[Stargate: Atlantis] is a Sci-Fi channel show produced in Canada, starring Canadians and featuring a cranky, sympathetic Canadian character in a lead role. But thanks to Canadian trade-barriers it has yet to air on Canadian television. Remind me again what original programming Canada’s CRTC sheltered Space: the Imagination Station has produced? How many times can we be expected to watch decade old repeats of Seaquest DSV in defense of “Canadian culture”? If they had the wisdom to rebroadcast Starlost or some such epic crap I could almost see the point but as it stands CanCon rules, and the businesses they shelter, are a joke.
I tried making this case to a left-leaning friend. She said, half-joking, “I know you are speaking Canadian but I can’t understand any of the words.” I am reminded every day of my former communication studies undergrads who would argue for Canadian content rules (I am told these represent “regulation” and not “censorship”) and, with no change of expression, cheerfully explain they never watch Canadian television because it is uniformly awful. Such is the naked truth of ideology.
Ghost of a Flea, “Poisoning the Well”, Ghost of a Flea, 2005-08-12.
February 25, 2020
QotD: Canadian content rules
February 24, 2020
Canadian-American relations (and Canadian foreign relations in general) in the 21st century
Ted Campbell looks at the undisputable fact that Canada barely matters in Washington DC, and that this has been true since the end of the first Bush administration. He discusses a recent Globe and Mail article by David Mulroney which examines the need for the Canadian government to formally rethink “Canada’s role in the world” in that light:
Justin Trudeau meets with President Donald Trump at the White House, 13 February, 2017.
Photo from the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.
Mr Mulroney sees two major problems that confront Canada fifty years after A Foreign Policy for Canadians was published:
- First, he says, “Canada is again dealing with a threat to our autonomy from a major power, but this time, it comes not from the United States, but from the new world that was coming into being 50 years ago. The threat is now China, which is using its economic power to influence and silence us, is undermining our national security, and is challenging the rules-based international system that the review itself championed;” and
- Second, “we again need to face up to the consequences of our diminished status, but this time much closer to home. Fifty years on, the problem isn’t that the United States wants to dominate us, but that it has largely forgotten us. While it is tempting to blame this on the chaos of the Trump era, the painful reality is that the relationship has been in decline for some time, something that was manifestly evident in the cool detachment that marked Barack Obama’s management of relations with Canada.”
I think that second is, actually, more serious than the first. I believe we can wrap our collective mind around the fact that China doesn’t like us, that it regards us as an irritant and that it is using us as a whipping boy to send a message to its other, more important, trading partners. What has been harder to grasp is that Ameria no longer cares. It isn’t just Donald Trump, it was even just Barack Obama. George W Bush didn’t care either. Despite the great debates in Canada, it seems clear that President Bush never even asked for our help in either Afghanistan or Iraq, the “pressure” to do something to stand with the USA was entirely self-generated within Canada’s own foreign affairs and defence establishments. Bush, Chaney, Rumsfeld and Myers (the latter was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 to 2005) were, possibly, grateful for the help on the ground, when they noticed it at all, but quite uninterested in Canada’s views on any of the issues concerned. Nor did Bill Clinton care about our views on or our actions in e.g. the Balkans. We, as a country, and our leaders, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, did not and do not count for anything in Washington. Neither Chrystia Freeland nor Erin O’Toole nor any other Canadian prime minister, Conservative or Liberal, will fare any better. The last time Canada mattered was when Brian Mulroney and George H W Bush renegotiated the Canada-US Free Trade deal, making it into NAFTA, over a quarter-century ago. And the end of the halcyon days of Canada-US relations came a full decade before that, in the Mulroney-Reagan years. That can only change if Canada makes itself matter.
[…]
We, Canadians, must accept ~ and millions will not want to accept this ~ that, as Mr Mulroney says, “International influence … [and that includes influence where it counts most, with the USA] … is enabled by a strong economy, robust national infrastructure and institutions, and the willingness to invest in national defence and security.” One of the impacts of Pierre Trudeau’s policies was to divert spending from National Defence to social spending. That was immensely popular with many, actually with most Canadians … something for (a perceived) nothing always is. None of Brian Mulroney, Paul Martin or Stephen Harper, all of whom, it seemed to me, wanted to reverse course and act responsibly were able to change what Pierre Trudeau had put in place. The political price was suicide. But it has been fifty years and Canada is at risk of being totally irrelevant in an increasingly complex and dangerous world.
