalist groups like Diagolon,” said Trudeau in the House of Commons on April 30, one of several times he would slap down a question from the Conservatives by bringing up Dialogon.

Poilievre’s alleged ties to Diagolon are pretty tenuous. At a Nova Scotia fundraiser, among the attendees who queued up to shake Poilievre’s hand was Diagolon founder Jeremy MacKenzie, who claimed he did it just to get Poilievre in trouble. More recently, Poilievre visited an anti-carbon tax encampment where one of the RVs had a small Diagolon logo scrawled on its front door in permanent marker.

What’s more, multiple police investigations have concluded that Diagolon isn’t even a group, much less an organized anti-government militia.

It’s basically three guys on a podcast and their followers — whom they’ve occasionally met for BBQs. According to an RCMP profile of Diagolon put together at the height of Freedom Convoy, it was “exceedingly difficult” to nail down Diagolon as “a distinct group, with common ideology, a political agenda, and the cohesion necessary to advance such an agenda.”

The bought-and-paid-for Canadian media, of course, haven’t done much to point out just how ludicrous these accusations are, because even if they’re not, y’know, true, they are “truthy”. It’s not likely to change, as the legacy media still hate and fear anyone who might threaten their cosy subsidy deal with the Liberals.

And then there’s the Liberals’ fixed belief that Canada is the most racist country to ever have existed and that our entire culture is based on white supremacy and oppressing the “global majority” at all times:

Derived from the U.S. academic dogma of critical race theory, anti-racism holds that Canada’s basic structures — from its police forces to its justice system to its parliaments — are all fundamentally white supremacist. As such, they can only be remedied by “deliberate systems and supports” favouring “equity-seeking groups”, according to official Government of Canada literature.

The Trudeau government has established an Anti-Racism Secretariat, they’ve poured tens of millions of dollars into race-specific grants and they’ve subjected every arm of the federal government to anti-racism mandates and training.

Agencies such as the Canada Research Chairs program now openly screen for candidates based on ethnicity and other immutable characteristics. And perhaps most infamously, it was a federal anti-racism program that paid more than $500,000 to Laith Marouf, a virulent antisemite who has repeatedly referred to his benefactor as “Apartheid KKKanada”.

All of this has proceeded on the core assumption that Canada is — and always has been — a country defined by “systemic racism”. This was stated most plainly in an internal Canadian Armed Forces report which declared “racism in Canada is not a glitch in the system; it is the system”.

There’s a lot of (imported) fretting and huffing and puffing about this “issue”, yet there is almost no evidence for any of it being true in Canada. It would be statistically more likely to be true that much of our government and business organizations are actively over-hiring and over-promoting people on the basis of them not being white or male or heterosexual than the reverse.

QotD: Women’s voting interests

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

… I was young, then. Imbecilic stupidity is common in the young, who are subject to fashionable excitations. My mother, on the other hand, was older. As a Tory, she of course doubted whether women should vote at all; but as my father was of old Ontario Methodist farmboy stock, his congenital propensity to vote Liberal had to be acknowledged.

“I have to vote Conservative, for his sake,” she reasonably explained.

She had compounded his characteristic error in 1968, however, and felt she owed an explanation to her son. This began by reminding me of her fragile, female sex.

“One thinks of the party leader on the analogy of going for a date.”

And true enough, the Tory leader, Mr Robert Stanfield, was the sort of man you could present to your father. He could be relied on, to get you home safely, and on time.

“But there are times when a woman does not want to get home on time,” mama added.

She, a registered nurse acquainted with the eccentricities of mental patients, called my attention to a phenomenon I had not previously noticed. Whenever a truly monstrous (male) psychopath is strapped away in gaol, the prison receives adoring letters for him, from women. These correspondents have never met him, and know him only from accounts in the yellow press. He may have been found guilty of heinously murdering a succession of wives and lovers. But they promise to be waiting for him on the steps of the penitentiary; and as the police will confirm, they are still there.

My mother had never comprehended how a woman could be so crazy. But when she realized that she had herself just voted for “Pierre” [that’s Trudeau the elder, to clarify], she suddenly understood.

David Warren, “The women’s vote”, Essays in Idleness, 2024-02-22.