David Mulroney’s second challenge ~ recovering “the confident elaboration of national identity,” is, I suspect, much more difficult, especially given the “post-national state” quasi-intellectual rubbish that Justin Trudeau says was part of “his father’s vision.” It’s lunacy, of course, but it’s the sort of lunacy that appealed to many in the 1960s and appeals, again, a half-century later.
While I don’t disagree with Mr. Campbell’s analysis (and that of David Mulroney), I think getting our domestic house in order is the top priority, and the current Trudeau government does not appear to be doing much constructive on that sheaf of issues. With the very rule of law threatened at home, there’s little to no point in casting our eyes across the 49th parallel or overseas: we need to address the breakdown of internal governance first.
Bidding farewell to the rule of law in Canada?
John Carpay on the importance of the rule of law in civil society and why we’re at risk of losing it here in Canada:
The rule of law is one of the most important legal principles on which Canada is based. Along with the supremacy of God, it is mentioned in the very first words of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.”
The rule of law means that we are ruled by laws, not by the whims of a King, or the clamouring of a mob. The rule of law also means that the law applies to everyone, even the King; there can be no exemptions for the King or his favourites.
Countries which practice and uphold the rule of law tend to thrive economically, socially, politically and culturally. Countries which uphold the rule of law become wealthy because people can work, buy, sell and trade in the knowledge that their property and their person are protected by law. Economies thrive when people know that the law will be enforced, and that the law will be applied to everyone, even to the King and his favourites. The rule of law provides investors, foreign and domestic, with confidence to invest their money in business projects.
Conversely, when a country condones law-breaking, investors will put their money elsewhere, and quickly. The world’s poorest and most violent countries are those where politicians are above the law, and the law is not applied equally to all.
The decisions of Canada’s politicians and police to condone – for three weeks or longer – the blockading of railway lines by aggrieved protesters violate the rule of law in at least two ways.
First, our politicians are effectively stating that individuals with strongly held political opinions are entitled to engage in illegal activities, in this case shutting down railway lines. Second, law-breaking is permitted because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other politicians sympathize with the protesters’ ideology and demands: the law does not apply to the King’s favourites.
February 23, 2020
Benjamin Griveaux discovers that “privacy” is an outdated 20th century concept
At The Register, Alistair Dabbs describes the descent of formerly ascendent French politician Benjamin Griveaux:
Previously a key spokesman for president Emmanuel Macron, he was flying high in the polls to be elected mayor of Paris next month … until the electorate got a good look at his knob.
Benjamin Griveaux on 11 October 2018.
Photo by Jacques Paquier via Wikimedia Commons.In a case of political revenge porn that is gripping the French nation almost as tightly as Griveaux was gripping himself, videos of him buffing the aubergine appeared on a short-lived satirical website apparently focusing on “political pornography” (don’t bother asking) and promptly went viral.
These were private, first-person videos he’d taken himself spiralising the old courgette and sent to the object of his amour who, unfortunately for his wife, was not his wife. Predictably, neither woman was impressed with the, er, outcome.
Cue an embarrassed press conference with lots of deliberately posed shots of him looking downwards and contrite, during which he announced he would stand down from the imminent elections and pass the, er, baton to someone else. Taking their example from Griveaux himself, Macron’s party La République en Marche (since redubbed “La République en Main“) did a bit of frenzied reshuffling to find a replacement.
Put aside the political, moral and human issues: these are being thoroughly argued out in the media as you read this. As for nudey selfies, come on, most of us have tried it for a laugh – albeit most probably when we were students. What I want to know is how an intelligent, well-connected and tech-savvy party executive like this could allow his personal instruction video on the subject of unclothed self-taming to get into the wild in the first place.
Griveaux’s official statement to the police claims that he sent the video person-to-person via a certain private messenging system – press reports do not name which one, unfortunately – that would delete the video after one minute. If this is true, it strengthens his case for “invasion of personal privacy”, which has massive punitive outcomes in France thanks to Jacques Chirac who as president beefed up the privacy laws to protect his illegal financial dealings from media scrutiny.
What messaging app was he using? And is he being all that tech-savvy in his belief that his video would self-destruct after 60 seconds, like in some ’70s episode of Mission Impossible? Even in WhatsApp, you have to remember to delete it yourself.
Perhaps he was using a business-focused porn-selfie messenger: a kind of doing-the-business sharing app. It’s the innovative new way of engaging with your contacts. Norbert Spankmoney wants to connect with you! Yes, I bet he does.
Come on, Ben, surely you know that for every ultra-secure, ultra-private, ultra-personal video messaging app, there are a dozen freebie video-grabbing utilities out there. Even if you code it up to prevent screen capture, someone could always video your video, just like they can photograph an onscreen secret document.
Give it up. Nothing is private any more.
China’s government and the coronavirus epidemic
In Quillette, Aaron Sarin shows how the Chinese government has systematically failed to respond adequately to the epidemic which broke out late in 2019in Wuhan and risks “losing the Mandate of Heaven”:
As of this writing, the epidemic’s death toll is still rising, and many of these deaths can ultimately be traced to the paranoid rigidity of the Xi Jinping administration. By late December 2019, doctors in Wuhan were already sounding the alarm over cases of what appeared to them to be SARS. Instead of listening to their warnings, the authorities summoned eight of these doctors for a dressing-down. They were warned of the punishments they could face for “rumour-mongering.” News of their detention was broadcast to tens of millions: a clear message to anyone else who might have been thinking about discussing viruses in public.
The Party’s leaders actually knew enough to be worried by this point — they alerted the World Health Organisation on December 31st — and yet still they hid the truth from the public. This neurotic obsession with secrecy has certainly cost lives. If the medical community had been informed of the outbreak back in December, hospitals could have stockpiled the necessary supplies. But now there are drastic shortages, and patients are dying in hallways and waiting rooms.
Even the critics of authoritarian dictatorship will usually agree that the system beats democracy for sheer efficiency, but the coronavirus debacle has turned that old wisdom on its head. Where we might have expected cold and methodical governance, we have found dithering bureaucrats, unable to take a step in any direction, paralysed by what Xu Zhangrun calls “systemic impotence.” Weeks went by and citizens swarmed in and out of Wuhan, picking up the virus and transporting it to the far corners of the country. Local government officials stayed quiet, wary of the heavy hand of Xi Jinping. On January 23rd, a citywide quarantine was finally announced, but eight long hours passed before it was enacted — time enough for a million or more to flee the city.
The Wuhan lockdown was repeated in other parts of the country (most recently the southern megacity of Guangzhou), and some observers praised the speed with which new hospitals were constructed from scratch. These very visible displays of its power aside, the Party has moved far too slowly at every stage of the crisis. Diagnostic testing required samples to be sent all the way to a laboratory in Beijing, and this delayed the distribution of testing kits to many of the hospitals in Wuhan. Even when testing kits were available, patients still found themselves trapped in a Kafka-esque web of bureaucracy. According to Reuters, the tests have been refused to people who fail to make it through a complex reporting system involving hospital authorities, district authorities, city health authorities, and disease control officials.
None of this should come as a surprise. The cliché about the efficiency of authoritarian systems was always, on closer analysis, something of a low-resolution image. In the old days of the Soviet Union, speedy industrial growth obscured the reality of a fragile system largely devoid of autonomous decision making. During the 1920s, the Communist Party’s state planning committee Gosplan was established with the impressive-sounding mission of creating a series of five-year plans to govern the economy. But over the next 70 years, the vast majority of these plans were radically revised and rewritten, or more frequently ignored altogether in favour of Joseph Stalin’s arbitrary dictates. Indeed, Gosplan actively tried to avoid making decisions at all, because committee members knew Stalin would have them shot and replaced if their ideas produced unwelcome results. In the end, fear saps the efficiency of all authoritarian regimes, and the Chinese Communist Party is no exception.
Li Wenliang has emerged as the most vivid symbol of the Party’s latest failure. Li was one of the Wuhan doctors disgraced for discussing the coronavirus on social media. A few days after his police warning, he contracted the virus himself, and on February 6th he died. It was during the period of Li’s short illness that the Party apparently realised its error and decided to absolve the doctors, but still the central government would accept no blame for the tragedy. Instead, the Supreme Court (which is controlled by the CCP) scolded the local government in Wuhan — an unusual move, no doubt designed to create a scapegoat for surging public anger. The truth is that the city’s officials had been faced with an impossible job. They obediently followed orders, and now they will be punished for it.
Justin’s hidden victory – “… in the fight against global warming, this has to have been Canada’s best two weeks EVER”
As Rex Murphy points out, the nattering nabobs of negativity (okay, he didn’t call ’em that) miss the key benefits of Justin Trudeau’s tour de force of ingenious diplomacy and inaction:
It was at the very heart of Justin Trudeau’s triumph in his first election, that having vanquished the Mordor orcs of Harperland, that the country was going to be served by new thinking and fresh approaches, that anger and conflict would be no more. In an era marked by respectful thinking, exquisitely careful language, above all by the ability to listen, protests would be no more. Concord would reign, all would be sweetness and light.