May 25, 2024

Justin Trudeau – “a large percentage of small businesses are actually just ways for wealthier Canadians to save on their taxes”

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

Even before he became Prime Minister, the signs were there that Justin Trudeau was instinctively anti-small-business and that this would inform his approach to taxation and regulation of the private sector:

Changes to capital gains tax in this year’s budget were aimed at the wealthy, said the Trudeau Liberals, but the move has angered small businesses owners who have been snared by the increase.

Maybe that was part of the plan, since Justin Trudeau appears to view small business owners as rich Canadians trying to dodge taxes.

In an illuminating interview with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge in 2015, Trudeau didn’t directly answer a question about whether he would lower taxes for small businesses.

But he did say, “We have to know that a large percentage of small businesses are actually just ways for wealthier Canadians to save on their taxes and we want to reward the people that are actually creating jobs and contributing in concrete ways.”

It was a remarkable denigration of small business owners and may have passed unnoticed because Trudeau was still a month away from becoming prime minister.

For the record, businesses with fewer than 100 people employ almost 12 million private workers in this country.

And the government’s own statistics state that in the 20 years up to 2020, the number of small businesses increased every year except for three — 2013, 2016 and 2020 — so a decrease in two of the Trudeau years.

Meanwhile, Trudeau’s apparently tax-dodging wealthy small businesses seem to be having a hard time of it. Businesses that began with four or less employees were only 62 per cent likely to still be operating five years later.

Earlier this year, Reuters news agency warned that a 38 per cent spike in bankruptcies of small businesses in the first 11 months of 2023 could rise even further.

Small businesses are “an integral engine of Canada’s economy,” said the budget, but 72 per cent of the owners fear that the new changes to capital gains tax will harm the climate for investment and growth.

Interestingly, when Trudeau was asked in that 2015 interview how he planned to balance the budget by 2019, because that was what he promised, it was investment and growth that was the answer.

Then prime minister Stephen Harper had tried to cut his way out of the deficit, said Trudeau. “That doesn’t work.”

“He has been unable to create growth. He has the worst record on growth of any prime minister in 80 years.”

But as the Fraser Institute has pointed out, in the last nine years under Trudeau, Canadian living standards have declined.

May 23, 2024

Where does a former general go to get his reputation back?

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Military, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The National Post reports on a former Canadian senior officer launching a lawsuit in an attempt to clear his reputation after an abortive court martial brought his career to an end:

Lt.-Gen. Steven Whelan, a three-star general who was accused of sexual misconduct in what he claims was a politically motivated prosecution that was then abandoned before he was able to defend himself, is looking for his day in court.

“I didn’t get a chance to tell my side of the story,” he told me.

Whelan’s lawyer, Phillip Millar of Millars Lawyers, has just filed a bruising statement of claim with the Federal Court in Ottawa, naming a who’s who of Canada’s military establishment as defendants; a litany that makes allegations of abuse of office, negligent investigation, malicious prosecution and involvement in media leaks that destroyed Whelan’s reputation and career.

Defendants named in the lawsuit include His Majesty the King in Right of Canada (the Crown) and top brass in the Department of National Defence (DND) and Canadian Armed Forces (CAF): Jody Thomas, former deputy minister of National Defence and former national security advisor to the Prime Minister; General Wayne Eyre, chief of the defence staff; Lt.-Gen. Frances Allen, vice chief of the defence staff; and Lt.-Gen. Jennie Carignan, CAF’s chief of professional conduct and culture.

The allegations stretch all the way to the Prime Minister’s Office.

Last September, Whelan faced a court martial, accused of sexual misconduct purported to have taken place more than a decade ago.

At the trial’s outset, military prosecutors dropped the more serious allegation of improperly communicating with a female subordinate (flirting, in colloquial terms). A week later — following the testimony of the complainant and minutes before Whelan’s lawyers could cross-examine her or hear from other witnesses — prosecutors dropped the remaining charge accusing Whelan of doctoring the same subordinate’s performance evaluation in 2011, allegedly fearing she would disclose their friendly but not physical relationship to others. The court martial came to an abrupt end. Notwithstanding the technical win for Whelan, the allegations effectively sidelined the three-star general.

Casual observers, seeing just how many Canadian generals’ and admirals’ careers have run aground in scandal of one sort or another, might draw conclusions about the quality of the leadership and the deep culture of the Canadian Armed Forces at both military and political levels.

The “post-national” entity formerly known as “Canada”

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

You have to hand it to the Trudeau family (and all their sycophantic enablers in the legacy media, of course). What other Canadian family has had such an impact on the country? By the time Justin Trudeau’s successor is invited to form a government, Canada will have changed so much — to the point that he could describe us as the first “post-national” country thanks to his unceasing effort to destroy the nation. At The Hub, Eric Kaufmann points the finger at Trudeau’s “Liberal-left extremism” as the motivating factor in Trudeau’s career:

Justin Trudeau has always had a strong affinity for the symbolic gesture, especially when the media are around to record it.

Canada is currently suffering from left-liberal extremism the likes of which the world has never seen. This excess is not socialist or classically liberal, but specifically “left-liberal”. It is evident in everything from this country’s world record immigration and soaring rents to state-sanctioned racial discrimination in hiring and sentencing, to the government-led shredding of the country’s history and memory. Rowing back from this overreach will not be the work of voters in one election, but of generations of Canadians.

The task is especially difficult in Canada, because, after the 1960s, the country (outside of Quebec) transferred its soul from British loyalism to cultural left-liberalism. Its new national identity (multiculturalist, post-national, with no “core” identity) was based on a quest for moral superiority measured using a left-liberal yardstick. Canada was to be the most diverse, most equitable, most inclusive nation in world history. No rate of immigration, no degree of majority self-abasement, no level of minority sensitivity, would ever be too much.

In my new book The Third Awokening, I define woke as the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups. Woke cultural socialism, the idea of equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for totemic minorities, represents the ideological endpoint of these sacred values. Like economic socialism, the result of cultural socialism is immiserization and a decline in human flourishing. We must stand against this extremism in favour of moderation.

The woke sanctification of identity did not stem primarily from Marxism, which rejected identity talk as bourgeois, but from a fusion of liberal humanism with the New Left’s identitarian version of socialism. What it produced was a hybrid which is neither Marxism nor classical liberalism.

Left-liberalism is moderate on economics, favouring a mixed capitalism in which regulation and the welfare state ameliorate the excesses of the market, without strangling economic growth. Its suspicion of communist authoritarianism helped insulate it from the lure of Soviet Moscow.

On culture, however, left-liberalism has no guardrails. When it comes to group inequality and harm protection, its claims are open-ended, with institutions and the nation castigated as too male, pale, and stale. For believers, the only way forward is through an unrestricted increase in minority representation. They will not entertain the idea that the distribution of women and minorities across different occupations could reflect cultural or psychological diversity as opposed to “systemic” discrimination. This is the origin of the letters “D” and “E” in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Rather than seeking to optimize equity and diversity for maximal human flourishing, these are ends in themselves that brook no limits.

Left-liberals fail to ring-fence the degree of sensitivity that majority groups are supposed to display toward minority groups. Their emphasis on inclusivity through speech suppression rounds out the “I” in DEI. From racial sensitivity training (starting in the 1970s) to the “inclusive” avoidance of words like “Latino” or “mother” that offend and create a so-called hostile environment that silences subaltern groups, majorities are expected to police their speech.

May 19, 2024

Rush Meets LOONEY TUNES???

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

pdbass
Published Jan 4, 2024

Remember that time Rush worked music from cartoons into one of their greatest recordings?