What few and feeble disputes that might emerge would be defused with a waving of the diversity wand, and a choir drawn from the Liberal backbenches intoning solemnly “this is not who we are as Canadians” before the Centennial Flame on Parliament Hill.
As an ultimate fillip every month a kitten and a ball of wool would be sent to every Canadian household (and Lo, a zen-like tranquillity would settle over the land). To be clear, these would be very progressive kittens, and the wood fair-trade down to the last twisted fibre.
[…]
Looked at in the cool light of reason, in the fight against global warming, this has to have been Canada’s best two weeks EVER. Keep it up and Canada, the whole wide, cold country, can soon declare itself one half-a-continent carbon-emission-free zone. Apocalypse deferred.
How do you spell Hallelujah? Greta Thunberg — Canada has heard you. Find a bamboo raft and come visit us again.
February 22, 2020
Andrew Sullivan on the “inconvenient pioneers”
Along with a mandatory worry piece on Trump and some positive news on the British economy under Boris Johnson, Andrew Sullivan noted the dog that didn’t bark about either Republican or Democratic pioneers:
Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaking with supporters at a town hall at the State Historical Museum in Des Moines, Iowa, 12 January 2020.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
Every now and again, I take a moment to take stock of how deep gay integration has gotten in my adult lifetime. This past week, our politics featured two relatively young men, on both sides of the political divide, whose sexual orientation is both clear and irrelevant. Pete Buttigieg has been at the top of the field in Iowa and New Hampshire, one of seven remaining candidates, and in the circular flamethrower squad of Wednesday’s debate, he once again held his own. More than that: He was relentless in his attacks on Amy Klobuchar and more than a little blunt about Bernie Sanders’s plans to take private health insurance away from everyone (something that doesn’t even happen in socialized health care in Britain). There was not the slightest whiff of defensiveness about him.
His moderate politics (on most subjects) is filtered through a seemingly brutal, calculating Rhodes Scholar–style ambition. And why can’t gays as well as straights harbor that? It’s fantastic also that he is a man of Christian faith — like countless other gays and lesbians in America. Who would have imagined that the pioneering gay figure of 2020 would be a married Christian who got a standing ovation in a Fox News town hall? But that’s old news now.
It’s also fantastic that, for the most part, his sexual orientation is ignored. Yes, the queer left hates him — but they hate a lot of gay success in public life if it doesn’t exactly fit their ideological niche. And Rush Limbaugh indeed took a slightly homophobic dig the other day. But I doubt Trump would openly use Pete’s orientation as a way to demean him. And that’s not just because Trump is not personally homophobic but because he knows it would look ugly, and be counterproductive. That’s how far we’ve come.
Richard Grenell has not subjected himself to getting elected anywhere, but, like Buttigieg, he’s a classic careerist D.C. meritocrat (and why the fuck not?). From the heartland, he got a degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School and then attached himself to Republican pols — notably George Pataki and George W. Bush, who made him communications director for the U.S. seat at the U.N., a post he held for seven years. Launching his own communications shop, Grenell subsequently worked Fox News gigs even as he was a signatory to an amicus brief in defense of the right of gay couples to marry. By all accounts he has been a disaster as ambassador to Germany, trolling the E.U. and German elites, although I doubt Trump sees his regular Twitter provocations as a liability.
But check out a simple video of Grenell being sworn in for the Germany job. Mike Pence, of all people, officiates as Grenell’s longtime partner, Matt Lashey, holds the family Bible. This week his appointment as acting director of National Intelligence was widely panned — and is not expected to last long. But he nonetheless became the first-ever openly gay member of the Cabinet in U.S. history. You missed that? All the better. But for some of us, it’s a quiet landmark tarred only by the fact that most gay groups won’t even acknowledge it. The Human Rights Campaign’s Twitter feed has made no mention at all — even as they are rightly touting the first lesbian mother in Congress. Why is the first openly gay Cabinet member a nonevent? Because he’s a conservative. And to the activist left and too many of the Establishment liberals in the gay movement, that means he’s not really gay.
My politics tilt more toward Buttigieg than Grenell — but a moment like this should not be filtered entirely through ideology. History matters too. When I was a very lonely openly gay figure in Washington in the 1980s and 1990s, the idea that I would live to see an openly gay and successful presidential candidate and an openly gay Cabinet member at the same time would have been preposterous. And now it’s virtually normal. I’ll take that.
U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell speaking with attendees at the 2019 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in West Palm Beach, Florida on 20 December 2019.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
Update: Inconvenient typo in the headline fixed.
February 21, 2020
Justin Trudeau, Prime Empathizer of Canada
The Prime Minstrel channels his inner Bill Clinton, although he just manages to avoid saying that he “feels our pain”:
A strange thing happened Tuesday morning. That strange thing was … an important and interesting exchange on the floor of the House of Commons. It happened during routine proceedings, and not in the Punch-and-Judy exchange of question period. The leaders of the various parties in the House stood and outlined positions on the rail blockades being conducted around the country in support of Wet’suwet’en opponents of B.C.’s Coastal GasLink pipeline.
First came the prime minister. “People are troubled by what they have been witnessing this past week,” he said. Our empathizer-in-chief, the emotional mascot of Confederation, was about to go to work. “Young, old, Indigenous and newcomers are asking themselves what is happening in the country … On all sides, people are upset and frustrated.”
The next three words out of his mouth were: “I get it.” Huh. Is that the sort of thing you say when you’ve actually gotten it? If a friend called you up in a shattered emotional state because he had just lost his job, as people are starting to lose jobs to the Wet’suwet’en solidarity protests, would you say “I get it”?
Beyond this tin-eared reassurance, Trudeau did not have much specific to say, and what there was seemed to contradict itself. “Our government’s priority is to resolve this situation peacefully, but also to protect the rule of law in our country,” he promised. “That is a principle we will always stand up for.” One would have thought the role of a prime minister was to apply the law rather than to “stand up for” it. He gave his usual spiel about the myriad of ways in which the federal government has failed First Nations, again speaking as though someone else were in charge. Certainly very little of it is his own fault: the government he leads has “invested more than any other … to right historic wrongs.”
Trudeau worried aloud that Canada might become “a country where people think they can tamper with rail lines and endanger lives,” but he seemingly renounced the use of force (it’s not “helpful”) against protesters who openly discuss sabotage. What the prime minister means when he talks of the “rule” of something called “law” has been left imperfectly clear.
Chris Selley suggests the government’s fecklessness will continue to prevent any solutions being implemented:
The stupefying weightlessness of Justin Trudeau’s government has never been more evident than in recent days, as it tries to arrange an end to the Mohawk blockade of CN’s main line near Belleville, Ont. At times it seems as if it might just float away, like an improperly tethered bouncy castle in a thunderstorm.
This week has been particularly windy.
[…]
The situation is ludicrous: Because Ontario’s independent provincial police won’t enforce a court injunction, the federal public safety minister seems to be in discussions with B.C.’s solicitor general about whether B.C.’s independent provincial police might back off enforcing a different injunction.
And the worst part of this absurdist theatre festival is how difficult it is to imagine a better alternative. Conservatives continue to call on Trudeau to somehow fix the problem, but the way Canada is set up, it’s really not a federal issue. The RCMP might have some jurisdiction over the railway as federally regulated infrastructure, said University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach, but that hasn’t happened in past cases. It wouldn’t even be up to Trudeau to send in troops: under the Emergencies Act, Roach said, a provincial solicitor-general has to request it.
These are structural issues that any PM will face. Indeed, the biggest difference between the Liberals’ approach to this blockade and the Conservatives’ approach to the 2013 Idle No More protests, which included a 13-day blockade of a CN line in southwestern Ontario, has been one of rhetoric and engagement. The Conservatives talked tougher, but Aboriginal Affairs rebuffed CN’s request to intervene. (Those protesters eventually obeyed a court injunction and left.) The Liberals needlessly tie themselves in knots and insult our intelligence — they know no other way — but they clearly believe it’s their job to broker some kind of resolution.
It’s tough to say which approach is likelier to work. At this point odds seem to favour “neither.” If you have a better, workable idea to get the trains moving, for God’s sake get on the horn to Ottawa.
February 20, 2020
QotD: Preventing bureaucratic mission creep
Private companies are just as vulnerable. However in that private sector we have a mechanism by which the seemingly inevitable bureaucratization is dealt with. Once it happens, the organization goes bankrupt and is removed from the scene. What we need is a similar system to deal with this process in the public sphere.
I don’t, given the above, find it at all remarkable that the WTO is regarded as succumbing to these forces, nor the UN, Amnesty, the European Union or even our own domestic governments (just how did the interstate commerce clause become a justification for Congress to restrict something that is not interstate and is not commerce?). I think it inevitable.