Digging into “La Villa Strangiato” from 1978’s Hemispheres, breaking down Geddy Lee’s wicked bass solo (and its Jazz connections) and showing you how pianist/composer Raymond Scott will always be linked to this iconic prog rock instrumental.
(more…)

May 17, 2024

Lies my teacher taught me

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

A Peel District School Board teacher using the pseudonym “Igor Stravinsky” explains the sort of indoctrination high school students are receiving about First Nations and the development of Canada:

Previously in this series, I have discussed some of the things students are learning, and not learning, about Indigenous people in the Peel District School Board:

  • Indigenous people are the true owners of the land; the rest of us are just settlers
  • Indigenous people should be able to continue to practice their traditional ways while being provided all the amenities commensurate with living in a modern, first world country
  • Indigenous people are victims, other Canadians are oppressors
  • The disproportionately poor quality of life which characterizes the lives of many Indigenous people today is the result of past and current injustices by non-Indigenous people, chiefly the Indian Residential Schools
  • Life was good for Indigenous people, who were wise and peaceful, before Europeans showed up
  • The goal of the Europeans who arrived in Canada was the genocide of Indigenous people
  • The settlers failed in their quest for genocide due to the courage and resilience of the Indigenous people

As I have demonstrated, all of the above is simplistic, misleading, or false.

Why teach students a false narrative?

The ahistorical Indigenous genocide narrative started out in academia where Grievance Studies (Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, Fat Studies, etc.) have a massive presence. These post-modernist inspired programs, collectively referred to as “Critical Theory” have influenced all areas of academia and spread to Canadian institutions generally. Grievance studies programs can only exist so long as there are grievances, which necessitates re-writing history and putting people into oppositional groups of victims and oppressors. Academics had to either get on the bandwagon or keep their mouth shut if they disagreed with this new paradigm. Those who did not, such as Frances Widdowson, were attacked and paid a massive price for speaking freely about the lies on which grievance studies programs are based.

Left-leaning politicians have been keen to get on board with Critical Theory. It wins them support from the academics and well-meaning (but poorly informed) members of the public who want to be “on the right side of history”. Even conservative politicians tend to look the other way, seeing taking on the well-organized, well-funded, academia-based activists as an overall vote loser. After all, they can count on the conservative vote. To whom else can such voters turn? Consequently, school boards and the authors of school curricula are captured by Critical Theory and teachers are expected to tow the line. Anyone who doesn’t is said to be “causing harm” and faces harsh discipline.

Entrenchment of the Indigenous genocide narrative ensures ever increasing payments from Canadian taxpayers in the form of rent and compensation. The lion’s share of these payments go to the Grievance Industry Tzars- Corrupt Indigenous leaders and their non-Indigenous allies, with little trickling down to the average Indigenous person. That is why, in spite of the fact that an ever-increasing part of our federal budget is dedicated to payments to Indigenous groups (to reach 7.7% – $74.6 billion annually by 2026-27), many Indigenous people live in squalor on reserves without basic amenities like clean water, while many others live on the street in urban areas. How can this be happening when taxpayers are handing over more than $40 thousand per year per each Indigenous person?

Is it reasonable for people who want to live in remote areas engaged in low value hunting, gathering, and horticulture activities, declining to integrate into the modern Canadian socio-economic system, to expect 21st century amenities and services paid for by other Canadians? If non-Indigenous people balk at funding this economically unviable mode of existence, does that make us guilty of racism or genocide? That is the impression kids in school are left with after the “education” they receive on the matter.

Canada Post is in deep, deep trouble

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

I was vaguely aware that Canada Post has been in financial difficulties for a while, but I had no idea things were quite this dire:

You’d better believe that the Canada Post Corporation is in very deep trouble. Here’s how they phrased it in their 2023 annual report:

    Canada Post’s financial situation is unsustainable.

“Unsustainable”. Well that doesn’t sound good. Think they’re just putting on a show to carve out a better negotiating position? Well, besides for the fact that they’re not currently negotiating with anyone, the numbers do bear out the concern:

    For 2023, the Corporation recorded a loss before tax of $748 million, compared to a loss before tax of $548 million in 2022. From 2018 to 2023, Canada Post lost $3 billion before taxes. Without changes and new operating parameters to address our challenges, we forecast larger and increasingly unsustainable losses in future years.

In other words, it’s madly-off-in-all-directions panic time.

Hey! You know I can hear your condescending sniff: “I’m sure this is just a temporary disruption. They’ll figure out how to fix the leak and get themselves back on the road like always. They’re too big to fail.”

Yeah … not this time. The competition from digital communications (i.e., the internet), FedEx, and UPS isn’t going anywhere. Letter delivery nosedived from nearly 5.5 billion pieces in 2006 to just 2.2 billion in 2022. And vague references to “major strategic changes to transform our information technology model” don’t sound much like magic bullets for reversing the decline.

But Canada Post’s labour and pension costs sure are marching bravely forward. In fact, if it wasn’t for Parliamentary relief in the form of Canada Post Corporation Pension Plan Funding Regulations, the Corporation would have had to pay $354 million into the pension plan in 2023 alone. But that $354 million — plus whatever additional amounts show up in 2024 and besides the $998 million in existing general debt — are still liabilities that’ll eventually need paying.

QotD: Canadian socialism

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

Canada is being destroyed by a form of socialism, but it is not called socialism. Even the NDP shy away from the s-word, and did so long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. How do you fight an idea, or even examine it, when there is a tacit social convention not to speak about it. Forget the Victorian morality brigades fainting at the mention of sex or women’s suffrage. Our modern moralists, who, in this country, are mostly on the left, will not let you use the s-word when talking about issues of public policy. To do so is to be an extremist. A sin at least as bad as immodesty a century ago.

We are a nation of muddlers. Until we grow out of that I’m afraid the words “American-style” and “ideologically driven” will continue to frighten us away from seriously debating issues of public policy.

“Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2005-05-14.

May 16, 2024

The Canadian Senate is an anti-democratic fossil … that might totally frustrate a future Conservative government

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

Tristin Hopper considers the constitutional weirdness of Canada’s upper house, an appointed body that has the power to block a popularly elected House of Commons:

“In the east wing of the Centre Block is the Senate chamber, in which are the thrones for the [King and Queen], or for the federal viceroy and his or her consort, and from which either the sovereign or the governor general gives the Speech from the Throne and grants Royal Assent to bills passed by parliament. The senators themselves sit in the chamber, arranged so that those belonging to the governing party are to the right of the Speaker of the Senate and the opposition to the speaker’s left. The overall colour in the Senate chamber is red, seen in the upholstery, carpeting, and draperies, and reflecting the colour scheme of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom; red was a more royal colour, associated with the Crown and hereditary peers. Capping the room is a gilt ceiling with deep octagonal coffers, each filled with heraldic symbols, including maple leafs, fleur-de-lis, lions rampant, clàrsach, Welsh Dragons, and lions passant. On the east and west walls of the chamber are eight murals depicting scenes from the First World War; painted in between 1916 and 1920”
Photo and description by Saffron Blaze via Wikimedia Commons.

By the anticipated date of the 2025 federal election, only 10 to 15 members of the 105-seat Senate will be either Conservative or Conservative appointees. The rest will be Liberal appointees. As of this writing, 70 senators have been personally appointed by Trudeau, and he’ll likely have the opportunity to appoint another 12 before his term ends.

What this means is that no matter how strong the mandate of any future Conservative government, the Tory caucus will face a Liberal supermajority in the Senate with the power to gut or block any legislation sent their way.

“If a majority of the Senate chose to block or severely delay a Conservative government’s legislative agenda, it would plunge the country into a constitutional crisis the likes of which we have not seen in more than a century,” reads an analysis published Tuesday in The Hub.

Constitutional scholars Howard Anglin and Ray Pennings envisioned a potential nightmare scenario in which the Senate casts themselves as “resisting” a Conservative government. Given that senators are all permanently appointed until their mandatory retirement at age 75, it would take at least 10 years until a Conservative government could rack up enough Senate appointments to overcome the Liberal-appointed majority.

“Canadian politics would grind to the kind of impasse that is only broken by the kind of extraordinary force whose political and social repercussions are unpredictable,” they wrote.

The piece even makes a passing reference to 1849, when mobs burned down Canada’s pre-Confederation parliament.

The prospect of an all-powerful Senate able to block the mandate of an elected government is a legislative situation almost entirely unique to Canada.

New Zealand abolished its Senate and is now governed by a unicameral legislature. Australia and the United States both employ term-limited elected senates. The U.K. House of Lords – on which the Canadian Senate is closely modelled – is severely constrained in how far it can check the actions of the House of Commons.

But in Canada, the Senate essentially retains the power of a second House of Commons; it can do whatever it wants to legislation that has passed the House of Commons, including spike it entirely.

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