Various solutions appear to be available, the French one might be an example. Put up with it for 50 years then have a revolution and start again. Perhaps the answer is never to allow the public bodies to have much power in the first place, a solution that hasn’t really been tried anywhere. The Italian one? Let the system carry on adding ever more layers but ignore it? Stalin’s? Every 15 years or so shoot the bureaucrats?
All such methods have their attractions and their faults but a solution we do need to find. For one of the lessons I take from the history of the 20th century is that we don’t actually want to be ruled by those who stay awake in committee meetings.
Tim Worstall, “‘Any Organization Will, In the End, Be Run By Those Who Stay Awake in Committee'”, Ideas in Action, 2005-06-23.
February 19, 2020
QotD: Myths the Greatest Generation believed
This belief in the military-like efficiency of government inspired the ambitious welfare-state policies of the postwar era, especially Johnson’s War on Poverty. When, in 1972, Richard Nixon declared a War on Drugs, and when, in 1977, Jimmy Carter described the energy crisis as the “moral equivalent of war,” the model they had in mind was, again, World War II. Today, newspapers and scientific journals still proclaim the need for ambitious government action to fix enormously complex problems — for example, calling repeatedly for a “new Manhattan Project” to solve the problem of climate change.
War, as conservatives figured out early on, is a poor metaphor for government doing socially useful things. We can’t fight and win a “war” on poverty, or drugs, or cancer, because these things are nothing like war. The last heroic big-government project run along World War II lines was the Apollo program, which put Americans on the moon. This was a tremendous achievement, but here a military mindset was directly relevant: like the design of war machines a quarter-century earlier, the Saturn rockets were a discrete engineering challenge, one whose basic parameters were well understood.
E. M. Oblomov, “The Greatest Generation and the Greatest Illusion: Success in World War II led Americans to put too much faith in government — and we still do.”, City Journal, 2017-12-28.
February 17, 2020
Justin Trudeau and the UN Security Council
Although I’m much less a fan of the United Nations than Ted Campbell is, I agree that Prime Minister Trudeau’s grip-and-grin-and-bribe world tour in support of Canada’s bid for a temporary seat on the UN Security Council is probably doomed to failure:
The United Nations Security Council Chamber in New York, also known as the Norwegian Room.
Photo by Patrick Gruban via Wikimedia Commons.
He has seemed oblivious to the fact that he’s bragging about Canada’s “human rights” and “equality” to politicians who are happy to have laws that criminalize homosexual behaviour and that he’s willing to enter a “partnership” in Africa’s oils and gas sectors even as his cabinet tries to shut down Western Canada’s energy industries and as his own country is in a political and economic crisis over pipelines. And then he bowed and scraped to the foreign minister of the mass-murdering Iranian regime, only a month after it shot down a civilian airliner, killing 57 Canadians.
This is all in pursuit of the ambitions of a few Laurential Elite insiders who are still campaigning against Stephen Harper. They remember that Prime Minister Harper’s government’s bid for a UNSC seat was rejected (2010) largely because Canada was perceived to be too close to Israel and because Prime Minister Harper was perceived to be too different from superstar US President Barack Obama, and not serious enough about climate change. Team Trudeau is hell-bent on proving that it is “better” than Team Harper by winning that seat (the other contestants are Ireland and Norway).
My guess is that Canada will fail again because the few hundred million dollars in
bribesaid it has promised to spread around Africa is not going to make much of a dent in the anti-Canada campaign that I suspect China is waging to continue to punish us for the Meng affair, amongst other things. China is, I believe, using Canada as a bit of a whipping boy to send a message to the rest of the world about the benefits and costs of dealing with China … on its terms.In fact, I rather hope Canada loses. Not because I enjoy seeing my country rejected. Not even because I would enjoy seeing Justin Trudeau humiliated, but I admit that would be nice. I think that losing the bid for the worthless, second class Security Councils seat might persuade our diplomats that we need to rethink our role in the UN.
The United Nations is a marvellous idea and it’s an important institution. But it is also a deeply troubled organization. It is corrupt. It is badly managed. It is poorly led. It is badly organized. It is in dire need of reform.
The bad leadership and poor organization begin at the Security Council.
The Roman Senate during the Republic
Historia Civilis
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There’s an earlier video on the functions of the Senate during the monarchy here, but the audio track is rather wonky.
“The rails to hell are laid with good intentions”
In the National Post, Jonathan Kay explains how Canadian governments find themselves in the situation where the basic laws of the land can be flouted at will by a small extremist faction and the police are unwilling to do more than bare peacekeeping duties:
“Vancouver Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en” by jencastrotakespictures is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
If you find yourself astounded by the current situation in Canada, whereby protesters have been allowed to shut down a rail network that remains a backbone of passenger travel and industrial transport (and whose coast-to-coast completion in 1885 became a symbol of national unity), it’s useful to revisit the accumulation of symbolic gestures that have steadily destroyed the moral authority of our governments to push back at any assertion of Indigenous rights and grievances. For years, our leaders offered reflexive acquiescence to increasingly expansive claims that Canada remains a white supremacist dystopia, culminating in last year’s campaign to convince us not only that modern Canada is a “genocide” state, but that even the act of expressing disagreement with this description makes you a sort of metaphorical train conductor on the rails to Canadian Dachau. Having publicly tattooed their guilty settler souls with every imaginable hashtag, our leaders now apparently find themselves stopped from restoring the rule of law.
The rails to hell are laid with good intentions. And there is nothing that now signals goodness in Canadian public life more than the land acknowledgment. Certainly, no one can argue with the historical truth that Indigenous peoples populated Canada for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. But words have meaning. And the well-understood meaning of these acknowledgments is that Indigenous peoples exercise a sort of broad, vaguely defined moral sovereignty over lands “owned” by Canadian governments, corporations and private citizens — including the lands on which we have constructed roads, rails, ports and legislatures. And since this sovereignty apparently now may be asserted at any time, for pretty much any reason, we have effectively lost the ability to enforce the systematic organization of property rights on which every functional society, Indigenous or non-Indigenous, depends.
The push to recognize Indigenous sovereignty over ancestral lands stretches back generations, an effort rooted in very real constitutional and treaty rights. But what I am describing here is not this formally bounded legal campaign, but rather the more general insistence that the entire country remains stained by original sin, and so must be purified by an open-ended, quasi-spiritual process of “decolonization.” This project began in earnest in 2017 as a counter-reaction to the perceived jingoism of the Canada 150 celebrations. Within the rarified corners of the literary and arts milieus (in which I found myself embedded at the time), decolonization quickly became a sort of state religion, complete with decolonization-themed sensitivity training and confession rituals.
[…]
The people doing the protesting are led by dissidents within one of the affected Indigenous communities, amplified by a critical mass of white environmentalists who are perfectly happy to cherry-pick Indigenous causes based on how well they line up with their own Anti-Racism/Critical Studies term-project requirements. Indeed, there is a certain type of very self-satisfied white Canadian leftist who sees himself as a real-life Lorax. Drawing on antiquated noble-savage stereotypes from the past, these decolonization super-allies cast Indigenous people as their little bar-ba-loot bears. And it just ruins their day when Indigenous leaders refuse to grab their tummies, moan for the CBC cameras, or read their bar-ba-loot scripts.
There is a larger hypocrisy at play here, too. Justin Trudeau and his entourage — currently on world tour, hoping to convince African and Caribbean leaders to hand him the shiny trophy of a UN Security Council seat — don’t take the train much. They fly. So, too, do the provincial politicians passing the buck in equal measure, not to mention the national broadcast journalists offering maudlin profiles of the demonstrators. Forcing ordinary travellers to bear the burden of upholding officially sanctioned upper-middle-class social-justice pieties isn’t “progressive.” It’s reactionary, snobbish elitism with a progressive façade.
February 16, 2020
The Canadian economy taken hostage while the PM swans around the world schmoozing for a temporary Security Council seat
Chris Selley on the state of play in the stand-off between (some) First Nations protesters and their temporary fellow travellers of the various permanent protest class:
“DSC02285” by Bengt 1955 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
The majority of Wet’suwet’en First Nation members support the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline project, and they are in an objectively peculiar situation. On the one hand, the RCMP is doing its best to clear away the protesters and let construction proceed. On the other hand, anti-pipeline protesters claiming solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en have created chaos in their name — most notably the total shutdown of CN Rail’s eastern Canadian network, the cancellation of nearly every Canadian passenger train, and the layoffs and untold economic costs that go with that.
If protesters acknowledge the diversity of opinion among the Wet’suwet’en at all, they will defer to the authority of five hereditary chiefs who oppose the project, or observe that the five elected Wet’suwet’en band councils — all of which have signed community benefits agreements — represent a form of settler democracy imposed by the Indian Act.
[…]
Clearly the Wet’suwet’en are a divided community, including on the most basic questions of how they should be governed. It’s a mess. Mind you, look at the state of Canada as a whole.
Just as the RCMP have court authorization to clear protesters and encampments along the pipeline route, the Ontario Provincial Police have court authorization to clear the Mohawk rail blockade near Belleville, Ont. Unlike the RCMP, the OPP refuses to exercise its authority. And we just have to live with that. Conservative politicians are barking at Justin Trudeau to “enforce the law,” but he doesn’t give orders to the OPP, and neither does Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and nor should we want them to.
Still, you might expect senior ministers to have moderately stern words for folks illegally causing economic harm. You might expect the prime minister, at minimum, to be in the country. Instead, Trudeau spent the week swanning around Africa drumming up support for the UN Security Council seat with which he remains unaccountably obsessed, then decamped for the Munich Security Conference, where he was photographed warmly embracing Iranian foreign affairs minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, five weeks after Iran blew an airliner full of Canadians out of the sky over Tehran.
The Little Potato is probably doubly happy to have a valid (in his own mind) excuse for not being in the country at this particular time. He loves being the centre of attention … as long as that attention is friendly. He doesn’t handle situations well if the tempers are higher and the hostility is rising … like much of Canada right now.
The pipeline is a provincial project, not a federal one, but if the OPP won’t end the blockade and the feds aren’t willing to take truly extraordinary measures, then at some point in the foreseeable future it may well make short-term economic sense to give in to their demands. Maybe the feds can buy the pipeline from Coastal GasLink and shut it down.
And what if the Mohawks do lose interest, or are somehow induced to stand down? That now counts as the best-case scenario, and it will have involved shutting down the CN railway for at least a week — maybe two, maybe three — with enormous consequences for people’s livelihoods and the economy as a whole, all in the name of killing a project supported by the vast majority of Indigenous people affected by it. And it will happen again, as many times as any group wants it to, on whatever issue they want it to, for as long as they want it to. Unless someone in power does something unusually bold and concrete in the very near future – and it’s not even clear what that thing would be — we are well on the road as a country to being terminally screwed. In the meantime, we certainly have no lessons on accountable government to give the Wet’suwet’en.
February 15, 2020
Disrupting railways as an activist tactic appears to work really, really well
As Colby Cosh writes, for all the issues Alberta has with the government in Ottawa, nobody seriously suggested messing up the railways to get attention. Perhaps they should have:
“DSC02285” by Bengt 1955 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
It never occurred to us to mess with the rail network in Eastern Canada — to inconvenience the precious commuters of the Golden Horseshoe — as a means of gaining negotiating leverage. Actually, I’m sure some people must have suggested it, but they would have been written off as selfish, dangerous idiots advocating counterproductive tactics.
The economic impact of the rail protests is big, but surely comparable, at the moment, to that of a big storm. Yet because a B.C. Aboriginal community is carrying its fight with the B.C. government to the guts of Canada, the clamour over whether large public works are now possible at all in Canada has instantly achieved new and unfamiliar volume levels.
The Coastal GasLink that is the source of the strife is a provincially regulated work running from Dawson Creek to the coast; unlike the vastly more expensive problems Alberta has encountered, this technically isn’t an issue for the wider federation at all. Except, whoops, it is! Because someone decided to make it one!
The levels of irony dazzle the imagination. The Canadian West was settled by means of passenger rail, which is supposedly one reason it was chosen as a target by the radicals supporting the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs in their pipeline fight. But intercity commuter rail no longer really exists between the West Coast and Hamilton. The West is ultimately as dependent on rail freight as the East, and maybe more so, but it was that commuter inconvenience that gave rise to an immediate sense of national crisis, while Calgary and Saskatoon and Winnipeg snoozed.
And climate-change activists found themselves blocking rail lines in “solidarity” with the Wet’suwet’en, even though the chiefs’ fight is a question of territorial principle rather than carbon sins. This put the greenies in the position of opposing and thwarting actual rail travel. They admit this is anomalous; nobody likes to attach the word “hypocritical” to himself.
One of the protesters pointed out to the Star‘s Alex Boyd how dependence on rail — dependence of the sort that they spend 364 days a year advocating for intra-city commuters — facilitates unlawful, obstructive protest as a means for the self-anointed to “put pressure on decision-makers.” It is a little harder to block paved roads than railroads, and much harder to sabotage them, if it comes to that — which it might have if the police had used force to immediately disperse the protests. For some, this counts as a feature of rail, not a bug.
